The Order of Melissa

I'd like you to meet Wolfram. He's not a suite of mathematical software, he's a German knight of c. 1200AD, turned poet.

He writes a bit like a sports-jock commentator, whose favourite sport just happens to be jousting. He compensates for the repetitiveness of his imagery with his obvious enthusiasm for, and experience of, what he describes.

He's the author of the epic "Parzival", which is a version of the Grail story, but the Grail is not what I'm talking about here. Instead, I'd like to draw your attention to a quirky little sub-plot which weaves in and out of his early chapters.

It concerns a lady, Cunneware de Lalant, who suffers some physical abuse at the hands of the churlish seneschal Keie (a.k.a. Sir Kay), which abuse comes to the attention of Parzival (a.k.a. Sir Percival).

Parzival's response is curiously indirect. He does not confront Keie in person, partly because he isn't there. While Keie is at court, Parzival is out doing his Knight Errant thing. However, on two successive occasions, having earned the surrender of a noble opponent, he transfers that surrender to Cunneware; that is, he says something to the effect of "instead of submitting to me, go to King Arthur's court and offer your submission to Lady Cunneware, who has suffered an indignity". In this way, he rebuilds the status of the beaten lady, and disturbs that of her abuser without actually being present at any point.

(The first of the surrendered knights is also a seneschal, like Keie. Their responsibilities include catering, so, having introduced themselves, they cook together. They cook pancakes for Cunneware, by way of apology. This has no bearing on the present idea, but I wanted to tell you anyway.)

When Parzival does return to court, Cunneware is very pleased to see him. She gives him a fine cloak originally worn by the other surrendered knight, and laces that cloak with a ribbon "from next her own white thigh". She closes the neck of the cloak with an emerald broach, and girds him with a gem-studded girdle, and then... nothing. Although, in the course of the poem, Parzival has a number of love-interests, she isn't one of them.

This all has to do with the idea of Courtly Love. There's a set of institutions here whereby people can exchange "strokes" in the extended sense of "stroking" used by the psycho-analyst Eric Berne, while being physically apart most or all of the time, and without the expectation of sexual consummation. Sexual consummation might happen, but if it doesn't, no-one has to feel cheated. Furthermore, since the absent man's idea of the absent woman is bound up with a sense of his own obligations, both to her and to the world in general, his desires can be sublimated in actions which, he imagines, are "worthy" of her.

Now I'd like you to consider David Smith, a programmer from New Jersey. In the late 1990s, he became pre-occupied with a Floridian lap-dancer called Melissa. Being a nerdy loser like many of us programmers, he couldn't form any sort of relationship with her, but he couldn't get her out of his head, either.

Sometimes, in this situation, stalking happens. David, however, didn't stalk Melissa. Instead, through his notorious Word macro virus, he stalked the world in her name. Every mail server he knocked over was dedicated to her, in much the same way as those bruised gentlemen turning up at Camelot asking "Excuse me, where can I find the lady Cunneware de Lalant?", but less coherently and less helpfully.

He was caught. Rightly, he went to jail. Yet, although the jail sentence was fair enough in the circumstances, the whole episode represents a terrible and avoidable waste both of the man's talents and of his feelings.

This waste would be avoided if contemporary Western society offered an acceptable meme or institutional hook on which to hang feelings like his. No, "get a life" doesn't really cut it. Nor does "move on", nor yet "get over yourself".

Meanwhile, the object of such a man's feelings, if he is cruder than Smith in the way he expresses them, is also in a very awkward position. She finds herself in a sort of "relationship" whose terms of reference are defined entirely in someone else's imagination, possibly someone else quite creepy.

So, here's the idea.

We define a form of contract, in which the woman has very few obligations beyond acknowledging the existence of the man, and the fact that they are parties to such a contract. The man has obligations to respect the woman's privacy and personal and territorial space, obligations of a kind which might otherwise be spelt out only in a restraining order because, for many people, they are just common sense. However, because the man has been acknowledged in a more or less respectful way, he is less likely to commit that kind of act that would lead to that restraining order. The woman may enter into some sort of pen-friend relationship, but may terminate that relationship, and/or the whole contract, if the man crosses certain specific lines in his correspondence without her clear consent. It is made very explicit that both parties remain free to meet, date or marry anyone they like.

There is a third party to these contracts. We might call it the Knights Errant of the Order of Melissa (Some More Errant than Others). It would not only act as a support group for obsessive, socially inadequate men who are in love. It would also ground those men on acceptable ethical foundations. Rule One would be, "Your unrequited love is not her problem". From that basis, they could ask one another, "Given that our several loves are beyond us, what Worthy things can we do to sublimate those loves?" The answers might be a mixture of bland Rotarian do-gooding and occasional showing off in the style of a Gay Pride parade. In either case, they might make people smile, but would not creep anyone out. Much.

To get this type of contract established and widely recognised, we'd have to start with celebrities, who could use it as a sort of extension to their existing fan-clubs. If we take it as a given that celebrities love attention, some of them at least might like having an identifiable body of super-fans who would do crazy things in their names, *but*, crazy things within nice, reassuring limits. Once a few celebrities have endorsed the system, it could spread. Popular but fairly ordinary girls could cheer up favoured losers with the occasional token, without raising any expectations that they didn't intend to meet. In return, they would get a distinct ego boost.

I used to know one woman in real life who pretty much achieved this with a substantial circle of admirers, but it would be easier and more widespread, and less dangerous, if there were a recognised form in which to do it. There was also a woman, Ottoline Morrell, who seems to have attempted this sort of relationship with the men of the Bloomsbury Group, but came rather unstuck because the lack of clear rules in the relationships, in that instance, exposed her to rather shabby treatment by the men.

So, the innovation I'm proposing here is not so much the Knight Servitor role itself, but rather its redefinition in a contractual and organisational form that would work nowadays, and that people could adopt with, first, minimum risk and, later, marginally reduced embarrassment.