Last week's podcast episode revisited an old article I wrote eight years ago, “The Feminine Computer”, which was, back in the day, somewhat more controversial than I was expecting, though it's still, I think, an interesting bit of exploration of that masculine/feminine polarity.
But here… we continue the journey with archetypes, which I'll return to from time to time.
In one version of the story, the native American foolish-trickster god has an encounter with a plant, which tells him not to eat it “or I’ll make you shit”. The trickster eats it in spite of being warned, and consequently shits so much that he is completely surrounded by shit, caked in it up to the top of his head, so that he is indeed blinded by shit. He is, however, saved, because he sings to every tree in the forest, and they respond to him, and he thus feels his way through the geography of the trees to the lake, where he falls in and is able to wash himself clean.
Of course, Nanabozho/Wenebojo - the Trickster - is a Fool. He naïvely takes risks that make his life and his stories much more interesting. I’ve always found the Fool an inspiring archetype: if Socrates late in life could reveal his own lack of wisdom, or paradoxically his great wisdom in acknowledging his lack of it, there’s hope for the rest of us idiots. There’s more to it though: Wenebojo’s story is a great piece of scatological humour, making little kids laugh but also tempting adults to remember too as well. Foolishness is funny, and laughter brings joy.
I’ve spent days practising laughing for no reason, which is of course very good for one. An experiment with seriously depressed AIDS counsellors in Limpopo province found that laughing for no reason, for ten minutes in the morning, drastically reduced their depression levels remarkably quickly. Happiness is definitely a a case of faking it until you make it, but try telling that to a serious adolescent. When I’d just done a laughter yoga workshop and come home to try out the ‘exercises’, my daughters told me “stop being embarrassing dad!” Of course they did: that seriously unfunny frontal cortex had just kicked in with puberty, far too clever by half. We laugh, on average, far, far less than our ancestors, or our children. Phones don’t help of course, lol. The Clown can make kids laugh; teens have to be reminded of why. A red nose is a cliché, but of course it is! Fools are not supposed to be original or clever; they’re supposed, like Wenebojo, to engage with what’s in front of them with “beginner’s mind”, as if they’ve never seen such a thing before, but also as if they expect to experience a response. Of course the trees will answer back, if we’re the Fool. Somehow Western minds got caught up in the notion that Tragedy was superior to Comedy, which was base, low class, unrefined. Naturally this comes in part from a mistrusting elite, who felt they could be laughed at, or the tyrannical God they’d devised in their own image could be laughed at. Tragedy, though, comes when we are cut off from Nature. Cut off from our foolish bodily functions.
The “beginner’s mind” is obviously the basis for many a theatrical improv workshop I’ve taken part in or given. The Fool is the ultimate teacher of how to be Present, not thinking cleverly about the future or mulling the past. He’s more interested in that thing with laces going through small holes, and a large soft top and hard bottom. Not that she would analyze so intently. Perhaps it’s a sound box, or a telephone, or an ice cream, or a hammer, or anything else except a shoe. The Fool knows that we get much too stuck in our agreed reality. At the same time, the Fool is super present to his body. She works with feeling into where the Great Mystery of the body’s magical, highly clever processes, might be taking him. For our little brains pick up and bring into our Mind only a few possibilities of what might be happening; and our foolish minds often get us into trouble, if we don’t acknowledge how silly we are. When we do, the tension breaks and all is forgiven.
We need that tension though. As I’ve got older I’ve become much more familiar with the notion of Taking Things Seriously as a wonderful way to build tension sometimes: like tightening the string of a guitar. Or a banjo, or a balalaika, but then again the Fool’s instrument par excellence is of course the flute. Leading us off on pied pipings towards a dance that spirals in strange twists. A flute is perfect because you can dance while you play it, like that bloke from Jethro Tull. The mischievous minstrel. Or perhaps it is the didgeridoo or the ancient Greek aulos, taking us out of our busy clever selves and into - sacred ecstatic trance.
You see, there is a serious side to the Fool, actually. When we give up caring quite so much we might drop into the Zero, his Tarot number; we might come back to neutrality. Stand in that basic pose for any wandering Tai Chi master, ready to step forward into a new expression, a new gesture; ready to move out of that breathy Aum and into some other speech or vocalising. When I was a kid I witnessed Dmitri, a brilliant Swiss clown, honking on four saxophones at the same time. Or it could be that the Fool then steps into a magically charged place, as many shamans would have it (including theatre practitioner Antero Alli in his Towards an Archaeology of the Soul) - a place that now holds the energy of Power or Wonder or Cruelty or Joy. And when there, she discovers a new language, of some creature or country whose existence nobody was previously aware of. All done at the pinnacle of deeply felt ridiculousness.
Of course, the Fool is often one step away from the Trickster who is too clever by half. As told in parts of north America, Coyote is furious at each part of his body and tries to teach them a lesson; until he realizes too late she’s doing the equivalent of cutting off his nose to spite her face. For us in southern Africa, Nogwaja appears there in the moon, that trickster hare, no doubt beaten by the tortoise. The distracting, battery-powered version towered over Afrikaburn in 2014, cheekily stoking divided opinions amongst festival-goers until it went up in smoke; but meant, of course, in part as a tribute to that wonderful trickster-troublemaker-Rolihlahla Mandela, our Madiba who had just passed away. (You can find the somewhat disturbing monotone audio I produced for its big night here!) Poking fun in utmost seriousness at those in what they think is Authority, while we Tricksters pranced off into the bushes and sniffed the stars. Madiba might well have had other archetypes to him that I’ll look at another time: but that night we were focused on his sacred Trickster.
The Fool never follows the straight line, like Nature of course. As the traditional Jewish dance goes, There once was a man and he was wise and he knew where to go; He went to heaven and got there first as well we all do know; The fool however danced here and there and round and round and everywhere; And in the end he got to heaven too! And like Poetry, whose rhythmical back-forth slippery pitter-patter trips across the beats until we are insanely luminous. The Fool’s riposte to the squawking of the past few years: Follow the Poetry. Trust the Poetry. Sticking his tongue out: for she is supremely playful, the ultimate rule-breaking Tantrika, for actually the great joke is, of course, that Zero contains everything and maybe, just maybe, We are making all this shit up. All of it. Did the Fool put the moon up there in the first place?
For me, all of this became revelation I got from ‘conscious dance’. It’s the Body that holds the key; and for the Fool the Body is above all the sacred seat of Play. Our body-instrument sings and taps out the rhythms in swirling complexities that arrive when we listen inside. They are, of course, much more fun when the Fool finds other Fools. I cycled in from the Tankwa Karoo desert to that wacky evening when the Bunny burned to hear a band, a trumpeter seducing the night, a strangely foolish warping of space to make fresh sounds. Yet it takes bravery to Play, because of that frontal cortex thing trying to stop us Looking Silly. The part of us, as the Landmark Forum first told me decades ago, that doesn’t get that when we Look Stupid we actually Look Good. For real. The part that believes that Life is Hard and indeed Life is Suffering, as the Buddha said, (though I’m sure he said it with a Trickster-ish grin; like Euripides, casting out another tragic soap opera before ripping it apart with a raucous satyr play). It’s the dominance in major world religions of this Hard Life belief that has ensured that the quest for earthly ecstasy has become deeply suspect. ‘Follow Your Bliss,’ say several Tantra teachers I’ve known, as well as numerous corporate marketers: St Francis and the ascetics mught be justifiably appalled. Or they might look out at a world that is constantly making love with itself, get the joke, play the game, and briefly remember that we’re making it all up, before the next wave comes and we forget again. What beautiful fools we are.
Perhaps it is the Trickster’s task to show us that, to take us in, to take us for a ride. For the Fool is definitely always at the beginning of a journey. If we can allow him to do so we might just stop getting So Very Offended. But we’re wary; that foolish pied piper sometimes steals children. Many parts of us are on guard in case the fool becomes the trickster, the scary clown. If we drop too much into naïvety, we know we can be manipulated. The true Fool, however, is not interested in Power Over others; and indeed the true Trickster reminds us of our folly as much as her own. He wants us to get the joke, and to know that it’s as much on her as it is on us.
I’m conscious in this little unpacking that I’ve played around with male and female pronouns; I sense that the Fool comes before sex; he/she is fundamentally neutral. The Fool breaks all codes of stereotyped male behaviour, or female. He will put on a skirt and high heels and makeup and sing in a deep bass. She will strut about like a tyrant general and fart in your face before blowing a kiss. The Trickster has a little more edge to his folly: I felt her when knitting on Cape Town trains twenty years ago, comfortable in my masculinity but aware of my provocation as I set off unexpected thoughts in any conservative fellow-passengers. A little more mischievous self-awareness, calling us towards opening, stretching. On the dancefloor I feel my toes uncurl, I listen to my bones shaking free, and I laugh at that busy Mind. The dance floor is a route, of course, to being carried forth by life: body and spirit in flow. Ecstasy. Trance. If we keep going, in the Zone, in the Groove, feeling the pulse, we get closer to God, Spirit, Oneness. Who is right now wrinkling Her nose and giggling like a baby.
Joseph Campbell saw striving heroes everywhere in his quest into the ur-Myth. Russian fairy tales, however, have a somewhat different take on who that hero actually is. Ivan - Vanya - sits on top of a stove and does, as we say in Afrikaans, fokol. He’s a Fool, not an earnest third son. A classic Russian tale I loved to tell young children was The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship. He does very little and still ends up surrounded by souls with extraordinary powers and marrying the princess, very much against the wishes of the Tsar. Russians with spirit have long recognised the power of doing Nothing and getting away with it; perhaps the horrific doublethink of communist Russia was just a dark part of this traditional Russian mighty appreciation of paradox, of the ability they knew we have to shift reality in our favour if we are just a little curious. The Art of Soaring, if anyone’s interested, is a great little introduction to Russian spirituality from the point of view that Vanya can win. Curiosity - genuine interest in the world, which is the counterpart of that naïve trust - just watch a dog’s interest in a cat that’s about to swat it - is so very Foolish. And yet, perhaps that’s all the world wants. The truly Foolish attitude is rather close, in fact, to True Love.