Guinevere and Lancelot – a metaphor of comedy or tragedy, without Shakespeare but with shocking ends to wonderful lives (Part 1)

Four year ago today when I began blogging I looked back at the start of the New Millennium, expressing that though I chose a special day to begin it was already 9 years late when that earlier time should have started something new for me (“Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late”):

“Now with nine years, nearly a decade, or almost one-tenth of one-tenth of the New Millennium, gone, I am finally posting my first weblog (i.e., online diary), on a day that is special to me not only in a small annual sense but in a big way. I feel like I am finally leaving the gallows (behind), but still with chains in tow. Not the worst manner in which to transit into a new era, perhaps.

So where have I been in the nine years, to think of myself as entering the New Millennium only now?”

January 29 is in fact my birthday, and to start something real on that day 4 years ago, even if it had been long overdue, was a personal gesture of resolve.

Now 4 years later, with several weblogs, a website, and regular posting on social media venues such as Facebook and Google+, I do not feel that I have really achieved, for there has not been major progress on the political and social issues to which my writings and postings have sought to bring exposition and understanding – no matter how limited – and my personal life, which has somehow become a part of them, remains the same.

So on this personal special day, instead of celebrating the wisdom and knowledge gained in an important period in life’s journey, I choose to remember others, some of whom now rest in eternal peace or had their times cut short in circumstances I see as entangled with mine. Again I start the story from the New Millennium.

As I described 4 years ago I had arrived at Silicon Valley in California shortly before the New Millennium (“Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late”):

“Just before the New Millennium began I was joining the Silicon Valley in California (after another stint as an educator at the University of Hawaii, in Honolulu), arriving at the high-tech world among the dot-com and venture-capitalism rushes, which I wasn’t really part of. The ominous notion someone like me read and heard daily about the New Millennium at the time was not failure of education, but fears for Y2K (also called the ‘millennium bug’), and the tremendous amount of government and corporate efforts being made (and of course money being spent) to prevent disasters from materializing out of tiny numerical ‘legacies’ of computer programs.”

“Dot-com and venture-capitalism rushes”?

Having landed a software design engineer job in a start-up company coinciding with the time of the Y2K hype, after New Year I found a place to live when a young Iranian American lawyer, who was studying for a Master’s degree in Computer Engineering at San Jose State University, generously rented out the master bedroom of his 2-bedroom condo. Only years later did I learn that Saman Taherian, practicing law since 1994, at the time was a convicted felon disbarred due to some fraudulent practice.

“Sam” has since been reinstated after volunteer activity with Big Brothers Big Sisters of Santa Clara County, and psychological and religious therapy by Dr. Rosemary Ellmer (“In the Matter of SAMAN TAHERIAN, Petitioner for Reinstatement, Decision”, February 28, 2006, State Bar Court of California Hearing Department–San Francisco), and is now a partner at the Fuller Law Firm, a bankruptcy firm headed by lawyer Lars Fuller who has a degree in Chemistry (“Meet Our Bankruptcy Attorneys”, The Fuller Law Firm).

More like “crashes”.

I remember later in year 2000 there were a lot of dot-com company failures (“The Dot.com Retail Failures of 2000: Were There Any Winners?”, Vijay Mahajan and Raji Srinivasan, University of Texas at Austin, and Jerry Wind, University of Pennsylvania, Fall 2002, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science), so much so that “Gordon”, our company’s board member with responsibilities for finance, liked to emphasize, “We are not a dot-com company”.

By Spring, I moved to Myra Marsh’s home on Meridian Avenue in Almaden Valley of San Jose, who rented out most her rooms to men working in San Jose or Silicon Valley. Myra was a very friendly lady, we have continued to keep in touch, and in a blog post on March 29, 2011, I mentioned her as one of my friends whom I said goodbye to when I later departed the region (“Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 3) – when violence and motive are subtle and pervasive”):

“In 2002 I said goodbye to the Silicon Valley-San Francisco Bay Area, to old friends like “Ling” and new friends like Myra Marsh, research librarian at the mystical Rosicrucian Order headquartered across the street from Herbert Hoover Middle School in San Jose.”

Yes, Myra was the research librarian of the Rosicrucian Order in San Jose, a mystical organization claiming ancient philosophical roots and practicing alchemy, i.e., creating various precious elements by chemistry. Earlier claims by Rosicrucians included making gold from base metals like zinc, but the more veritable or modern experiments only yielded artificial precious stones, such as topez and diamond. (“The History of Alchemy in America”, Mark Stavish, 1996)

A kind of California Gold Rush, then?

Well, the Rosicrucian Order and Christian institutions had much longer regional historical roots than Silicon Valley itself. The grandiose Rosicrucian Park in San Jose, the organization’s headquarters in America and worldwide, was founded in 1927. North of San Jose, Santa Clara University, a Jesuit, Catholic school, had an engineering school since 1912. Farther north, Stanford University, founded by former California Governor Leland Stanford, had a magnificent Memorial Church as its center since the early 1900s. By the time high-tech seeds of Silicon Valley were in its infancy in the 1940s and 50s through research and development related to Stanford, the Rosicrucian Order had built its experimental activities around Rose+Croix University. (“Rosicrucian Park”, Rosicrucian Order; “About SCU, Santa Clara’s History”, Santa Clara University; “About Memorial Church”, and “History of Stanford, The Rise of Silicon Valley”, Stanford University; and, “The History of Alchemy in America”, Mark Stavish, 1996)

As William Shakespeare once wrote in “Merchant of Venice”, “All that glisters is not gold” (“Damp Squid: The top 10 misquoted phrases in Britain”, February 24, 2009, The Telegraph).

But even the physicist and mathematician Isaac Newton, certainly my idol, had been deeply influenced by Rosicrucian thoughts if not an actual member of the cult (Michael White, Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer,  1999, Da Capo Press; and, “Our Traditional and Chronological History”, Rosicrucian Order”).

I considered myself a scientist, not an occultist, but this was the second time I came to Almaden Valley. In 1988 when I had received my Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley – further north of Stanford but across the San Francisco Bay as I noted in a 2009 blog post (““Nairobi to Shenzhen”, and on to Guangzhou”) – and was about to go to teach Computer Science at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, Maria Klawe, who along with her husband Nicholas Pippenger had been recruited by UBC ahead of me and was to become Head of Computer Science, invited me to Almaden to give a seminar talk so I could meet my boss beforehand.

IBM Almaden Research Center was a new kid on the block in Silicon Valley, founded only in the 1980s since the company had set up its first West Coast laboratory in the early 1950s in a modest commercial building at 99 Notre Dame Avenue in downtown San Jose (“IBM Research – Almaden History”, IBM). But IBM Almaden was a big player, getting talented researchers from Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, including Klawe, who by 1988 had been the manager of Mathematics and Related Computer Science Department and was the manager of Discrete Mathematics Group at Almaden, and Pippenger, a prestigious IBM Fellow.

I was an unknown and only a few persons came to my IBM Almaden seminar talk in 1988. The researcher showing the most interest discussing with me was Jorge Sanz (“Actionable Business Architecture: IBM’s Approach”, IBM Global Business Services Whitepaper).

But by the end of 1992 I had had a big fallout with Maria Klawe at UBC, and she and former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney became at the center of certain political controversies including suppression of my challenging political activism, as covered in some of my other blog posts (e.g., “Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between”).

In the summer of 1999 when I was finishing my teaching work at the University of Hawaii and considering Silicon Valley as an option next, I spoke on the phone with “Lenore”, a senior professor in Mathematics and Computer Science, who had mentored me at Berkeley.

With Lenore’s continuing sponsorship, in 1990 I had returned to Berkeley as a visiting scientist for a month, during which time I bumped into familiar faces as recalled in a 2009 blog post (““Nairobi to Shenzhen”, and on to Guangzhou (Part 2)”):

“I returned to Berkeley in the summer of 1990 for a research stay when I was already teaching at UBC in Vancouver, and one evening a Berkeley old-time friend “Dar” who was also from Guangzhou, and I went to a Telegraph Avenue pub for a drink, and “Shawna” was sitting right there with a boy friend.

“Dar” has since finished his post-doctoral work at the Salk Institute in San Diego and at Stanford, and now works in Houston, Texas.”

Friends with Klawe and Pippenger, this time around in 1999 Lenore responded to me coolly, “If you can program, you don’t need to be in the academia”.

Luckily, the software engineer job I then got involved more than programming, but also other subject matters like algorithm design, performance optimization, and image processing. But in Silicon Valley I knew of quite a few Ph.D.’s from various disciplines including chemistry, who became primarily programmers.

So it wasn’t that bad, given the circumstances, that my second visit was to live in the home of someone at the Rosicrucian Order. It was just to live there.

Besides, a house with a nice swimming pool, and on Meridian Avenue, was probably a “special accord”, so to speak. Back in 1988-92 at UBC when faculty candidates visited they usually stayed at UBC Faculty Club or in a small hotel like the Sylvia Hotel at English Bay, but when Warren D. Smith came from AT&T Bell Labs in 1990, Head Klawe booked the top-rated, Air France owned Le Meridien, today’s Sutton Place Hotel, in downtown Vancouver (“New Management Firm Changes Hotel’s Name From Le Meridien to Sutton Place”, January 4, 1995, Los Angeles Times).

Except that my bedroom was so tiny, converted from the study: my bed was foldable and placed in front of the small closet where my suitcases had to be kept, as a desk and some shelf space rounded up the rest of the room.

Worse yet, much of the room and furniture were painted so white that I felt like living in a hospital room.

But what more could one want, when the owner Myra herself lived in a garage-converted bedroom so that more renters could share her nice home for reasonable rents? It was springtime, I didn’t notice anyone swimming in the pool, but we sat next to it, or in the living-dining room/kitchen chatting while listening to her parrots talk.

But there was something in my room Myra had generous space for, a painting titled “The Accolade” by Edmund Blair Leighton in 1901:

Accolade by Edmund Blair Leighton, Wikipedia

The only artwork in my small room was up on the wall opposite my bed so I naturally stared at it all the time. “A scene from a Shakespeare play”, I speculated, being poorly educated in Western Art beyond the basic Classical Masters’ works, but had read various things about and even by William Shakespeare since in my teen years in China. It looked right.

In a Chinese blog post I once recalled that on one of my first days attending UC Berkeley I caught an outdoor student performance of a Shakespeare play (“艺术为功利还是为政治–社区艺术可以自治吗? (Arts for fame and fortune or for politics–can community arts have autonomy?)”).

“Was it from Shakespeare?” I asked Myra when she came into my room. “No. It’s Queen Guinevere knighting Sir Lancelot.”

I see, from King Arthur and the Twelve Knights (of the Round Table). That was about all I knew. “Shakespeare must have written about it, but I just don’t know enough”, I said to myself.

Myra moved from Britain decades ago, where the King Arthur stories were indeed serious, referred to in the scholarly circles as “Matter of Britain” (“Matter of Britain”, Wikipedia). But though viewed as the genesis of Britain as a nation and civilization, the events that had supposedly taken place in the 6th century were known to later generations in the form of folklore, not authenticated history. Much of it was first written cohesively only over 600 hundred years later, part of it from Celtic myths, part of it by foreign authors, some possibly from Roman literature, and all in fictional forms.

Citing from various literary sources, the late British writer David Hughes’s recent book, British Chronicles, Volume 1 (2007, Heritage Books), has given concise introductions to the subject.

It was a story of a king warrior who led and won battles and united Britain, reigning in the barbarians, expelling foreign invaders, recruiting foreign warriors and with them invading and conquering other countries:

“The situation in Britain, under attack by Scots, Irish and Picts, combined with the rebellion of the Anglo-Saxons, induced some of the British local lords to seek the assistance of Arthur and his 1000 knights. And, Arthur was twelve times elected by the league of the British local lords as “dux bellorum” [“War-Lord”] [“generalissimo”] over the next twelve years (495-507) and fought twelve battles, and was as many times victorious. …

…

It was while Arthur was campaigning in Wales that he met and married Guinevere (Gwenhwyfar), daughter of Gwrawd “Gwent”, the King of Gwent [a major Welsh regional kingdom]. She was the first of Arthur’s three wives who have all been confused in medieval romance and are all called Guinevere. …

…

Arthur revived the British kingdom Year 507 and reigned over the whole of the British Isles. …

…

Letters were sent abroad by Arthur who invited distinguished men and “free lances” [unconnected knights] from far and wide to come to Britain and join his service. … Lancelot also appears around this time. … Lancelot (French: Lancelin) is to be identified with the French duke Wlanc[a] of the “ASC”…

…

In 511 Arthur repelled an invasion of Britain by attacking Danes, Norse, and Jules; and also suppressed a rebellion of the barbarians [Anglo-Saxons] in Britain. …

The next year, 512, Arthur carried the war with the Scandinavians overseas and attacked them in their homelands, which was Arthur’s “North Sea War”. …

…

Tysilio, in his “Chronicle”, tells us that Arthur invaded France to take part in wars going on there. The Britons under Arthur invaded France from the north in Year 513 and occupied Northern France…

…

Easter Sunday, the 28th of March, Year 519, is the “starting date” of Modern British History, for in that year King Arthur united Britain, Ireland, and France, into a “United Kingdom”, and founds a “new order for the ages” [“novus ordo seclorum”]. Legend says that Arthur reigned over thirty kingdoms throughout the British Isles and France. King Arthur imposed unity over-ridding the regional-kings by having everyone swear an oath of allegiance to him personally as equally subjects of the crown. This loosened tribal ties and gave greater autonomy to individual families, resulting in the place of the “tribe” being taken by the “people”. That caused a new nationality to develop around a common allegiance to the crown, and from that grew political and cultural unity and a common existence and a new Golden Age dawned in Britain, that is, the Arthurian Age.”

King Arthur instituted a Christian monarchy based on “divine mandate”, but he also accepted “equality” among his top warrior knights in an otherwise rigid and hierarchical social order, and the best of his warrior knights championed skill-and-courage “quests” over deadly fighting:

“The old Roman constitution was discarded by Arthur who adopted one based on Christian values, and Arthur formulated a legal code which became famous and inspired others to imitate. …

…

Arthur, a child of destiny under a wondrous star, introduced into Britain the doctrine of the “divine right of kings”, that is, a ruler as “the one sent by destiny” [referring to “The Sword in The Stone” episode] as an ideology of kingship and as the authorization of his right to rule and as the cult of his dynasty giving the British Monarchy a divine mandate…

…

Nine orders of chivalry or knighthood were instituted by Arthur, enrolling distinguished men from all the world’s countries. They were: (1) Order of The Holy Grail; (2) Order of The Round Table; (2) Order of the Garter; (4) Order of the Thousand Knights; and the orders of the (5) Rose; (6) Leek; (7) Thistle; (8) Shamrock; and (9) Lily [Fleur-de-lis]. Those belonging to the Order of the Holy Grail had to live pure lives. Its “keepers” [the “Grail-Kings”] were hereditary in Joseph of Arimathea’s descendants. The Order of the Holy Grail was a religious order of The Holy Mother Church hijacked by Arthur, who annexed the order to his regime. The Order of the Round Table was sometimes called “The Fellowship of the Ring” for a ring its members wore as precedence. It was the first use of a common table in world-governments. … The Round Table sat 150 knights. … The Order of the Garter was instituted to commemorate the neckerchief, sash, or girdle that Gawayne wore in the “Beheading Game” with “The Green-Knight”, which was a damsel’s garter its lady wearer had given to Gawayne for luck. Its members wore a garter as the insignia of the order. Membership was restricted to the monarch, the heir, and twenty-four honorary knights [usually retired prime-ministers, retired generals, or distinguished personalities deserving of public honor]. Gawayne, a young man, accepts the Green-Knight’s challenge to play the “Beheading Game” when none of Arthur’s twelve champions do, which begins his career and he comes to be a famous knight. In the “Beheading Game” the challenger proposes that the volunteer strike a blow to the challenger’s neck, but if the volunteer misses or somehow the challenger survives then the volunteer must allow the challenger a reciprocal blow. The twelve champions comprised a fraternity of Arthur’s twelve most distinguished knights. The Order of The Thousand Knights was instituted to commemorate Arthur’s original one thousand followers. … The orders of the Rose, Leek, Thistle, Shamrock, and Lily, were military orders of the knighthoods of England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and France [respectively].

Legend says that Arthur’s knights, restless in times of peace, sought glory on difficult “quests” rather than on the battlefield and gained individual popularity and fame for themselves, and some became legendary folk-heroes.”

But King Arthur’s rule was tenuous, and when one of his twelve warrior knight champions, Sir Lancelot from France, had an affair with his Queen Guinevere amidst the fractures and rivalries in Britain, it led to a civil war, which though settled through self-restraints by Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot, saw the losses of loyalty to, and strength of, the King and ultimately determined his later defeat and death while Guinevere and Lancelot, lovers permanently separated, became heartbroken captive and hermit, respectively:

“There was an attempt to assassinate Arthur which was thwarted by the efforts of Sir Erec (Erex), one of Arthur’s twelve champions [formerly a Scandinavian pirate], and the same year, 523, Queen Winlogoto [called Guinevere] was kidnapped by Melwas, the Duke of Somerset. … Arthur spent a year looking for her, while regional disputes among local lords began popping up all over the country. It was discovered that she was being held captive by Melwas, Duke of Somerset, and Arthur besieged his castle. The queen was rescued by Lancelot while the abbots of the nearby monastery at Glastonbury were in the process of arranging her release. … Melwas was exiled to Iceland [which was then a penal colony] for his part in the conspiracy, and that is why he appears as the “King of Iceland” in medieval romance. Winlogoto (Guinevere-II) fell in love with Lancelot, her rescuer, and he with her; but kept it a secret. The struggle between love and loyalty was innocent at first when it began, but during the following year developed into a full-blown relationship, and the next year after that they were caught in questionable circumstances in a trap set by Morgan “le Fai”. The scandal was made public knowledge by three of Arthur’s knights, namely, Agravaine, Colgrevance, and Accolone [one of Morgan Le Fai’s paramours], who all accused Winlogoto with adultery and Lancelot with treason. Lancelot was compelled to champion the queen versus her three accusers in a joust in which Agravaine was killed, and according to myth, was miraculously brought back to life by Lancelot who prayed over his corpse. Arthur did not want to punish them but had to abide by the legal code he himself had instituted, and according, annulled his marriage to Winlogoto, and adultery being a capital-crime was sentenced to be burned at the stake… Lancelot and his followers however arrive in time to rescue the ex-queen though it meant fighting his fellow knights of the Round Table, and civil war broke-out in Britain between factions of the Knights of the Round Table. Lancelot and his followers were defeated by Cerdic of Wessex [one of Arthur’s vassals], in 526/527, and Lancelot fled with Winlogoto to his castle in France. … Arthur pursued them to France and laid siege to Lancelot’s castle. A truce was arranged, and Arthur, Winlogoto (Guinevere-II), and Lancelot met secretly to decide what to do, for they did not have the heart to fight one another. Lancelot went off into self-imposed exile and Winlogoto entered a convent and became a nun. Later, Lancelot secretly returned to Britain and searched for the ex-queen, and found her in a nunnery. … The tense and final meeting, in the presence of others, ends with both heartbroken, and Lancelot rides away on his horse weeping. The meeting broke the agreement she had made with her ex-husband, and when the news reached Arthur she was carried-off into life-long captivity far-away to the north in Scotland near Dundee. She was imprisoned in a fort at Barry Hill in Strathmore, and a well-known sculptured stone at the neighboring kirk of Meigle marks her grave. Lancelot became a hermit and went insane, however, years later, came to his senses, but too late at Camlan [where Arthur fell in battle] ended his days as a priest.”

It does read like the sort of story William Shakespeare, the greatest English playwright, loved to write, doesn’t it?

But Shakespeare didn’t write about King Arthur, therefore not Queen Guinevere and Sir Lancelot, either.

Why not? Some Shakespeare experts and enthusiasts, such as some commentators on the Shakespeare Geek blog, opined that it was because Shakespeare the playwright didn’t write romance (“King Arthur”, February 19, 2011, Shakespeare Geek):

“Why not? I am as befuddled as anyone else; it seems like ripe material for the picking. Medieval romances (of which the Arthurian legend is the prime, but not only, example) were a very popular source of entertainment during late medieval/early renaissance times. By Shakespeare’s time, they were not as in vogue, though.”

– Wee Katie (Kate Lechler)

“I think Wee Katie stumbled on the right word — romance. Although some of the late plays are sometimes referred to as romances, they are nothing of the sort. The Shakespeare canon has nothing to do with romance. It is comedy, tragicomedy, and tragedy. Shakespeare did not write romances. I do not think that sort of stuff interested him. Tragedy and comedy are much more complex than romance and Shakespeare was, I think, interested in complicated interactions.”

– catkins (Carl D. Atkins)

Here are some early Medieval manuscripts of writings on Guinevere and Lancelot, including “The Romance Of Lancelot Du Lac”, that contained paintings portraying their romance:

The Meeting Of Sir Lancelot And Queen Guinevere, 1370, The British Library

Miniature of Lancelot and Guinevere, 1316, The British Library

Looking at them, I am tempted to speculate that if Shakespeare wouldn’t have written a scene like the first of the two shown above, he would have wanted the second one before any tragedy struck, and that the 1901 Edmund Blair Leighton painting “The Accolade” shown earlier – on my bedroom wall in Myra Marsh’s home – would have been from a Shakespearean play.

Besides, even though “comedy, tragicomedy, and tragedy” were the norm to categorize Shakespeare’s plays, quite a few of them can still be viewed as romance (“King Arthur”, February 19, 2011, Shakespeare Geek):

“Carl, I think saying “Shakespeare didn’t write romances” is a bit broad of a statement. I agree that Shakespeare didn’t write any plays that focus primarily on feats of heroic derring-do. But is that really the only criterion for a romance? If we define romance slightly more broadly, as a heavily rhetorical work with a complex plot involving journeys and reunions, exotic locales, and magical elements, then the set of Shakespeare’s works that are usually classified as romance (Tempest, Winter’s Tale, Pericles, Two Noble Kinsmen, Cymbeline) fit right in. Of course these are qualitatively different from Arthurian romance, but they are romance nonetheless.”

– Alexi (Alexi Sargeant)

Decades ago, while a Sun Yat-sen University student in China studying Mathematics and Computer Science, I was tutored extra English lessons by a family relative, an English Lecturer, who later became Rev. Edward Ho of St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral in Boston (“On A Mission to Malden Retired Cleric Reaching out to Chinese Immigrants”, Christine MacDonald, March 22, 1998, The Boston Globe); and I still resonate with the following lines by Shakespeare (“The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet”, Open Source Shakespeare):

Romeo said of Rosaline:

“One fairer than my love! the all-seeing sun
Ne’er saw her match since first the world begun.”

Then later said of Juliet:

“It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief,
…”

What man could have been more romantic than Romeo in “Romeo and Juliet”, the story of star-crossed lovers’ love for, and commitment to each other, forbidden due to the hatred between Romeo’s Montague family and Juliet’s Capulet family, that ultimately led to their deadly fates?

Ah, neither the Montague family nor the Capulet family in Verona, Italy, were royalty (“Characters in Romeo and Juliet”, Wikipedia), the prerogative to belong in Medieval romance.

But like Romeo and Juliet, Guinevere and Lancelot exhibited a high degree of “gynocentrism”, namely female-centeredness, that had probably been uncommon in the warrior times of King Arthur.

When the King Arthur stories appeared in written literature in the 12th century – first authored by Geoffrey of Monmouth, a Welsh monk whose father’s name happened to be Arthur (“Geoffrey of Monmouth”, David Nash Ford, Britannia) – they obviously would not have had the Shakespearean character depth, but had great focus on war and conquest as in ancient literature, and chivalry and romance as in the Medieval literature.

But many of the storylines, especially that of Queen Guinevere and Sir Lancelot, were created later by French author Chretien de Troyes and in the case of Guinevere and Lancelot, at the behest of Chretien’s patroness Marie, countess of Champagne, daughter of the French King Louis VII and Queen consort Eleanor, who later divorced, with Eleanor remarrying the British King Henry II to become the British Queen consort. (“Chrétien de Troyes”, Encyclopaedia Britannica; and, “Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart” and “Eleanor of Aquitaine”, Wikipedia)

Clearly, Guinevere and Lancelot made the King Arthur era appear not only more romantic but more female centered.

That last was what came to my mind in the year 2000 when Myra Marsh told me the theme of Edmund Blair Leighton’s painting, “The Accolade”, hung on the wall across from my bed in my hospital-like room in her home: here was a romantic queen resting her sword next to the head of her knight, without the king even in the picture; whatever demands and conditions of loyalty placed on the knight were probably hers, and the oath of allegiance by the knight likely to her.

When I then visited the Rosicrucian Order at Myra’s invitation, I gained a sense that such female focus was the exception rather than norm in that part of the society.

With the largest collection of authentic ancient Egyptian artifacts on display in Western U.S., the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum was wonderful, and so was the Rosicrucian Planetarium (“Rosicrucian Park”, Rosicrucian Order). The guides’ explanations of Rosicrucianism in relation to alchemy, science and politics were surprisingly open-minded. I learned that even the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte was once a Master of the Rosicrucian Order.

Visiting Myra at the Rosicrucian Research Library was delightful, whose work environment reminded me of the academia I had been in.

Then I wandered around in the garden, seeing roses in colorful blossom, but few people outdoors in the Rosicrucian Park, or across Park Avenue at the Herbert Hoover Middle School. It was probably a Saturday, but my Bay Area experience had been influenced by the UC Berkeley campus and the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, with their hippies around.

I came upon a memorial structure and read the inscriptions, amid eerie silence as no one else was around, and as I vaguely recall I learned: the modern Order had been founded in the early 20th century in New York by Harvey Spencer Lewis, who became Imperator, like the Roman Emperor, for life; when Lewis died his son Ralph Maxwell Lewis succeeded as Imperator; and when son Lewis died his chosen successor, Gary L. Stewart, became Imperator.

One of the museum guides may have mentioned it also. Only in 1990 did the Rosicrucian Order become more public with its management practice, when Stewart left the Order in a financial dispute and for the first time a new Imperator, Christian Bernard, was elected and was from outside America (“Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis”, Wikipedia).

Like Sir Lancelot, Imperator Bernard was from France.

I was about to leave the memorial and a man showed up, pointing me to a sign I had overlooked, that the area was for Rosicrucian members only.

Before leaving Myra’s house in the summer of 2000, I met her daughter Yvonne and Yvonne’s then husband, who lived in Campbell neighboring Almaden. In our conversations, Myra often mentioned her ex-husband Harold, Yvonne’s father, who lived in southern California, and her then husband, Lawrence, who spent much of his time in his home state of Alabama.

Only a few weeks before my leaving did Lawrence show up, and I realized that though nearly all of her tenants were white, Myra’s husband Lawrence Conaway was a considerably younger African American. What a surprise! Lawrence told me he was working with a Bay Area Christian pastor to create a care project for the elderly.

I gained a sense that in Myra Marsh’s personal world of images, Guinevere and Lancelot could be much wilder, much less socially inhibited than in her other world – her work at the Rosicrucian Order.

In the fall of 1999 when I returned to the Bay Area, I had help from my former UC Berkeley roommate and University of Hawaii colleague David Chin, and my elementary school friend with a University of Texas at Austin Ph.D., Ling Yuan, both of whom mentioned in earlier blog posts (“Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 3) – when violence and motive are subtle and pervasive”). I stayed with David’s parents Norman and Lucinda and then with Ling, both in Palo Alto near Stanford University. Even after renting a room from Sam and then from Myra, my boxes of belongings from Hawaii stayed at Ling’s place.

I found Palo Alto the place to run into my greatest sports idols of the student days, by chance perhaps. When roommates with David I had been an avid American football fan, especially liking the quarterback plays, with the San Francisco 49ers quarterback Joe Montana my No. 1 idol, and when Steve Young took over the helm it was a lot of excitement also.

It was probably after my early-2000 stay in Palo Alto. One day I was driving along the Middlefield Road not far from the home of David’s parents, and there Steve was driving an SUV from the other direction, in clear focus in my view as there was no other traffic at the time.

Months later one day I went to the Stanford Shopping Center, and as I was walking from parking to near the mall entrance, Joe appeared from the mall walking towards me to go to parking. Again, no one else was nearby and my recognition of him was instant.

Living at Myra’s home I began to feel the need to have a place to myself, so I could unbox my books and documents, and have more control in personal life. Renting a small apartment would be the default option as when I was in Vancouver and in Honolulu.

But catching the fever of homeownership bug, I decided to look at that possibility despite caution from my start-up company’s President “Ian”, “You would need another 2-3 years to own a home” – I was willing to rent out the extra rooms in a house so it should break even.

Not within Silicon Valley, where the high-tech workers made higher salaries and the real estate prices were also higher. I looked to the older working areas in the East Bay where I had attended UC Berkeley.

In 2-3 days, Re/Max Accord realtor Dick Vesperman, who today is with Keller Williams Realty, took me to Hayward, Castro Valley, Dublin, Pleasanton, and Livermore where the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was located and where the climate, on the outside of the East Bay Hills, was almost desert-like.

When we finally arrived at the house of “Marcia” on Stanton Avenue in Castro Valley, I was smitten by the sight of the 2-storey white bungalow, its rustic back porch, and the long and terraced backyard on a slope also dotted with many large, naturally grown trees, where Marcia had built a gazebo with a Jacuzzi hot tub and kept a rabbit pen, and where there was plenty of space for a vegetable garden as Dick suggested, who grew tomatoes in his backyard – but I would never get to use much of it though.

The modest 2nd-floor bachelor unit – added by Marcia only a few year back – would be for me while downstairs, where living/dining room and kitchen were, had 2 bedrooms for renters.

A retired secretary living by herself at near 80, Marcia was healthy and fit. She was very pleased to see my interest and proudly told Dick, who then brought to my attention, that Marcia had done work with Mother Teresa in Calcutta, India. I admired her for it.

Dick then drove me to the top of the hill, waving his arm at the expansive, albeit nearly treeless, views around and exclaimed, “This area was once the territory of a powerful politician, Edwin Meese”.

Mortgage broker Wallene Nelsen helped get acceptable financing for me as I didn’t have much down payment, using a main first mortgage with a relatively high rate set for 2 years, and a second mortgage of very high rate but compounded over longer intervals. The first mortgage contained a penalty fee if for payoff prior to 2 years, unless it was for the purchase of another property.

My work visa status in the United States didn’t concern anyone, though, as Dick reassured.

I took Dick and his wife, and Wallene, to dinner at Dick’s choice of restaurant, Back Forty Texas BBQ. During dinner, Dick mentioned to Wallene a previous client, saying that “David” didn’t do too well as a first-time homeowner.

That began my first homeownership. The day it became official may have occurred on the anniversary day of my arrival in Berkeley for graduate school, August 28 as referred to in an earlier blog post (“Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 3) – when violence and motive are subtle and pervasive”).

The house being older, Dick also introduced me to Mike Spurr, a young handyman-type guy who had enlisted in the Navy for a few years and brought home an Asian-Pacific American wife from Hawaii, where I had recently moved from.

Around this time, an engineer candidate interviewed at my company, who was originally from Hong Kong, returned to San Diego and began phoning me to recruit me to his company, General Instrument. But I was already buying a house in Castro Valley.

Ian gave me a modest salary raise in light of it.

And I was not the only one I knew moving to Castro Valley. Ming Gu, like me originally from China, had studied for his Ph.D. at Yale University, and by the time I returned to the Bay Area he was a professor at my alma mater, UC Berkeley Mathematics Department. Ming had just moved to a newer Castro Valley neighborhood above Crow Canyon, with a view of the Bay and San Francisco, and after my move Ming invited me to his house party.

But right away I noticed in the responses to my newspaper room-rental ad that there didn’t seem to be many people looking for a room to live in Castro Valley – one of the largest unincorporated townships in California with a mixture of rural, working-class, middle-class and newer-development neighborhoods.

The first responder was a young male resident doctor at the main local hospital, Eden Medical Center in Castro Valley, who looked strong and behaved pushy like an ox, reminding me of my elementary school friend “Weisheng Huang”, or Wilson Huang, whose Chinese family had been kicked out of Indonesia in the 1960s as I mentioned in a 2011 Chinese blog post (“忆往昔，学历史智慧（五）——青少年时代的另一些文化熏陶”), who in the 1980s had applied to California State University at Hayward adjacent Castro Valley with my assistance, but upon arrival gone instead to San Francisco State University across the Bay.

The young doctor insisted on renting the larger bedroom. He first enticed by saying that my living-room carpets were old and he knew someone who could replace it. I replied that my first choice would be two women for the two rooms as they could keep things tidier. He then stated, in an authoritative and slightly intimidating manner, that I would find it difficult to rent to women.

Another responder of note was “Devon”, a young African American with a hairdressing business across the Bay, interested in a room in Castro Valley but not thinking of moving his work across – a bright young man with an exploratory idea. I myself had to commute to South Bay but as a homeowner, and interestingly my old UC Berkeley friend “Dar”, by this time a Stanford research scientist, was commuting daily across the San Mateo Bridge from his brother’s home in San Leandro adjacent Castro Valley.

I did get two female renters, despite the male doctor’s dismal prediction.

The first woman who liked one of the rooms, Melisande Elliott, a new University of Virginia graduate majoring in mental health, got the smaller bedroom at close to a student rent as I estimated, despite my being irked by the “mental health” coincidence – in Canada in 1992-94 I had been forced through the regime by the authorities suppressing my political activism against certain conducts on the part of my boss Maria Klawe at UBC and then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney (“Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between”).

Deer that came to the backyard often tried to peek inside through the back window of the room “Meli” rented.

Internet information indicates that Melisande Elliott is Melisande Holohan(“Melisande G Elliott, 34”, Radaris; and, “2012 Commencement & Graduation Issue”, 2012, Volume 63, Number 1, Santa Catalina Bulletin). In 2006 she earned a Ph.D. from Alliant International University in San Francisco with a thesis titled, “Putting it Into Words: A Storybook for Latency-aged Children with Cystic Fibrosis and Their Families” (Alliant International University, San Francisco Bay, 2006).

I wouldn’t be surprised if that was Meli. In UC Berkeley student days a classmate and good friend of mine had been William Geller, whose fiancee and later wife, Stephanie Montague, received her Ph.D. in 1989 from California School of Professional Psychology, which is now part of AIU (“Welcome to the California School of Professional Psychology”, Alliant International University). And her thesis title was, “A Comparison of the Rorschach Responses of Suicidal and Outwardly Aggressive Children” (California School of Professional Psychology, Alameda, 1989).

From a Italian American garment business family in New York City, Stephanie had liked to say, “My family name is that of Romeo’s in Romeo and Juliet”.

Perhaps the polar oppositeness of the two’s Ph.D. thesis topics in child psychology were like “Romeo and Juliet”.

I vaguely remember Meli telling me she was to be a bridesmaid for a girlfriend back in Virginia. She did in 2001 for her UVA friend Leigh Anne Spencer’s wedding to U.S. Navy fighter pilot Andrew Richard McLean (“Spencer-McLean”, May 6, 2001, Daily Press), after moving to another house in Castro Valley. Melisande Holohan is today a psychologist in Littleton, Colorado, a town known for the Columbine High School massacre on April 20, 1999, while Stephanie and Will work in Indianapolis.

The other, more mature woman renter gave her name as “Gay Ktaay” though I am unable to find any public reference to it. An administrator at America Online in San Francisco, Gay claimed to be a former UC Berkeley secretary in Anderson Hall, although UC Berkeley maps lists only an Anthony Hall and an Arthur Andersen Auditorium (“UC Berkeley Campus Map Key” and “Reserving a Room at the Haas School of Business”, University of California, Berkeley). Seeing her willingness to come down to my place, I rented the larger bedroom to her at close to student rent also.

My relationship with the female renters was respectful, but non-personal. Gay being in the internet communication company America Online, I said to her a few times that perhaps I could visit her office sometime, and each time she responded, “I can introduce you to Amy in our office. Amy is from Dallas”. But Gay never actually invited.

AOL was a hot company generating huge market waves at the time, in the process of acquiring Time Warner (“The Taking of Time Warner”, Nina Munk, January 2004, Vanity Fair). Its founder Steve Case was from Hawaii, and the company was headquartered in Dulles, Virginia (“An On-the-money History Of America Online”, Fred Hamerman, August 23, 1998, Chicago Tribune), a town named after former U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, near whose family hometown in upstate New York my sister Ning and her family have lived as discussed in my first blog post in 2009 referred to earlier as well as in a recent post in 2011 (“Some family photos of note”).

There was another “Amy”. To start working in Silicon Valley, prior to renting a room to live I had bought a used Jeep Cherokee SUV from Robert Peak in San Jose, whose daughter Amy took me on the test drive and told me the 4-wheel-drive vehicle was her Mom’s. It was a very noisy and bumpy car to be in, but its brakes were acceptable – that was important because my previous car in Vancouver and Honolulu, an Alfa Romeo Milano sedan, had an elusive, borderline malfunctioning anti-lock braking system.

My name’s Chinese meaning happened to be “High Peak”, or “Summit”.

And Amy was also the name of my company boss Ian’s wife already, who worked at Cisco Systems.

I did have a few flirtatious moments with some young women working at the local Safeway store. The head of the pack was Jenny, i.e., Jennifer or Gennifer, who told me she was from Hayward and studied Art Sculpture at Cal State Hayward using live models.

Jenny would sometimes joked with others when I was going through her checkpoint, like, “Let’s all go to Andrew’s house party this weekend”. She reminded of the last time in 1990 when Dar and I had seen the familiar UC Berkeley student “Shawna”, as prior to UC Berkeley Dar had lived in Hayward attending Cal State Hayward.

Two young twin sisters working at Safeway would also show their attention calling me “Mr. Gao”, one of them all the time but I couldn’t always tell them apart.

Then some of the warnings by the young male doctor who had first responded to my room-rental ad, began to be borne out.

The sewer pipe under the toilet in the downstairs bathroom Meli and Gay shared backed up one day, and with dirty water overflowing the toilet as well as filling the bathtub flooded a section of the living-room carpets was flooded.

The two ladies couldn’t hide their grins, apparently having fun with the misadventure. What a costly comedy! Fortunately, the home insurance company paid more than enough to have the carpets cleaned professionally.

Then I became mysteriously ill, and the local doctors couldn’t see what was really wrong.

There was more of a story prior to that, besides the young male resident doctor having come to look at the rooms for rent. Arriving at Castro Valley I found Dr. Steven Una as my family doctor, a thoughtful and sure-handed physician who told me he had worked in Peace Corps overseas.

Not long after my first attending Dr. Una’s small clinic of 2-3 doctors located near Eden Medical Center where the young resident doctor worked, a young female doctor. Dr. Ling Xu, arrived in this clinic and one day did an exam for me in place of Dr. Una, whereby I learned more about her, both being Chinese and Mandarin speaking.

Living in Foster City across the Bay and commuted daily across the San Mateo Bridge, Ling, or Dr. Xu – not to be confused with my childhood friend Ling mentioned earlier – was from Jiangxi province in China, my father’s home province, and received medical education from Gannan Medical University in Ganzhou – not to be confused with Guangzhou where I was from – and the University of Texas at Austin.

As I have said in a 2009 blog post (““Nairobi to Shenzhen”, and on to Guangzhou (Part 1)”), both the president and the engineering vice president of my company had received UT Austin graduate degrees, not to mention my old friend Ling. Now came this friendly and outgoing doctor with such related backgrounds, and already assigned to exam me, what should be my gesture?

I told Dr. Xu that I would ask Dr. Una to transfer me to be one of her first clients as a family doctor in this clinic.

When I spoke with Dr. Una about it, he was extremely concerned, saying that he would be very hesitant in my position, but couldn’t give me a convincing reason beyond that changing the family doctor who covered a lot for the patient wasn’t an easy thing. I assured Dr. Una that it was just like a change of medical filing in the same small clinic, and that I would let him know of any problem and change back to him if necessary.

The mysterious illness struck in October 2000.

One day I was on my way home from work at around 8 o’clock in the evening, and on the highway before reaching Castro Valley I suddenly felt extremely weak, unable to continue driving or would lose control of the car. I thought I was too hungry given that I hadn’t had supper. In the past I occasionally felt like having low blood sugar and needed to chew candies, and for months now I had worked in front of a computer 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, with most of the lunches and sometimes the suppers ordered by the company.

Getting off Interstate 880 at the intersection of Union City and Hayward, somewhere along Industrial Way near Home Depot Union City, I went into a restaurant and ordered sweeter food for supper. Afterwards I felt strong enough to drive home, but unlike before when my blood sugar had probably been low, this time after a sweet meal I still felt sick.

I missed work for nearly a week, the longest sick period at the company, lying in bed with a fever that was high but not the very high ones I had had before, with a feeling of serious weakness worst than that of the fever.

My aunt in Maryland, who was the older of my mother’s younger sisters and the mother of my environmental modelling scientist cousin Ying mentioned in my first blog post 4 years ago (“Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late”), was visiting and I had tried to figure out a way to accommodate her, possibly sleeping in the living room myself. The limitation of all women living downstairs was evident, but now I was sick also.

But Auntie phoned me, letting me know that our family friends Zhicheng Lin and his wife Ruth Lin would accommodate her in their townhouse in Mountain View. Both Lins were my Sun Yat-sen University alumni, and had become Silicon Valley engineers with their graduate degrees from Auburn University in Alabama. They had strongly encouraged me to come to work in Silicon Valley, and I also stayed with them in the fall of 1999 besides at David’s parents’ and Ling’s places in Palo Alto.

I only managed to get out of my sickbed to let Auntie take a few pictures of my house when she came over, otherwise unable to show her around in the Bay Area. The last time I was visiting Berkeley in 1990, she and Ying’s father came to the Bay Area also, and together we visited some of my maternal grandfather’s relatives in San Francisco. But Ying’s dad had since died of cancer in 1998.

Attending Eden Medical Center I was seen by emergency physician Dr. Ben Meek and others, who ordered a plethora of medical tests but couldn’t find anything wrong other than my fever, which they thought was due to a flu and gave me medications accordingly.

After the fever was over I continued to feel half-sick, with physical weakness and seriously deterioration in my vision, which for a long time had been better than 20-20. I discussed with Dr. Ling Xu, but she couldn’t see anything wrong either.

It was an irony, that when I was a renter living in a room that felt like a hospital room I was healthy, but now in not only my own house but one with natural elements all around, and sharing them with renters as my landlady Myra had done with me, I was inexplicably ill.

No longer comedy, if not yet tragedy!

Meli moved out not long after. Her former room was then used to accommodate some of Ruth’s relatives and friends who came to look for work in the Bay Area, but everyone of them stayed only briefly, and my efforts to find another stable renter was unsuccessful.

Meli had a car. The walk downhill to or uphill from the bus stop took 15 minutes, which Gay did dutifully but others probably had no tolerance for it.

Moreover, I wondered if some people, especially the Chinese, had an aversion to the name “Castro” in Castro Valley.

During that period of time, house prices went up very fast in the Bay Area and it was possible to sell a house not long after buying it and break even, or even keep some proceeds if another property purchase was made to avoid the penalty fee for ending my first mortgage prior to 2 years.

I contemplated all types of options, including: doing nothing; selling the house, maybe buying another as investment while renting an apartment; selling it and buying a more accessible one; or selling it and buying one even more out of the way to please my own sense of finding solace in nature – or perhaps just satisfying my curiosity to explore more places.

So in the spring of 2001 I went to areas ranging from Scotts Valley in the Santa Cruz Mountains southwest of the Bay, and Antioch northeast of the Bay, to Grass Valley and Placerville at the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in Eastern California.

I traded in my old white Jeep for a used white Land Rover Discovery SUV from a young salesman “Michael” at a small Vallejo dealership that had no other Land Rover, who told me the car was from the Cole European dealership in Walnut Creek. For the fist time since my student days, my car was in a very safe driving condition.

Around this time in February 2001, mortgage broker Don Harman helped me reorganize my mortgages so it became more stable. Harman’s rationale was: the home value had gone up in the last 6 months so a lower-rate mortgage was now possible; having a main mortgage without a set rate 2 years later would be risky if interest rates went higher. The immediate monthly saving was small though.

There was a catch or two in Harman’s arrangement: the prepayment penalty for the original mortgage needed to be covered, which he could by using a slightly larger new mortgage if I remember correctly, and I would pay him several thousand dollars personally as his fee.

Soon I became interested in a semi-detached, ranch-style house in a subdivision in Pleasant Hill, after a few realtors including Marilou Mazotti, Bob Decker and Debbie Carter, at Re/Max C.C. (Contra Costa) Connection in Suite 140,  2950 Buskirk Ave, Walnut Creek, showed me a few places in Concord, Pleasant Hill, and Walnut Creek where Marcia had moved to after selling me her Castro Valley home.

Public transportation and highway access were superior in that area a moderate distance north of Castro Valley. I seriously considered getting a smaller condo unit, but when I saw that at the price range I would pay I was shown rental-type units, I decided to go still for the semi-detached 3-bedroom one within a subdivision, which I really liked when I saw it with Marilou, as compared to a standalone one on a large lot as in Castro Valley.

The homeowner “Mario”, a small businessman originally from the Middle East, was happy that I liked his house, saying he was moving to Orinda near Berkeley. But Mario was actually moving his family to Alamo, an unincorporated but exclusive town where in my student days roommate David’s sister Patti and her husband David, both oil company employees, had lived in a condo, who by now were living in Texas, managing projects for Halliburton in South America.

Eugene, the baby boy of my sister Ning and her husband Yuzhuo, had been born in year 2000 and soon my mother had come from China to visit them. Now in the early summer of 2001 she came to visit me. Among my Castro Valley friendly neighbors, “Rose” and “Mitch” had been particularly helpful, and now when Rose took her daily walk to the hilltop she would invite and take my mother along, even though my mother’s English was limited to mostly words.

I had Rose, a Coldwell Banker realtor, sell my house in an arrangement made by her with Marilou at Re/Max C.C. Connection and mortgage broker Don Harman, so that extra proceeds would go to down payment for the semi-detached house in the Pleasant Hill subdivision.

Within a couple of weeks, Rose found “Daniel” in Hayward who would happily move his family to Castro Valley to become her neighbor.

It was a little nostalgic to leave the Castro Valley house and say goodbye to neighbors like Rose and Mitch, and others. One of them, the landscaper across the street who did work in as far as Los Gatos south of San Jose – a favorite town for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs like my engineering supervisor and Georgia Institute of Technology Ph.D. “Bill” – had suggested a few times, that because I worked on video processing software in San Jose, “You can apply to work for George Lucas in Marin County”.

I wasn’t moving that far north – where David’s sister Patti had lived with her Chevron girlfriends before she got married and moved to Alamo.

The overall financial cost was higher this time: just before the Pleasant Hill house purchase was completed, Re/Max C.C. Connection informed me that the new mortgage lender they had found for me felt I didn’t have enough assets, demanded refinancing my car to its full value to squeeze out several thousand dollars for additional down payment, and they could only find Fireside’s high-rate car loan.

Despite my concern of over-financing both the house and the car, having been in political activism in the past I found the name “Fireside” romantic, thinking of former U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s historical Fireside Chats in which he rallied Americans to overcome the Great Depression and win the Second World War (“MBC Flashback: The 70th anniversary of FDR’s Fireside Chats”, Diana Mankowski and Raissa Jose, The Museum of Broadcast Communications).

It was naivety. I had no idea that Fireside Bank, which I knew of as Fireside Thrift Co. and Fireside Auto Finance, was not a business accredited by Better Business Bureau (“BBB Business Review: Fireside Bank”, Better Business Bureau), that when my financial situation was weak the real-estate brokers submerged it to a further risk of “fire side-sale”.

But the room-rental situation was improved at Pleasant Hill. Soon I had my first Chinese tenant – if that was important.

Cindy Wang was originally from a touristy coastal city in northern China, Qinhuangdao, its Chinese name meaning “Emperor Ch’in’s Island”. She got a software engineer job with Siemens Medical Solutions at 4040 Nelson Avenue in north Concord, and needed to live near work – away from her boyfriend across the Bay.

Cindy especially liked daily workout in the subdivision’s common swimming pool. Prior to Siemens she had been with IBM in San Jose, and now invited some of her IBM friends over for a party also.

My mother and I celebrated her 70th birthday at the new place. She liked the new place better because she now could walk around in nearby shopping malls and take the bus to visit her relatives and friends.

My mother also met my former landlady Myra and her husband Lawrence, and we had a Japanese meal together. But it wasn’t long before my mother said goodbye and returned to China.

I was able to quickly rent out the room my mother left.

My single-storey house shared a wall with a friendly couple’s 2-storey home, who owned a store in Walnut Creek and told me they were from Iran. Their son was a Ph.D. student in Political Science at the University of Nebraska, and their daughter “Mary” had just been accepted to study music at UC San Diego.

Mary seemed to enjoy a “comedy” of her own, though not getting my carpets soiled like the last time in Castro Valley.

Mario’s wife left their 3 cats temporarily in my care. I was happy to oblige as I had loved cats, starting with taking over one in my early teen when our family moved into a housing unit vacated by a foreign teacher at the same university as my father, and her outdoor-loving cat refused to move.

Mary liked to play with the neighborhood raccoons in her backyard, sometimes in the evening with the backyard lights on, like having a party. The raccoons would come over the fence into my yard to scare the cats off to the roof and eat their food.

When I tried to get them off the cat plates the raccoons would fight me, so I started to throw small rocks at them; but one time when they ran over the fence back to Mary’s yard, a child raccoon was left behind, having trouble scaling the fence, crying while I continued to lob tiny rocks at him until he made it over.

I could hear Mary laugh on the other side of the wood-panel fence.

Not long after that, I heard loud uproars on the patio in my yard. Looking out through the patio door, I saw over a dozen raccoons assembled outside, not to eat the cat food but rally to fight me, howling at the house.

I brought a broomstick out to the patio and waved it at the raccoons, who dispersed, with some going under the patio, and I knocked the wooden patio hard and loud over those hiding underneath, until they all ran away. After this confrontation, the raccoons seldom came to rob the cats of their food and playground.

Soon, Mario’s family settled in their new home and brought the cats there. And Mary went off to school in San Diego.

But in the new environment I continued to feel sick, with my eye sights deteriorating further, which I attributed to work, i.e., staring at the computer screen for long hours daily, or perhaps hyperopia, i.e., farsightedness, as I got older.

Then two pieces of bad news hit.

One has been mentioned in an 2009 blog post (““Nairobi to Shenzhen”, and on to Guangzhou”), that on October 11, 2001, the one-month anniversary of 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington D.C., I was given layoff notice to take effect immediately, which at my request was then added an unpaid grace period by my company so I could look at other job prospects.

Near that time after moving to Pleasant Hill, I received a package of brochures from a New York Life Insurance Company agent in that area, which highlighted a number of life insurance plans with very reasonable terms and conditions. I responded to the agent, and his office quickly arranged for a required medical check-up.

Not long afterwards, the insurance agent, Joel Osher, made another appointment with me at his office and gave me a copy of the medical report, informing me that New York Life had to decline my application because I suffered from Type 2 Diabetes.

It was not an illness normally expected of someone of my slim body shape, though I had gained some weight over the years. I immediately attributed it to lack of physical exercises, which I had had in Vancouver in the form of swimming, jogging and hiking, in Hawaii in the form of jogging and treadmill running, and none while working long hours in Silicon Valley, and in addition to larger meal intakes as provided by the company while sitting there and working.

But I had been sick since October 2000, and had told the Castro Valley doctors from the start that it had first appeared like an extremely severe form of past low blood-sugar symptoms but could not be relieved by sweet food intake – all the medical tests by them could have missed the logical and simple one of blood-sugar level?!

I told Joel Osher I had been ill for a year but doctors couldn’t find anything. He nodded a little, and said that he enjoyed socializing with Chinese people at the Lions Club, sometimes attending their dinners in San Francisco.

I went to Dr. Ling Xu in Castro Valley whom I continued to see as family doctor, told her the news and asked about the healing prospect. Her reply was: “It will depend on whether you comply”.

My mood was certainly negatively affected by it because diabetes, even Type 2, was considered not curable though it could be treated so that the sufferer’s health may be stable, from the conventional medical viewpoint. For instance, a May 2012 news report on diabetes research in Toronto, Canada, had the following descriptions (“New treatment might put Type 2 diabetes in remission”, May 7, 2012, CTV News):

“Patients develop diabetes when their pancreas can’t produce enough insulin to lower blood sugar levels after meals. While medications can temporarily boost insulin production, many type 2 diabetics eventaully need to begin a lifetime of daily insulin shots. Over time, patients with the disease can go on to suffer from a range of complications including blindness, heart disease, kidney problems and nerve damage.”

But speaking of attentions to a social organization like Joel Osher emphasized, the immediate neighborhood in my Pleasant Hill subdivision was in a sense already like a “Lions Club”, or a metaphor of one. Most of the homeowners were ethnic minorities, and owned small businesses, like my Iranian neighbor, another Iranian nighbor two doors on the other side of my house,  and a Hong Kong Chinese neighbor several houses away, or in the technical trades, like myself and the South Asian neighbor on the other side.

I can recall only two obviously white families nearby: a thirtyish, outgoing couple probably in the sales profession, with a speed boat on their driveway and small children playing outside; and Mrs. Morrison and her family, a retired teacher who liked to introduce herself as Elizabeth.

It turned out that getting a new job in late 2001 was harder than I had expected, perhaps made more so by my emphasis on trying to enter the field of semiconductor chip design.

By December I hadn’t found a job, and so went to China to visit my parents, meet some people and also look at the job market there – the last was edgy given my past political activity. But my father, a retired professor of philosophy whom I have mentioned about in some blog posts (“The myth of political vendetta in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s Airbus Affair investigation, the politics of Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien, and some social undercurrents in Canada”; and, “忆往昔，学历史智慧 (Reminiscing the past, learning history’s wisdom) – Part 4”), said that if I didn’t go to protest at the police station it shouldn’t be a problem – how could he be sure when at not yet 70 he had long been a weakling due to serious heart troubles?

By early 2002 I went back to Canada as my U.S. work visa was expiring, and then returned to the Bay Area as a visitor to continue looking at the job market, and start selling my house as the mortgage payments were draining my savings.

In the spring of 2002, two unfortunate events there further illustrated the fragility and risks in life.

One was that my Iranian neighbor, Mary’s father, suddenly had a throat infection so severe that he could not speak and it was potentially life threatening. Hospitalized, he was looked after by his wife, and his son suspended Ph.D. study in Omaha, Nebraska, to be home keeping the family shop. We the neighbors wished him well, and after about 2 weeks he was home and able to greet us in his living room, but still unable to really talk for a time, while his son spent the rest of the school semester running the shop.

During this time Cindy left, after her boyfriend found a job at a small financial company in nearby Lafayette, headed by a financial expert from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and moved to the area.

I also decided to end room rentals in general so I could sell my house more easily.

In order to keep the sale price lower to attract more buyers, I tried advertising the house by myself without a realtor, after speaking with a number of them, but did have Dick Vesperman’s willingness to provide advice for a consultation fee after the sale. I also introduced Cindy and her boyfriend to Dick as potential clients, and they seemed to hit it off quite well.

Oddly, few people came to view the house, and that reminded me of past difficulties getting room renters in the short history of owning a home since the summer of 2000.

The other unlucky incident began when a young Chinese American woman by the name of Corrine Fong, who had just graduated from a college in East Bay, in a human-services related field if I remember correctly, came to visit after seeing an earlier room-rental ad by me.

I told Corinne I was no longer taking new tenants, but she told me a destitute tale: after losing her job recently she had to move out from her rental place but had no other place to move to; her next welfare check would come in 2-3 weeks and she was looking for a job, in healthcare related areas if I recall correctly, and asked that I let her rent a room at a low rent before the house was sold.

I sympathized with Corinne’s predicament, and having been politically active I also had empathy for persons in social work related fields. So I said okay, despite some concern about Corrine’s straight-shooting personality appearing closer to a left-wing watch type than one providing social help – she reasoned in a style more resemblant of an inspector.

I set her rent at about 1/2 the normal until she found a job, payable only when she had money as she said she would, and I told Corrine in no uncertain terms that the house was on the market and her full cooperation was required, including for showing her room to potential buyers and for moving out when it was sold. She readily agreed.

But my concern turned out to materialize in a way much worse than I had been prepared for.

Corrine had no money to pay rent despite saying that she would be getting some money, and couldn’t find a job. I could sympathize with these, given my own situation, but she kept her room in a terribly disorganized state and – worst of it all – refused to allow me to show it to perspective buyers at appointment times.

I told Corinne that showing my house to potential buyers was my bottom line, and that if she was unwilling to cooperate then I would have to give her the notice to leave. She became argumentative and then hysterical, yelling, “Don’t get near me, don’t touch me”, even though I had no such intent other than that she let her room be seen by potential buyers – I didn’t even hurt the raccoons who had pushed out the cats from my patio.

Unexpectedly, Corinne filed a complaint with the Pleasant Hill Police Department, and a male police officer came to my home, telling me that the police had received a complaint I was harassing a tenant. I told the officer that I was selling my house and only required Corinne’s cooperation to show her room to potential buyers, and that I had the right to do so as long as she and her belongings were not disturbed.

But the officer said no, that I would not be allowed to access Corrine’s room or approach her when she didn’t want to be; basically, “Leave her alone” or the police could take steps against me.

It was totally unimagined and unjustified.

In Myra’s home in the spring of 2000 I had the feeling of living in a hospital room; after moving to my own house in Castro Valley I fell ill in October 2000; then by October 2001 I not only lost my job but was confirmed ill with diabetes. Now here came this woman out of the blue, whose name sounded like “Chlorine”, i.e., the disinfectant used in hospitals, with an unreasonable personality to match it, clearly intending to squat in my house with an unknown, vindictive agenda – I was not a wealthy man to be justified as the target of such a left-wing motive, but was late on mortgage payments, having accepted her out of sympathy for her plights and now going broke due to her intransigence.

It took me days, during supper time when we were both in the kitchen area, to persuade Corinne to start looking for another place: at first she said there was no formal notice for her to leave; I then wrote a one-month notice; and she then said the rule should be 2 months – the compassionate reason for which I let her in meant nothing to her.

It then took another 2 weeks during which she viewed various places for rent in the area but didn’t like them, until one day she told me that she went to this large classy house up in the town of Novato in Marin County, that had a backyard facing open ranch lands, where there were lots of deer. She said the older man had 2 or 3 daughters about her age, but was happy to welcome her without being preoccupied with having a prior rental agreement.

Novato would be farther north of the San Rafael area in North Bay where David’s sister Patti and her Chevron girlfriends lived when I had first become Roommates with David in 1984, one of whom was a student probably at Dominican University of California in San Rafael.

So that was all it was about. Corinne had been using squatting-like means and police complaint tactics to make my life miserable as if I had been guilty of not being politically correct, when my life had already been bad and yet I had gone out of my way to accommodate her; but what was good enough for her wasn’t political correctness really, but a rich man taking her into his spacious household like one of his daughters.

I was only glad that Corrine found a place she liked, and encouraged her to move there, but she said it was a long distance to move her belongings and she wasn’t sure. So I volunteered to help her move with my SUV, along with her sedan.

It took two trips of a 80-mile drive from Pleasant Hill and back, to help get all of her belongings to her new place. When I got there the first time, Corinne had arrived earlier but was not around, and I met the homeowner, an artist living in the countryside with his family, and waited for Corinne to be back to move things to where she wanted. Out of self concerns I didn’t said anything to the gentleman that could be unfavorable to Corinne, but when once I started carrying things upstairs to her room, I saw that bags she had unloaded from her car were already scattered in the second-floor hallway in such a way that the homeowner had trouble getting to his room – it was self evident.

The view behind the house in Novato was indeed spectacular, gentle slopes of a huge ranch, with small hills behind in the far distance, and herds of horses and dear grazing idly on the slopes.

I had no idea at the time that several miles on the other side of the hills were filmmaker George Lucas’s ranches, including the Skywalker Ranch named after his Star Wars movie character, and the Grady Ranch he had bought from Novato rancher William Grady in 1985. Much of it was part of Lucas’s obsession since 1988 to develop a vast, countryside movie studio complex north of his main facilities in San Rafael, but Lucas’s ambition has been thwarted by opposition from residents of an affluent local community, Lucas Valley Estates, and since 2012 the spurned filmmaker has planned to turn the area into low-income housing. (“Staff Report to the Planning Commission, Lucasfilm, Ltd. Master Plan and Use Permit”, September 22, 1996, Marin County Community Development Agency; “George Lucas aide says Grady Ranch studio decision is final” Nels Johnson, April 12, 2012, Marin Independent Journal, ; “How Star Wars’ George Lucas Lost Out To A California Subdivision”, Victoria Barret, May 7, 2012, Forbes Magazine; and, “Grady Ranch In Marin: George Lucas Proposes Turning Failed Studio Site Into Affordable Housing”, Aaron Sankin, May 8, 2012, Huffington Post)

So where my Castro Valley neighbor across the street, the landscaper, had suggested that I go but I didn’t, Corinne now arrived with some assistance from me, but only after she had acted maliciously against me, and nearly ruined me – especially if she had in mind that I didn’t have permanent U.S. legal status.

As my house was cleared I also asked Dick Vesperman to act as my realtor instead of just giving advice. I had also looked at the possibility of renting out the entire house, and refinancing the mortgages, and found that the rental income would be considerably below the lowest level of mortgage payment I could get down to, not to mention the costs of continuing maintenance.

About 2 weeks later Concord realtor Kim Hong contacted Dick for an interested buyer, they toured the house and the buyer liked it. Mrs. Chung’s family, originally from South Korea, owned and operated a successful dry-cleaning and laundry service, the Swan Super Cleaners, in a mall on Monument Boulevard in Concord.

But rather unhappily Dick told me Mrs. Chung specified that the agreement should pay the buyer’s agent, i.e., Dick Vesperman, the minimum and not the customary amount, of the realtor fees paid by the seller to the agents. I voluntarily told Dick to make up for it by deducting the rest from my proceeds, and the short sale due to several late mortgage payments going mostly to the interests rather than the principal, became even shorter – despite the generous purchase by Mrs. Chung.

The less than 2 years of home-owning while working in Silicon Valley turned out to be a costly exercise, mainly due to the sudden downturn effect of 9/11 on the economy and employment as I saw it. The financial resources spent on mortgages, realtor fees, various costs and taxes, after tax deduction and rental income were taken into account were still considerably higher than for renting a small apartment; the higher amount spent had been intended as investment, which now evaporated when it could not be sustained. Money spent on maintenance and furniture was also considerably higher than for a small apartment.

Lawyer Ken Koenen, whom I spoke to about this resolution due to its negative financial implications, was very helpful, helping me in a way that I obtained a modest refund from the second-mortgage holder. Ken also expressed critical opinions regarding the mortgage financing and house sale arrangements, but said that from his standpoint there was no remedy unless there was a class-action lawsuit.

I only got to hold on to my car, with a Fireside high-interest auto loan now worth more than the car itself.

These experiences in life were no longer comedy, and definitely took physical, psychological and economic tolls that would take a long time to ease. That the melodrama didn’t turn into a disastrous tragedy was more a testimonial to my goals, determination and drive.

But there was an extra consolation bonus from the buyer side. The buyer’s agent Ms. Kim Hong’s daughter, a student at nearby Diablo Valley College with a focus on music and fashion, was a contestant in the Miss Korea Pageant 2002; the competition for the San Francisco Bay Area was being held in Oakland, and they gave me 2 tickets to attend to cheer for her. So I took “Dar” along and we cheered heartily.

Ms. Hong, her daughter and I had had a dinner together after the house deal. And later when Ms. Hong and I spoke I praised that her daughter’s Pageant performance was wonderful, but also said that I was particularly fond of another contestant, a UC Berkeley Political Science student, and hoped Ms. Hong could relay that.

Dry-cleaning and laundry seemed to be a common type of business for Korean immigrants in the United States to be engaged in. Later in 2007, the worst gun-shooting massacre in U.S. history was committed by Cho Seung-hui, a Korean immigrant student at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, whose parents owned a dry-cleaning business in Virginia near Washington, D.C., and whose sister worked for the U.S. State Department. (“Iraq link to campus killer Cho”, Matthew Lee, April 19, 2007, The Daily Telegraph; “High school classmates say gunman was bullied”, April 19, NBC News; and, “Loner filled with anger and spite”, April 19, 2007, BBC News)

At this point my old friend “Peter”, from the elementary and middle school days like Ling, had invited me to visit and look at the job market in the financial industry where he worked in New York City, so I packed my belongings and got ready to drive across the United States.

I called Marcia, whose selling me her Castro Valley home had started my home-owning adventure, to say goodbye. Marcia was happy to have a lunch together, and suggested The Neiman Marcus Cafe on the top floor of the fashion department store in Walnut Creek, which Marcia said was reasonably priced and a favorite of hers. I hadn’t been to that restaurant before, and Marcia was right.

Over lunch, Marcia told me that as a young woman she had done fashion modelling. Yes, I could see that not only in her choice of restaurant, but in her look, which at 80 still reminded me of Kim Novak in the 1958 movie Vertigo, and Janet Leigh in the 1960 movie Psycho, murder suspenses directed by Alfred Hitchcock – not the least because I had been put under a probation officer named Fred Hitchcock, and a psychiatrist named Anthony Marcus as well, in the early 1990s in Vancouver, Canada, due to political activism as discussed in other blog posts (“Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 8 & Part 9)”).

It was a bright sunny day. Bidding farewell to Marcia, steps from the Neiman Marcus cafe was the store’s rooftop parking, where my Land Rover Discovery was ready for my longest solo driving trip ever, to begin in a few days.

These stories of personal life experiences during the first two years of the New Millennium, which at various junctions may have been directed or adversely affected by the agendas of others I was not aware of, would have ended here had it not been for the latest revelation about Marcia. Mrs. Marcia Foreman passed away in April 2012 in Santa Rosa, California, north of Novato, at the age of 91-92 (“Obituaries, 5-3-2012, Marcia Jacqunelia (Bates) Foreman”, May 3, 2012, The Windsor Times):

“Having touched the hearts of everyone you knew, your spirituality connected you with Mother Theresa, in Calcutta, where you worked beside her in “The House of the Dying”, one of your proudest memories.

You had so many life time achievements including your time served in the military as a decorated 1st Sergeant in the Army, modeling career, raising 6 children, lay ministry and many years of adventurous travels.”

Wow, the Mrs. Marcia Foreman who sold me her home, besides working alongside Mother Teresa of Calcutta – in no less than “The Home of the Dying” – had been decorated U.S. Army 1st Sergeant Marcia Jacqunelia Bates.

More details were reported, along with a wonderful picture of a fashion model-turned Army 1st Sergeant (“Marcia Jacqunelia Foreman”, Kevin McCallum, April 30, 2012, The Press Democrat):

“…

Born in 1920, Foreman endured a hardscrabble upbringing in Depression-era Oakland, but through her Catholic faith persevered to ensure her six children received good educations.

Foreman grew up without a father, and when her mother became mentally ill, she and her three siblings were sent to live in foster homes. With her good looks and eye for fashion, Foreman later modeled in New York and San Francisco for a time before joining the U.S. Army during World War II.

“She was a lovely lady. She was quite beautiful,” said her daughter, Melissa Foreman.

After the war, Foreman attended business college and for much of her professional life worked as a secretary. She married Charles Foreman, who worked at Naval Air Station Alameda, and had six children with him.

They later divorced, and she relied on Catholic schools during the ensuing years to help her raise her at-time rebellious brood.

After retiring from her work at a mortuary in Piedmont, Foreman sought to see some of the world, visiting a daughter in New Zealand and in the late 1980s working for three weeks at the home for the dying established in Calcutta by Mother Theresa.

A woman of deep faith, Foreman strongly believed in helping the less fortunate, and for years continued her work with the needy in the Bay Area.

“She was trying to replicate what Jesus did,” Melissa Foreman said.

When her ex-husband Charles was dying, she granted him his last wish to have his family back. They remarried in Reno, three days before he died.

…”

Marcia grew up in a foster environment, without a father and with a mentally-ill mother, but was able to become a New York and San Francisco fashion model before joining the army during World War II, attending business college afterwards and having 6 children with a U.S. Navy man – the same number my maternal grandparents had.

But Marcia’s last job was at a mortuary for dead corpses, before working briefly with Mother Teresa at the latter’s home for the dying!

Now my 2 years that crossed path with Marcia starts to make more than random sense: my hospital-like room in Myra’s home; followed by becoming ill in my own home transferred by a female former U.S. Army 1st Sergeant and retired secretary from a mortuary, who had also worked with Mother Teresa in “The Home of the Dying”, but whose history I didn’t know while the Castro Valley local doctors didn’t diagnose my illness; then followed by troublemaking from Chinese American renter in my next home whose name Corinne reminded me of “Chlorine”, after my illness had been diagnosed – not by doctors but by a life insurance company.

It’s not an scientific explanation that a hidden personal health theme like the above had been planned and executed by others, but more like an “alchemic” interpretation, or perhaps closer to a Chinese “Feng Shui” superstition – why Corinne sounded like “Chlorine”.

My Castro Valley home’s neighbor Rose and Mitch, or Rosemarie Mitchell and William K. Mitchell, had been around with Marcia before I moved there; the family Rose then helped me sell it to in 2001 were Daniel W. Clark and Donna Jo Clark.

Donna’s name reminds me of Joe Clark, former Canadian Prime Minister and political partner and rival of Brian Mulroney, both of whom I had written about in 1992 during my political activism, and then Joe Clark became a UC Berkeley Political Science professor for a while (“The myth of political vendetta in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s Airbus Affair investigation, the politics of Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien, and some social undercurrents in Canada (Part 5)”). After moving back to Canada from the Bay Area, in 2003 I had an exchange of letters via email with Joe Clark, in which I expressed some of my views about multiculturalism in Canada (“Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between”).

Later in December 2003, the Clarks sold the house to Laura Austin Wiley and Aaron Schleifer, who continued to live at Marcia’s former home to this day. Laura is a 1989 graduate of Columbia University in New York and a successful musician in the San Francisco Bay Area, and on one of her websites there is even a peek of Marcia’s old Jacuzzi hot tub (“Laura Austin Wiley”, lauraaustinwiley.com).

Another “Austin”?

It turned out that my knowledge of my Castro Valley family doctor Dr. Ling Xu wasn’t quite accurate: she had received training at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, not University of Texas at Austin, and had graduated not from Gannan Medical University in my father’s home province Jiangxi, but from Xiangya Medical College in Hunan province where my father had attended high school – a college founded by Yale University members nearly a century ago (“Yale-China History”, Yale-China Association; and, “Ling Xu, M.D.”, Sutter Health). Coincidentally, Dr. Xu lists cardiology as her specialty, and diabetes as one of her special interests – the same medical profiles as that of my father and that of me.

My aspiring musician neighbor in Pleasant Hill, Mary Kouyoumdjian, whose raccoon “friends” caused me troubles and whose father had a life-threatening throat infection, has also become a real musician, and now runs a “Hotel Elefant” – for a German elephant much bigger than the raccoon I guess. I am surprised to learn that Mary’s heritage is Armenian, not Iranian as I was told, and that her family had been “directly affected by the Lebanese Civil War and Armenian Genocide”. (“Hotel Elefant, ensemble”, hotelelefant.org; and, “Mary Kouyoumdjian Composer, about”, marykouyoumdjian.com)

Owning Marcia’s former home, Aaron Schleifer has been a manager at Kaiser Permanente, the largest managed healthcare system in the United States (“Requirements Management: Kaiser Permanente’s Rx for Better Projects”, Doug Bartholomew, August 10, 2006, Baseline; and, “Kaiser Permanente CEO on saving lives, money”, October 23, 2012, USA Today).

Coincidence, or also good protection against bad “Feng Shui”?

Can such manipulative schemes and control mechanism that reign over individual personal life, but are socially hidden, undisclosed, or unspoken of, have relevance to what an author like William Shakespeare wrote or didn’t write about in his critical appraisals of human characters?

Some think Shakespeare not touching the subject of King Arthur, and consequently not that of Queen Guinevere and Sir Lancelot, was probably a conscious avoidance of royal taboo (“King Arthur”, February 19, 2011, Shakespeare Geek):

“I know someone who actually wrote her Master’s thesis about this. He absolutely would’ve known the story — apart from it being in Geoffrey of Monmouth and other sources we know he pulled from, the stories were popular in “lesser” forms of theatre — puppetry, May Day festivities, etc. But —

The Arthur myth was hugely connected with the Tudor mythos — they connected to Arthur through their Welsh background — yet not only Shakespeare, but most other playwrights of the era neglected the topic. There are only a couple — I think perhaps literally two, though I could have that wrong — plays on the Arthurian mythos. I believe my classmate hypothesized that the topic may have been considered more proprietary to royal prerogative, so it could’ve been safer to avoid it rather than risk offending. (Sort of like how Shakespeare didn’t write about the Tudors until after Elizabeth was dead).”

– Cass (Cass Morris)

Cultural taboos in reference to the reigning Tudor monarchy in Shakespeare’s time may have applied to the dynasty’s ancestral folklore and legends as well. An ancient British story theme popular in the arts of the grassroots could be off limits on the high theater stage.

Thus Guinevere and Lancelot would not have been a proper case study for Shakespeare, though Romeo and Juliet were.

On the other hand, Marcia Jacqunelia Bates Foreman would have been too far down the social class ladder, not only for Medieval romance but for Shakespeare’s “comedy, tragicomedy, and tragedy”.

Then what about Edmund Blair Leighton’s 1901 interpretation of Guinevere and Lancelot in “The Accolade”, for any serious English writer no longer in the Tudor era? Was my first instinct about possible meanings conveyed by Guinevere’s sword next to Lancelot’s head apposite, irrelevant, or a contemporary social taboo of this time?

(Continuing to Part 2)