Playing the Fool
Bringing back the inner clown in my mid 30s
The Fool has been appearing to me everywhere recently. Or perhaps it’s just that I’ve been noticing him. I have missed him. I’m frightened of him. I wonder why people remove him disapprovingly from the card deck before they start a game.
The city I live in is full of sad and happy clowns. The humour is physical, dirty and cheeky. It’s quick and agile. People play verbal combat in the streets, markets and public spaces. And I used to look from afar and laugh quietly to myself.
There is something of the bull ring in Andalusian culture. The idea that when you enter, you enter like the torero, ready to defend yourself against an aggressive creature wishing you harm. In reality the bull is a defenceless creature needlessly killed for entertainment, and the majority of Spaniards don’t support the tradition. Yet Andalusia is the region where the majority of bullfights are held.
If we were to look upon this cruel “sport” as a kind of societal metaphor, it’s evident that there is a real joy in giving yourself completely to your art; defeating the bull, which symbolises one’s “fear” or “shame”. This is very evident in traditional flamenco juergas (parties) where flamenco aficionados enter the ring to display their dancing or singing prowess to the people circling them, clapping the rhythm as if to goad them on.
There have been many times I’ve been flung into the ring and died a kind of death as people laughed at my Spanish, or I forgot the flamenco steps or song lyrics I’d learnt. Yet the culture hugely appreciates bravery, and obliging yourself to go out there. It really is the effort that counts, and the way you do it, chest out, chin forward, teeth bared in mirth but also challenging. The Joker. As my friend said to me, “they eat the shy alive”.
It’s taken a while for me to accept that people laughing at me isn’t disastrous. Whereas openly laughing at someone might be perceived as malicious in the UK, where I’m from, in Andalusia it’s harmless. There is a tone of empathy to it; a, “we can see you’re embarrassed but don’t worry. Try again!” What is important is that you do try again, or at least have the intention to. Giving up is not respected.
Every time I entered the gladiatorial ring — keen to learn more about flamenco, guitar or singing — I would retreat, crushed. And even though I felt like I died a thousand deaths of shame, I kept returning. Until I stopped running away. I faced up to the bull.
And how did I do that, you might ask?
I contacted my inner Fool.
Who exactly is The Fool?
“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool”.
Touchstone in As You Like It, Shakespeare.
“For what says Quinapalus? ‘Better a witty fool, than a foolish wit.’”
Fool in Twelfth Night, Shakespeare.
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The Fool is an archetype, also known as the court jester, or clown. He is ridiculous. He is there to delight crowds, make them laugh, but is also poor and lowly, relying on the patronage of rich, high-status figures. In the old French and Italian card-decks he was called “Le Mat” and “Il Matto”, which means “the madman” or “the beggar”, and is dressed in rags and tatters. In the Rider–Waite Tarot deck, he is portrayed as a young boy, with a small dog and holding a white rose (a symbol of freedom from baser desires). In most of the decks he holds a small bundle of possessions, which in contemporary interpretations of the tarot is said to represent untapped collective knowledge.
The Fool card is number 0 in the tarot deck. Beyond his original function in card games as a type of “checkmate” figure, he is also a symbol of renewal. The Fool propels us to start again at zero, challenging old hierarchies. He bids us tear them down through jokes, malevolence, joy, or choosing to be apart from the crowd.
In the culture of the Sioux of the Great Plains of North America, the heyoka is a sacred fool. The heyoka is a satirist or contrarian who defies the norms and customs of his society.
“Heyókȟa have the power to heal emotional pain; such power comes from the experience of shame—they sing of shameful events in their lives, beg for food, and live as clowns. They provoke laughter in distressing situations of despair, and provoke fear and chaos when people feel complacent and overly secure, to keep them from taking themselves too seriously or believing they are more powerful than they are.” (Wikipedia entry on Heyoka)
The heyoka normalise “humiliation” and in this way brings themselves and their community closer to the original intention of the world — the process of humbling oneself.
I became obsessed with the Shakespearean Fool whilst studying Shakespeare at university. In many of Shakespeare’s plays, the Fool character is a wise court jester challenging the pomposity of his masters or mistresses, often aristocrats or royals. He is often named, simply, “Fool” or “clown”, but also goes by other names, such as Touchstone in As You Like It. I wonder if the nature of my obsession was a private rebellion against the pomposity of seriousness and intellectualism that surrounded me at university.
I was particularly intrigued by the Fool in King Lear. King Lear is in the process of losing his mind owing to his own foolish choices, resulting in him being betrayed by his daughters and ousted from his throne. The Fool doesn’t hesitate in telling his master, the king, what he thinks of him:
"I had rather be any kind of thing than a Fool. And yet I would not be thee […] I am a Fool. Thou art nothing" (King Lear)
The Fool is aware of his low status, but he recognises that it gives him the freedom to say and do as he pleases. Despite the Fool’s harsh words, he is empathetic to the king, and stays with him throughout the literal storm that sees King Lear lose all grip on reason. Indeed, it is only he, and King Lear’s disgraced youngest daughter Cordelia, who speak sincerely to the king. In court, after hearing the honeyed, false proclamations of his two eldest daughters, Lear bids Cordelia tell him how much she loves him. When it is her turn to speak, Cordelia merely says that she has “nothing” to say.
When the king urges her again to speak, Cordelia replies:
“Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave
My heart into my mouth: I love your majesty
According to my bond; nor more nor less.”
King Lear, Shakespeare
At these remarkably honest words, the King accuses Cordelia of being “untender” for one so young and banishes her from his kingdom. Cordelia disappears from the play until the very end when she attempts to save her father from the forces of her treacherous older sisters. When Cordelia is exiled, the Fool becomes the King’s faithful companion. The word of his court jester is the only voice of reason he has to anchor himself in the storm of insanity and distrust.
“O nuncle, court holy-water in a dry
House is better than this rain-water out o' door.
Good nuncle, in, and ask thy daughters' blessing:
Here's a night pities neither wise man nor fool.”
King Lear
The Fool is by default, an outcast, and Cordelia is literally cast out, but King Lear is exiled internally and emotionally. His betrayed, broken heart manifests itself as madness and the breakdown of his kingdom, his power, and all that once seemed indestructible. Though the play is a tragedy, the end brings about a catharsis. The Fool and Cordelia have never attempted to shield King Lear from reality. In some way they even facilitate the king’s humiliation, but this allows Lear to become humble, and therefore truly perceive who has stayed faithful to him.
How does one get in touch with one’s inner Fool?
A fear of mine, no doubt a common fear, is the fear of being outcast. But the Fool character is helping me to see that “being outcast” is not as frightening as all that. It is true that the times I was “outcast” allowed me to discover something new about myself. And I imagine that those involved in my “social ousting” discovered something new too. It is our work, those of us who play the fool, to question, or reveal dogmatic ideas and attitudes. The Fool allows us to challenge authoritarian ideas through a humorous, even nonsensical lens. It is cathartic and allows us to laugh in the face of the fear.
I started participating in a drama improvisation group. At first they laughed at me and my mistakes. But they accepted me. I started a choir. I breathed through my tension, I let my clammy hands go soft beside me. I asked people the vocabulary for words I didn’t know. I let people teach me. I stood up to a friend who wasn’t being very kind and understanding. I told them the truth even though my intuition said they wouldn’t react well.
My inner Fool tells me that keeping the peace at my own expense isn’t useful. The Fool doesn’t like fighting, but he feels the compulsion to speak up to those who maintain a fast grip on power or control. The Fool will bear the consequences. He has the wits and wiles to ensure he doesn’t collapse into his own fears or phobias. He keeps moving, though his clothes are ragged, his bundle in tow.
I’ve always been frightened of clowns. I didn’t watch the horror movies about them. From a young age I instinctively cried and ran away when I spotted one. In Primary School I was the class clown. Sometimes they laughed with me, sometimes at me. Sometimes they just wanted to me to stop talking. I did eventually. I learnt how to hide and be small. A jack-in-the-box. Perhaps springing out when I couldn’t take the silence anymore. Silence kept me safe.
I used to think that perhaps it was the clown make-up that scared me. But I love goths and Robert Smith from The Cure. I believe it’s the clowns’ forced sense of jolliness that unnerves me. That the jolliness might hide maliciousness. Or sadness. That we exaggerate comedy because we can’t accept these uncomfortable states. There is a thin veil between the joy and delight of laughter and the darker, baser sides of ourselves.
I don’t know if it is a coincidence that I began writing this on the eve of the pagan, Celtic festival Beltane. A friend of mine messaged me saying he felt that Beltane was a day that connected us to our innate mischievous character.
Later I read Circle Stories (a well-renowned blog on all things Celtic and pagan) and Beltane was described as a liminal period, where, “the boundaries between the physical world and the spiritual realms can be breached more easily.” In Irish folklore it marks the time where fairies begin to roam, and it is even said to be the day that the Fairy Queen walks among mortals. Anyone familiar with fairy lore knows that fairies are impish, naughty creatures, and are best avoided. This time of year symbolises the cyclical essence of nature, the fragility of the membrane between our existence and the will of the seasons, or perhaps, other worlds.
Therefore, it makes sense that the Fool archetype is particularly present at this time of year. And that it is a time of year rampant with festivals of dancing and brightly-coloured clothes. Here in Jerez, it is “the horse fair”, resplendent with horses and humans in eye-catching costumes, and people dancing Sevillanas (folk-dances) in huts stationed around a large park. The whole of Jerez shuts down and practically nobody goes to work.
The Fool is about cycles, shedding the old and jumping headfirst into a new world order. I’ve been doing this myself recently, and it’s heady and liberating. I am operating in a kind of fugue-like euphoria. I am frightened but thrilled by this new surge of energy. Some old weight has dropped away. My heart feels open, gushing, I want to kiss everyone.
Oddly enough I met a real-life clown recently. He wasn’t wearing make up. He invited me to a free bike repair workshop he was holding in the park. It gets stranger, as after our first encounter I bumped into him several times over the following week. One time he was trying out his new roller-skates whilst hanging onto the local flamenco drunk, offering around a potent homemade jar of CBD oil. Another time, windsurfing on the beach of a nearby town. I went to a bar with him and his friend. They ordered a jar of snails each (it is snail eating season in Jerez) and he convinced me to try my first snail. I complied, though I found it revolting. True to form, my encounter with the clown helped me to face two of my fears, clowns (ironically) and snails!
I have known other “unofficial” clowns. They are bighearted beings, though quite naughty. You must take care not to get too attached, as their raison d'être is to be free-spirited. You can imagine this would be a lonely experience. Clowns need compassion too. There is a lot of sadness between the loving and laughing, sometimes too much. I always knew that this is what truly existed beneath the makeup. The dissonance unsettles me. It is this dissonance that I am investigating.
Undeniably, accessing my inner Fool has improved my intuition. It has liberated me, helping me to release pain. But as we all know, too much of anything is never a good thing, and I am heeding the warning signs.
Caution!
Without sleep the Fool doesn’t function well. Another famous fool-like creature is the Greek god Pan. Pan is the god of shepherds, rustic music, sex, spring and fertility. He loved playing on his pipes in the woods peacefully, dancing and fornicating. He was a faun too, a half-goat man. The origin of the word “panic” comes from Pan, as that is what would ensue if he was awoken from his sleep. He would make a loud, persistent noise, which would startle the surrounding flocks, causing them to stampede. Because of this, the word panikos was created. Panikos means “sudden fear”, but also the fear arising from being in the presence of a god.
Pandemic. Collective fear arising from the jolly god’s lack of sleep. Lack of rest and self-care leading to dysfunction and illness. This is what happens in the throes of hedonism. We forget to rest.
Isn’t that what they always say about panic?
Lean into it. Let it happen.
During a panic attack all you can do is loosen your muscles and let it course through you. And recently, in confronting exactly what I’ve been afraid of — judgement, failure, telling people “no”— my panic attacks have subsided. These fears are sort of “god presences”, and I am facing them defiantly, as the Fool would. The authority of these figures, or their apparent importance, don’t frighten me in the least. But it’s true that I’m grazing the edges of a euphoria that I am struggling to come down from.
Everyday I do a practice to remind myself of who I am. I remember that I like books, quiet time, writing words in notebooks, strumming on my guitar, learning new songs. Even if I love singing and dancing, noisy bars and DJ sets make me anxious. My weekly social spoons are to be meted out carefully. The Fool is only one part of my psyche, and is there to be checked and balanced with all the other parts.
Here are some questions to help you think about your inner Fool.
How does your “inner fool” or silliness manifest itself?
What is your earliest childhood memory of a fool-like figure?
Is your relationship to the figure positive/ negative? Why?
Has that changed and fluctuated over the years? Why?
How do the people in your life, your family or social circle feel about the Fool?
Collaborations
A collaboration with Matteo Delred, for the online project Art in the Time of Commerce. I wrote and edited the visual poem, whilst Matteo Delred provided footage and images.
P.s. Support my foolish dreams of being a Fool, and tip me on Kofi.
I found out recently that to get the fool in your tarot is supposed to be good luck.