Voices of the Fools
Text from First Fools, April 2006

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Fools Rush in Where Angels Fear to Tread: Why?
Bradley Olson, Ph.D.

"When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools..."
King Lear

 

Since foolishness is the topic of the weekend, I thought it might be interesting to look at why foolishness can seem to be a subversive force in social circumstances and radically destructive -- perhaps deconstructive is the preferable term -- to the province of the personal ego.  Though at first blush foolishness might give the impression that it is pointless, in foolishness something extraordinary and soulful is finding its way into the world.  To illustrate better what is at work in foolishness, I want to look at just two of any number of examples from which one could draw: From dramatic literature, the tragedy of King Lear, and from myth one of the more mysterious narratives of Dionysus.

There are important differences between the folly of villainy, the folly of madness, and the folly of a fool. Villainy holds no wisdom in itself but rather puts forward and answers to only an insatiable appetite for power. Madness abdicates reason and creates an insular and idiosyncratic world that, as illogical as it may appear to the spectator, is as ordered and understandable to the madman as a greenhouse is to a gardener or, as it is for Lear, a grave to a dead man: for as the old king says as he wakes from a (for the nonce) restorative sleep, "You do me wrong to take me out o’ the grave..." (Act IV, Scene VII). Foolery, on the other hand, is not interested in power, nor is it interested in psychically terraforming one’s experience of life in such a way as to create a self-contained, self-referenced, and self-deceptive illusion of existence.  Foolery is chiefly interested in seeing the world from a perspective that destroys all illusions and allows us to, as Lear says, "...take upon [u]’s the mystery of things, As if we were God’s spies." (Act V, Scene III). I especially like this image: that fools (in other words, those of us here today) are agents for divine espionage. And what is the espionage being perpetrated? Just this: the fool turns the world upside down, and this inversion is reflexively threatening, but what isn’t realized is that the world has previously been inverted by a will to greed and power, by a splitting off feeling and substituting sentiment, by a ruthless enforcement of orthodoxy and conformity. Through his efforts, the fool is really setting the world aright, redressing the wrongs previously wrought and re-ensouling the world.

Only a fortunate few are wise enough to be born fools. The rest of us may only come into our foolishness after we appear to have been treated meanly by Titanic forces, or possibly in another way: by having the unaffected, born fool point out our folly.  The fool pushes, prods, and needles one toward self-knowledge ("Fools had ne'er less wit ["grace" in Folio] in a year, For wise men are grown foppish, They know not how their wits to wear, Their manners are so apish" [Act I, Scene IV]) by forcing one’s shadow material into conscious apposition: Lear...Who is it that can tell me who I am? Fool. Lear’s shadow (Act I, Scene IV). Self awareness is often the residue that is precipitated out from the psychic sturm und drang that threatens to whelm one's familiar world during a horrifying encounter with those psychic constituents which have previously been rejected for their inconvenience, incongruence, inflated, repulsive, or terrifying countenances.

When Lear and his small entourage are abandoned to a wild storm of such force, that every living thing caught out in it is threatened, only the fool remains unsheltered and outside with Lear to face the full fury of the gale. From the perspective of psyche, one might imagine that the foolish energy itself has unleashed the storm in order to make Lear conscious of his unreflected, unpsychological, and psychically topsy-turvy attitude. Shortly after this scene the fool apparently, but not entirely, disappears from the play; he seems to become conflated with Cordelia from this point on (which makes sense as a strong argument may be made that Cordelia has herself acted foolishly and in some sense has helped to set the tragedy in motion, and in fact, over the past 400 years, in several of the countless stagings of Lear one actor was often cast in both the roles of Cordelia and that of the Fool). 

As alluded to a moment ago, the fact that the fool seems to disappear from the play might be read as though the fool is a personification of psychic energy, and once that energy has constellated a move toward greater consciousness and punctured Lear’s extraordinary narcissism and inflation, the fool as a personified image is no longer needed.  A further insinuation that the fool is an energetic signature may be read into the end of a prophecy he offers: "This prophecy Merlin shall make, for I live before his time" (Act III, Scene II.  Italics are mine)1.  Shakespeare’s play is set in or around 800 A.D. or so, and every Englishman would know that Merlin was said to live in the 6th or 7th Century, and by suggesting that the fool lived even before Merlin -- even before there was an England -- may be a way that Shakespeare suggests the ineffable and primordial quality of foolish psychic energy.

Now I want to look at the image of the fool, not in a coxcomb, but in the horned guise of Dionysus. There is an ecstatic, wild, and bold quality to Dionysus that, to the modern sensibility, smacks only of foolishness and addiction: an excesses of wine, women, and (via Orpheus) song that results in a hierophant’s experience of extasis, an experience that appears, to a conformed, ordered, lineal, and civilized perspective, to be irrational. This is, however, a too facile reductionism. There is much more to Dionysus than behaviors that, to a pathology-sensitized eye, constitute unconscious acting out.

At first blush, there is something uncensored and vaguely obscene about Dionysus, but it is not this -- his enthralling, sexual charisma -- that threatens one foolishly.  Rather, in the case of Dionysus his foolishness is sensed in a startlingly reckless relationship to the Underworld; he is the wild, untamed, and horned youth clothed in animal skins -- an image of the sacrificial goat or ram that willingly sacrifices itself.  In the Orphic traditions, Dionysus was to have been the successor to Zeus, himself, but the Titans, their faces painted a death-like white, fell upon the child god, tore him into seven pieces and threw his remains in a cauldron. Zeus, drawn near by the smell of roasting flesh2, discovered the Titanic forces at their work, and hurled the Titans into Tartarus while at the same time preserving the heart of the young god.  Dionysus' heart was then made into what I imagine to be a kind of heart-stock pomegranate soup that was then given to Persephone. After drinking this strange brew, she gave birth to Dionysus Chthonios, the "subterranean."

It may well be that Dionysus is most readily identified with acts of dismemberment and transformation, and these powerful forces are precisely the legacy extended even to the kin of Dionysus. Dismemberment was the fate of his cousin, Actaion, who was famously torn limb from limb by his own hunting dogs; dismemberment was the fate even of Orpheus himself, who, spurning them, was dismembered by lustful Bakchoi (Bakchoi -- specifically not Bachanntes -- were properly identified with the worshiped deity, in other words, they were become Bacchus). What the myths of dismemberment seem to illustrate is the notion that the soul longs for its own deconstruction and subsequent transformation, and it necessarily draws us away from a place of physical and/or emotional comfort, familiarity, and relative safety. Instead one is plunged into a situation of great risk, terrible psychic danger, and utter confusion. To leave the one place for the other is to leave the known and the comprehended for the unknown and the never dreamt of. This movement of the soul defines the essence of life and living even though from another perspective it may look like death and dying. 

The dismemberment symbolized in these myths, as the various sobriquets to Dionysus’ name that invoke rebirth attest, is anything but a literal death. In fact, I believe these myths are an attempt to capture the soul’s movement through imagination and representation. Through such lenses the soul can be glimpsed, as C. G. Jung notes, as "quick moving, changeful of hue, twinkling...something like a butterfly -- [psyche] in Greek -- which reels drunkenly from flower to flower and lives on honey and love (CW 9 §55). The ego dismembering and intoxicating -- one might say, Dionysian -- motion of the soul moves one’s center of being from that of a substance to that of a no-thing and brings the awareness of one’s true nature into consciousness. Gaston Bachelard argues that, "Motion, more than substance, is what is immortal in us.  Motion says: 'I change, but I cannot die'" (Air and Dreams 46). 

If motion can illuminate what is immortal within us, it may at the same time dispense with what is unnecessary about us. It is certainly not rational to suggest that one may live life drunk with honey and love. Nor is it rational to say that one is immortal. But to be able and willing to accept such apparent irrationality is just the point of foolishness. As the motion of the soul becomes more and more noticeable, the rational drops away and the images the soul produces become increasingly more remarkable, realistic, and ultimately real, thus enabling the soul to "move toward the depths in order to find the images of the black chasm, images to which normal, rational sight is particularly unsuited" (Bachelard 99).

Standing at the edge of the chasm, preparing to be hurled or even hurl himself into the sea, is the young Dionysus with many epithets such as Trigonos, "the thrice born," and Zagreus, “the great hunter,” to name only two. Dionysus imagines the various impulses toward re-birth and transformations that tirelessly hunt us down; to accept such dismemberment is far from being absurd.  It is foolish.

 

Footnotes

                                                Works Cited

Bachelard, Gaston.  Air And Dreams: An Essay On The Imagination Of Movement.
         Dallas: Dallas Institute, 1988.

Jung, C. G.  "Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious."  The Collected Works of C. G.
         Jung Vol. 9 Part I. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1956.

Kerenyi, Carl. The Gods of the Greeks.  Thames & Hudson, Ltd.  1951.

Shakespeare, William. The Complete Illustrated Shakespeare.  Ed. Howard Staunton.
         New York: Gallery, 1989.

 

© 2006 Bradley Olson, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.

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