Dear Brain
Our fondest memory is supporting the lovely Lily Lieloly when she sat on your lap in the rear seat of a motor car as you journeyed home from a dance one blissful summer’s night many years ago. We were proud to give service to one so splendid and innocent. Although the journey took over an hour we never flinched and, if needs be, would have happily borne her till the pleasurable commission made us numb.
Later you were to use us for the transportation of creatures infinitely less savoury and immeasurably more seductive but our fealty was and ever will be to Lily Lieloly. Had we but wings we would one day bear her safely to the very portals of heaven. For her part, unlike so many others, she never made us feel knobbly or unsolicited. We regarded ourselves, in fact, to have been devised for the sole purpose of ministering to her in matters of transport. Enough of Lily, however.
We recall with dismay the countless times we wobbled as you trundled homewards in your cups. We became scarred and battered beyond recognition when you would stagger, then stumble and finally fall, sometimes on your posterior, other times on your hands but more often than not on us poor knees.
We knees are ungainly enough without adding to our aesthetic inelegance. Whatever it is about knees and despite their undeniable usefulness to men and women, nobody seems to love them. We have never heard it said of a man that he has lovely knees and rarely indeed would you hear it said of a woman. Women in fact, from what we manage to gather whilst listening to their conversations, very often loathe their own knees, particularly if they are unusually knobbly, crinkly or over-convoluted. It does not matter that we play the role we were ordained to play and that without us there would be no footloose movements of any consequence. Out of commission we spell total stagnation and, even when we suffer minimal damage, travel by shanks’s mare is restricted.
Once we felt you fall clumsily on us when you were swearing love to a rather podgy-faced woman at a distant orgy. You very nearly permanently damaged us, so heavy was this infatuated collapse, this prurience-inducing gratulation, this dastardly declaration of lunatic libidinosity. More offensive still was the raucous and unladylike laughter of your pickled pick-up as she contorted herself drunkenly in appreciation of your loutish tomfoolery. We were sore for several days following that particular exhibition.
We recall with delight how you were overcome on the occasion by your own alcoholic fumes and were unable to perform.
We would now like to refer you to a function for which we were, we firmly believe, designed by God. This is for the sublime purpose of paying Him the homage that is His eternal due, although you would argue in drink that if you were invited into the world and given the choice of acceptance or refusal you would have declined the invitation and stayed where you were, wherever that was.
You were always a great man for flying in the face of God, forgetting, you poor benighted mortal, that you may one day have to crawl on your hands and us in supplication before His throne, and that day may not be as far away as you think. Now to that function for which we were specially designed; i.e. making you kneel in prayer. Alas it is the one function for which we were never even partially utilised and it is the one function in which we would have been pleased to involve ourselves. It was Saint Paul who said: ‘At the name of Jesus every knee should bend.’
Paul was, of course, referring to the followers of Christ and must surely have meant every Christian knee, two of which have been possessed by you since the day you were born. However, neither of us can recall anything remotely approaching the faintest semblance of a genuflection since your sinless and virtuous mother was borne away to the plains of heaven by the nine choirs of angels. Neither did you kneel to pray at the anniversaries of your parents’ death.
Although these were not deliberate sins of omission we, nevertheless, find your negligence to be bordering on the unforgiveable.
How is it that your late father could always manage to find time for prayer, always make it a point to bend us on the floor or the pavement or in the fields which he loved to traverse in obeisance to his heavenly benefactor! How often we foolishly wished we were his knees instead of yours but those were transient aspirations for, through thick and thin, we are still determined to support you and though somewhat rickety and wobbly we will persevere with the struggle to support your ever-extending paunch and inexorably fattening buttocks and thighs.
We lovingly recall your father as he would gently lower himself into a kneeling position to thank the appropriate saint for some favour received. Even when he would recover the pipe or the spectacles which had been mislaid for but a few moments he would cross himself and kneel in thanksgiving.
The only occasion in recent times that we remember you kneeling in real earnest was when the right knee of one of your enemies guilefully connected with that prized and sensitive area commonly referred to as your private parts!
At once you fell to your knees clutching the affected spot, uttering hideous screams and gasping for breath until you were stretchered away to the nearest infirmary by some of your cronies. Even they would not deny that you had at last come into your entitlement for you, in your day, were never slow to inflict the same punishment on those who had incurred your wrath! How true the old adage: ‘Those who live by the sword shall die by the sword.’
You didn’t die then but you knelt as you never knelt before and, alas, have not knelt since nor have you the slightest notion of kneeling. We beg you to do so before a day dawns when infirmity will preclude any possibility of your kneeling and that will be the time you will want to kneel most so that your supplications for salvation will be properly delivered. Tennyson, to whom your father was devoted particularly towards the end of his days, asks:
For what are men better than sheep or goats
That nourish a blind life within the brain,
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer
Both for themselves and those who call them friend?
For so the whole round earth is every way
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.
You would do well to utilise us more while we are willing and able to accommodate any prayerful postures you may hopefully adopt before it is too late.
We have been most wrongfully deprived of our right to participate in divine worship. Millions and millions of knees fulfil their proper roles every Sabbath while we languish and pine for our heritage.
I don’t know for sure how medical texts might describe us but more than likely we would be delineated as being joints of the ginglymus type in the middle part of the human leg. We are the articulation between the femur, tibia and the patella. This is what they have to say about us in medical journals but this is a somewhat clinical analysis. There is much more to us that has not been revealed by the followers of Hippocrates.
In all wars from the lowly skirmish to the decisive battle the knees have played vital roles. Without us every rifleman who ever aimed his weapon would be at a disadvantage. Remember the position favoured in extended-order infantry drill in which the soldier kneels on the right knee, rests the left forearm across the left thigh and grasps his rifle in the position of order arms with the right hand above the lower hand. It is we who are at the very nub of this manoeuvre. Upon our mobility depends the very life of every soldier in charge or retreat.
It is we who enable the thirsty traveller to kneel by the roadside spring and it is we who stiffen to attention when the anthem of our country is sounding and yet we cannot recall a poem or song in praise of knees, but then it is also true that the horse which earns the oats rarely receives them. We care not because we know that virtue is its own reward and we are content while we are able to serve.
We had hoped – oh! impossible dream – that one day you would be summoned into a presidential presence and honoured for services to your fellow man. We saw ourselves bending so that you might kneel upon the tasselled mat. For us this truly would have been a moment to cherish. Only a knee can kneel and kneeling is the sine qua non of knighthood. Then would come the laying on of the royal sword followed by the royal command, Arise Sir Knight!
Sir Thomas Scam. It sounds right and proper but alas your activities over a lifetime were more suited to the jailyard than the palace. In fact there are many who would suggest that you should be permanently incarcerated, roundly whipped every day and made to lie on beds of nails at night. We must be thankful that nobody ever suggested you should be made to kneel upon broken glass.
We now feel obliged to conclude, and still we entertain the hope that you will see fit to make more use of us at wayside shrines and ancient oratories, before the sacred tabernacle and representations of the crucifixion, in cemeteries and places of holy pilgrimage, in mosques, synagogues, pagodas and temples of every denomination, in grand cathedral and humble chantry. Avail of us we beseech you so that you might give thanks to your creator for the life He has breathed upon you and for the longevity He has thus far granted you. Weigh upon us in every holy place and make it known to the giver of life that for every breath you are grateful to Him and mindful of His unparalleled munificence, for life is the father and the mother of all gifts and cannot be estimated in human terms. Press upon us then without delay so that we may contribute to your belated atonement and ultimately share in your salvation.
Sincerely
Your Knees