To Play the Fool (12 page)

He did not see his three passengers again, although as the summer
passed he saw others like them. The original three, having bowed their
heads and muttered in unison some chant barely audible even to the
women who emerged from the toilets ten feet away, turned to face the
Tower (and its tourists) full-face.

And an arresting trio of faces it was, too, glossy black on the
right side, stark white on the left, hair sleeked back, and a row of
earrings down the length of each left ear. Black trousers and shoes,
white blouses and gloves, harlequin diamonds black and white on the
waistcoats. The tall one alone had a spot of color: One of the diamonds
on his waistcoat was purple.

What followed was a busking act such as even London rarely saw,
street performance as one of the high arts. Part magic show, part
political satire, part sermon, it seemed more of a dance done for their
own pleasure, or a meditation, than a performance aimed at the
audience--though audience there was, and quickly. The act of the
three Fools was peculiarly compelling, faintly disturbing, wistful and
wild in turns, austere and scatological, the exhortations of gentle
fanatics, anarchists with a sense of humour, three raucous saints who
were immensely professional in their direct simplicity. The bobby who
eventually moved them on had never seen anything quite like it. He had
also never seen buskers who didn't pass the hat.

By the end of the summer, there were at least a dozen harlequin
buskers in London, and others had appeared in Bath and Edinburgh. By
Christmas, New York had its first pair, and the following summer they
were to be found as far afield as Venice, Tokyo, and Sydney.

Then, around the second Christmas, the first tattooed harlequins
appeared: the black half of their faces no longer greasepaint, but one
solid and spectacularly painful tattoo from a sharp line down the
center of the face, from the hairline to the chest. These
half-and-halfs were the extremists, the most radical of a radical
group, and although they never numbered more than a dozen, they were
visible, confrontational, frenetically active, and disturbing:
frightening, even. The other Foolish brothers and sisters contented
themselves with the small tattoo of a diamond beneath the left eye,
like a tear, but the handful of tattooed harlequins inevitably garnered
the attention of the press, and the police. There had been arrests
before, for such things as unlawful assembly and public nudity, but now
the Fools (as they were known to the public through the various
newspaper articles) began to collect more severe misdemeanors, and
eventually felonies. One half-and-half in New York was so caught up in
his performance that he picked up a small child and ran off with her,
the little girl was greatly amused, the mother was not, and he was
arrested for attempted kidnapping (a charge that was later dropped).
Another assaulted a police officer who was trying to move him out of a
crowded downtown intersection in Dallas. Four months later, the same
man, out on bail but now in Los Angeles, reached the climax of his
performance by pulling a revolver from his motley and shooting a young
woman dead.

It was the death, too, of the Fools movement. The young man had a
history of violence and severe mental disturbance, and the Fools were
not to blame for providing him with an outlet, but they were all
comprehensively tarred with the same brush of dangerous madness, and
within a few months they had dispersed. Fools went back to the everyday
life they had so often mocked: Fools bought clothes, bore children,
voted in school board elections. And six teachers, two lawyers, a
magistrate, two actors, four clergy of various denominations, and a
junior congressional aide all wear the faint scar of a removed tattoo
high on their left cheekbone.

The modern Fools movement of the early seventies sprang from a soil
similar to that which nourished earlier Fools movements: The Russian
Yurodivi, the classical Medieval Fool, the buffoonery of the Zen
master--all came into being as a warning personified, a concrete
and living statement that the status quo was in grave danger of
smothering the life out of the spirit of the individual and the
community. A church which no longer hears its parishioners, a
government which is operating with its head in the clouds, a people
which have moved too far from its source: The Fool's laughter
serves to point out the shakiness of these foundations,- the Fool seeks
to save his community by appearing to threaten it. The essential
ministry of a Fool is to undermine beliefs, to seed doubts, to shock
people into seeing truth.

However, I shall not trespass on the lectures of my colleagues by
going any further into the larger themes of the Fool movement, and in
addition, I see that we have run short of time. Perhaps we might take
just two or three questions from the audience.

The question-and-answer session that apparently followed was not
recorded, and Kate turned to the next article with a sigh. This one was
composed as a written, rather than oral, presentation, a reprint from a
quarterly journal, and had so many footnotes that on some pages they
took up more space than the text. Kate didn't think she really
needed to know all about "Fedotov's analysis of this
Russian manifestation of kenoticism," "Via's
exploration of the kerygmatic nucleus of Gospel and the generative
linguistic matrix of Greek comedy," or even "Harvey
Cox's dated but valuable
Feast of Fools."
The
article was cluttered with names--Willeford and Welsford, Hyers
and Eliade and Brown--and turgid with the concentrated essence of
scholarship.

She contented herself with skimming, picking up interesting tidbits,
mostly from the footnotes. "Holy Foolishness" was an
accepted form of ascetic life in Russia, with thirty-six canonized
saints who were Fools. Extreme Foolishness was used as a means of
triggering Zen enlightenment. The Cistercian, the Ignatian, and the
Franciscan orders of the Roman Catholic Church all had their roots
firmly in Foolishness. (St. Ignatius Loyola regarded Holy Foolishness
as the most perfect means of achieving humility, and St. Francis of
Assisi was, as Lee had suggested, Foolishness personified.) There was
an illiterate Irish laborer in the nineteenth century who lived the
life of a Fool, and a tiny monastic order in the same country, founded
about the time the tattooed harlequin in Los Angeles had murdered
international Foolishness. The members of this Irish order, monks and
nuns alike, wandered the roads like harmless lunatics, carrying on
conversations with farm animals and then going home to pray.

So why not Erasmus, in twentieth-century San Francisco? Kate mused, turning to the third folder.

The loose papers it contained were a disparate lot, most of them
handwritten, occasionally a mere scrap of paper, but mostly full
sheets, though of a different size from standard American paper. The
writing was in several hands, all ineffably foreign but for the most
part legible. Some of the sheets were merely references, often with two
or three shades of ink or pencil on the same page: titles and authors
of books or, more often, articles. Kate glanced at these pages and left
them in the file. Others had quotes and excerpts, with references, and
yet others seemed to be Professor Whitlaw's own writing, perhaps
thoughts for the book outlined on one page, much scratched out and
emended.

A number of the pages were as unintelligible as the second article
had been, one academic talking to others in a shared language. Others,
however, were obviously meant for popular consumption, as the
transcribed lecture had been. Kate picked up a few of these and read
them:

There is no place [professor Whitlaw wrote] for the Fool in the
modern world of science and industry. The Fool speaks a language of
symbols and of Divinity. We forget, however, those of us who live our
lives conversant with computer terminals and clay-footed politicians,
with scientists who gaze into invisible stars or manipulate the genetic
building blocks of living matter, that there is an entire population
living, as it were, on the edge, who feel as powerless as children and
cling, therefore, to any sign of alternate possibilities. They believe
in the possibility of magic, the reality of Saints, and would not be
surprised at the existence of miracles. The Fool is their
representative, their mediator, their friend.

Judaism doesn't have fools,- it has prophets. Mad-- look
at Ezekiel. Poor and uneducated--Jeremiah. Laughingstocks
all--poor old Hosea couldn't even keep his wife from making
a spectacle of them both. Jesus ben Joseph fit right in, preaching to
the poor, the prostitutes, the scum, scratching his lice and calling
himself the son of God--and the ultimate absurdity, God's
only son strung up and executed with the other criminals: A royal
diadem made from a branch of thorns, a king's cloak that went to
the high throw, his only public mourners a few outcast women with
nothing left to lose. Then, to cap it off, Christ the original Fool is
decently clothed in purple, his crown traded for one of gold, he is
restored to the head of his Church, and the transformation is complete.

But what consequences, when the jester assumes the throne? Someone
must take his place in the hall, lest the people forget that the
essence of Christianity is humility, not magnificence, that in weakness
lies our strength.

(This page was marked: "Taken from personal communication, 12 October 1983, David Sawyer.")

The three thinkers of Deventes--Thomas a Kempis, Nicholas of
Cusa, and Desiderius Erasmus--all based their thought on
Foolishness.

The craving for security leads modern people to images of God that
are powerful, demanding, and, above all, serious. We have lost the
absolute certainty in God (God existing and God benevolent) which
allows us to express religious ideas in freedom and good humour. In the
twentieth century, God does not laugh.

Foolishness can be a hazardous business, and not only to one's
mind and spirit. After all, one of the Fool's main activities is
to make a fool out of others, to throw doubt on cherished wisdoms and
accepted behaviours: in a word, to shock. If this is done too
aggressively, without caution, the result is more likely to be rage
than enlightenment. Foolishness does not usually coincide with caution.
Even the less flamboyant Fools courted danger: The half-and-half
extremists seemed almost to glory in it. I know of twenty-two cases of
violence against Fools, all but one of them a direct result of some
inflammatory word or action on the part of the Fool. One Fool spent
three days unconscious in hospital, put there by a motorcycle gang
member who became enraged when the Fool made fun of the
motorcycle's role in the man's sexual identity. Another
Fool had one foot amputated following a particularly aggressive mocking
episode which began when a young man came out of a Liverpool pub with
his girlfriend literally in tow, bullying and abusing her. The Fool
stepped in and soon had a crowd gathered, all ridiculing the young man.
A more experienced Fool would have then turned the barrage of criticism
into a more long-term solution--some pointed suggestion perhaps,
that real men do not slap women around--but this Fool was new to
street work and lost control of his mob. The man stormed off, got into
his car, came back to the pub, and ran the Fool down.

St. Francis wished his followers to become
joculatores,
clowns of God,- his band of fools and beggars quickly became an order studded with intellectual giants.

How can a movement embodying the antithesis of organisation possibly
deal with the modern world? When I wished to interview a certain
Brother Stultus about the early days in England, he was not to be
found. One of the brothers told me he had gone to Mexico (we were then
in San Diego), but that was some weeks before. Stultus was not a young
man, and I was concerned, but there was not much I could do. Some weeks
passed, and a rumour reached me of a "crazy Anglo" who had
taken up residence near the border patrol offices in Tijuana. I
immediately drove down, and there found Stultus, living behind a
garage, fed by the generous Mexican women, and waiting for rescue with
sweet patience (in between periodic arrests for vagrancy by the
frustrated police). Stultus, of course, carried no identification
papers, and without them the U.S. Immigration Service would not allow
him back in.

He listens to those to whom God himself will not listen.

Kate closed the folder, unable to read any more. She felt as if
she'd just finished Thanksgiving dinner: packed with more than
she could possibly digest and experiencing the onset of severe mental
dyspepsia. This wasn't cop business,- this was
tea-and-sherry-with-the-tutor business, Oxbridge-in-Berkeley business,
Greek-verbs-and-the-nuances-of-meaning business, worse than memorizing
the latest departmental regulations concerning the security of evidence
and treatment of suspects. That at least was of personal interest, but
this--she couldn't even convince herself it had anything to
do with one charred corpse in Golden Gate Park. She thought it did,
feared it might not, and all in all she had the urge to strap on her
club and go rousting a few drunks, just to taste the grittier side of
reality again. She scratched her scalp vigorously with the nails of
both hands, knowing that there was no way she would be going back to
continue her interview with Professor Whitlaw, certainly not tonight,
and possibly not tomorrow.

She reached for the telephone.

"Al? Kate here. I had an interesting time with Professor
Whitlaw." Hawkin listened without interrupting while she told him
about the interview with the English professor and gave him a brief
synopsis of the papers she had waded through, ending with,
"Anyway, I thought I'd check and see if you still thought
we needed to interview Beatrice Jankowski. I could do it tonight."