Play the fool... maybe I am...

Exercise 25  Play the Fool

Duration: 30 to 40 years

Props: a complex society

Effect: joyful

How did the court jesters amuse themselves, when there were jesters and people had a riotous good time?  They made fun of one and all, and had no time for rules and conventions.  They talked too loudly and laughed at all the wrong things.  Defying expectation was their destiny.  They could shake up people and conventions.  Nomadic and subversive, they wandered roads and crossed rivers, weaving in and out between etiquette and obligation.  They overturned holy images, parodied the sacraments, and mocked the authority of the Church.

     Let us do likewise.  Not that the rivers and roads used by those vociferous singing gangs are still at our disposal.  Try setting out like that today and you will be rapidly locked up.  So find another way.  Make yourself into your own critic, journalist, writer, novelist, filmmaker, musician, porn star*-something of the kind.  Something out of step.  Do everything you can to make waves.  Don't dream of changing the course of history, just sow a little chaos around you.  Disorganize plans, create surprises, confound predictions.  Live stubbornly within your own society, without at heart acquiescing to it.

     Obviously you have to submit to certain norms and forces.  You might even have to crawl, out of prudence, cowardice, or even sheer cheek, in front of some Mr. Big or other.  Tell yourself that is unimportant.  Give way, kow-tow tactically, from time to time, if you are absolutely certain that something within you is resolute and unbending.

     Take care to leave yourself room to maneuver, over a long period.  Act slantwise. Move like a bishop in chess-systematically diagonal.  Walk crablike and cross ways.  Day in, day out, meeting no resistance.  Make it a habit to seek the least appropriate, most incongruous answer to any question.  Apply it from time to time, and see what happens.

    The longest and hardest thing about playing the fool is arriving at the realization that truly nothing is serious.  Occupy the horizon, that point of convergence where absolutely everything becomes, in a sense, laughable: existence, death, humanity, love, the universe, ants, writing, money, careers, bodies, thought, politics.  Among other things.  Not forgetting laughter itself, and hilarity, and court jesters.



"Astonish Yourself!"  Roger-Pol Droit

*porn star replaces "drummer" from original text. 

Play the fool?  Just may be I am.

India Summer