You Asked, no. 8: Kin to the Fool

Watch out, Fool!

Bullington-Youmans interview party, continued. In response to a request to interview some of my painter friends, I have been interviewing Mary Boxley Bullington. As she, in turn, insisted on interviewing me, a part of the You Asked series will be composed of our questions to each other.

DEFINITION OF FOOL
  --from At Length 
  (more Red King poems there)


What does it mean to be a fool?

Is it to reel about the world
Like stars made out of icicles,
Dangerous and breakable?

What does it mean to be a fool?

Is it to make the things no one
Can recognize or put to use?
For the beautiful, for hurt joy?

He spins around, wanting to learn.

The Fool is dreaming that he lies
With truth—across a grave like glass
He lies, the shaft shoaling with leaves.

What can he do with schooling dark?

Each minnowed leaf says leave-taking.
He shakes his rattle at the dark
And fills his antic hat with leaves.

Bullington: 
In response to my question about the place of myth in your work, you wrote of the book of poems you first sent me in 2010 and that you're finishing now, The Book of the Red King: "Why do I feel so kindred to the Fool?" This struck me like a hammer. A fellow artist once brought me an astrology chart image of myself, based on the time, year, and date of my birth. It was the tarot image of the Fool looking back at the little dog playing at his heels as he steps off a cliff into thin air. I thought this was hilarious—and very true of me! But I didn't see the Fool as an image of the creative until I read your Red King poems. So, tell me, why do you "feel so kindred to the Fool"?

Youmans:
First, I will not lie, exactly, in answering this question, but I will not answer it as fully as I could do, if I wanted to do so. But I don't. Fair warning!

Second, all Fools are tricksters, wielders of stories and parables. I may have lied already, while wearing the mask of the Fool.

Third, I feel that the poems themselves say all I could possibly say about why the Fool and the writer (or any artist who has a calling) are the same. The reading of the book-to-be will be the experience of why the two things are the same--and it will be more, a good deal more, I hope.

The Fool in The Book of the Red King manuscript has a great struggle growing up. There's early death in the family, there's difficulty. He runs to the forest and becomes a sort of young woodwose: "When I ran off to the forest, I was / Looking for a favorable message, / I was looking for a sign or omen, / I was searching for some news of dreamtime." Eventually he lies down in darkness and has a kind of death himself. Even his bones are scattered, until "The little animals and the big came / Trotting with my teeth-grooved bones in their mouths." A "Lazarus breath" enters his mouth and he awakens, "braced to live before I died again."

The story's all about metamorphosis, transformation, reaching for a union of opposites, and climbing the alchemical ladder toward a kind of burning gold. It's about finding more and larger life, reaching for wholeness, mixing the profane and the sacred--"A wordless word, a sluice of fiery rain, / A sweetness that is hurt, made flowering"--into one great unity. The holy Fool is an ancient figure, and this Fool is a torrent of opposites, seeking more life and love of all sorts (including the love of his pearly girlfriend, the lovely Precious Wentletrap), often finding confusion, desiring to make, to be bigger than he can possibly be. It's a question early on, whether he will be destroyed by his own impulses and situation or instead will answer the call to aspiration and journey. Even when he finds a stopping place, darkness and memory still visit him--it's still a challenge to not tumble back into that former world. After all, he appears doomed from birth: "The Fool crashed out, howling into the world-- / A bruiser, slimed and slick and shock-haired, plopped / On his fontanelle, his catch less body / Like something tumbled from a guillotine."

from the Major Arcana

But when he reaches the city of the Red King, it's clear that he has found his real home, in part because he becomes immediately fruitful. All the anguish and hardship of his long journey flowers into something else: "He stood as pivot of the wheeling square, / And language was a gold chrysanthemum / That burst with fountain-like abandonings / Of stories, fragments, anecdotes, and jokes--." His excessive flood of words calls out to the world, and one person answers: "At dusk when the Fool shone, his petals fire / Against the cobalt air, the city lay / Hip-deep in golden words and visible / To naked eyes as far as the new moon, / The Red King left his tower under stars / And followed gold to make the Fool his Fool."

All I will say is such a weird pilgrim's progress feels like the story of my own life. And that is despite the fact that I never ran away, or that my parents were not wild as I "crashed out" (though I was, indeed, a shock-haired Marly.)

All this business about metamorphosis is, of course, tied in with the Tarot you mention. In esoteric meanings, the Fool is a story's protagonist. The Tarot Fool goes on, passing through the various mysteries of life and meeting archetypal figures along the way--that is, he goes on a fool's journey through the emblematic places and archetypal figures of the Major Arcana. While the Rosy Cross and such esoteric brotherhoods made use of the Tarot as an initiatory pattern, I didn't study or make a lot of use of that material, though the Fool does meet "the Tarot witch"and her daughter, and there's a poem that is based closely on the Fool card: "...The fortunetellers sketched / This card, the Fool with feathers in his hair, / As if those ancients knew that he would come to pass / And stand between all things, the ground and air, / Wildwood and the castle, Red King and Corvid King." The Tarot connection does, however, reinforce the idea of transformation and archetypes that come from alchemy.

In some ways, we are all the Fool because we go on a wandering path through the life and are changed by it--we begin as children (i.e. innocents or fools), going on insufficient knowledge, and learning as we are knocked about by events.  An odd thing about the Tarot and this book-to-be is that it seems quite possible to talk about the sequence in detail based on the Major Arcana and the Fool's Journey, even though I didn't have that in mind. Jung would have something to say about that mix of Tarot and archetypes. Don't we set off heedlessly into the big world with its Magician and Hierophant and Lovers, little realizing that we are about to step over precipice after precipice?

Painting, cooking, alchemy--

detail, "The House Opposite," Leonora Carrington

from Susan L. Aberth, Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art.

The relation of cooking and art production, according to Chadwick, is of central concern to the artist:

The prominent place given to the cauldron in Celtic myth and Grail legend had long fascinated Carrington, as had alchemical descriptions of the gentle cooking of substances placed in egg-shaped vessels. She has related alchemical processes to those of both painting and cooking, carefully selecting a metaphor that unites the traditional woman's occupation as nourisher of the species with that of the magical transformation of form and color that takes place in the artist's creative process, nourishing the spirit (pp. 68-69).

Readings for the 12 Days of Christmas: John Granger

I had a great love first for George MacDonald (as a child and young woman) and then for the Inklings; some of them I have reread, some not. But I have retained an affection for their books and concerns. One of the people involved (via J. K. Rowling) in a resurgence of interest in the Inklings is John Granger. I must have discovered him some time ago while delving about in search of some piece of information about alchemy. And what I found first, I think, was "The Alchemist's Tale," a lucid little explanation of alchemy, The Great Work, and literary alchemy, followed by a discussion of Rowling as in the tradition of literary alchemy--an idea that is pretty clear early on (a wand with a phoenix feather! Albus! Rubeus! etc.) in the books if you have, as I have, read the whole series outloud to a child or wandered through them on your own. But if you are a Rowling fan, Granger goes very deep into the subject and has published books and websites on Rowling and Meyer (I haven't read Meyer, but he classes her as a literary alchemist.) And if you don't know anything about alchemy, the article is a great capsule introduction, both to the original practice and its transformation into story.

Here's an excerpt:


Literary Alchemy

If English Literature from its beginning to Rowling is front-loaded with alchemical devices and images, why is this so? What is the connection between alchemy and literature that makes these images such useful tools for writers?

I think the connection is probably most clear in drama. Eliade even suggested that alchemical work grew out of the initiatory dramas of the Greek Mystery religions.11 Shakespeare doesn’t just make asides to alchemy in his plays; many if not most of them are written on alchemical skeletons and themes. The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labours Lost, and The Merchant of Venice come to mind.12 Frances Yates’s The Art of Memory argued persuasively that Shakespeare built the Globe Theatre on alchemical principles for the proper staging of his alchemical dramas.13 Why?

If you recall your Aristotle on what happens in a proper tragedy, the audience identifies with the hero in his agony and shares in his passion. This identification and shared passion is effectively the same as the experience of the event; the audience experiences katharsis or “purification” in correspondence with the actors. Shakespeare and Jonson, among others, used alchemical imagery and themes because they understood that the work of the theater in human transformation was parallel if not identical to the work of alchemy in that same transformation. The alchemical work was claimed to be greater than an imaginative experience in the theater, but the idea of purification by identification or correspondence with an object and its transformations was the same in both.

Alchemical language and themes are a shorthand. The success of an artist following this tradition is measured by the edification of his audience. By means of traditional methods and symbols, the alchemical artist offers our souls delight and dramatic release through archetypal and purifying experiences.

That may be harder for some of us than the idea of alchemy as a sacred science. If you are like me, you grew up with the idea that reading was entertainment and diversion, and anything but life-changing. This idea, really only in currency for the last seventy or eighty years, is a gross misconception. Anthropologists, historians of religion, and professors of literature will tell you that the rule in traditional cultures, and even in profane cultures such as ours, is that Story, in whatever form, instructs and initiates.

In his The Sacred and The Profane, Eliade argued that entertainments serve a religious function, especially in a profane culture. They remove us from our ego-bound consciousness for an experience or immersion in another world. C. S. Lewis, in his Preface to Paradise Lost, asserted that this is the traditional understanding of the best writers, namely, that their role in culture is “to instruct while delighting.”

Alchemy and literature are a match because they both endeavor (in their undegenerate or orthodox state) to transform the human person.

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Want more? Try here. And if you want more Granger, you can hop to wikipedia and check out the list of external links.

Illustration: "Old burnt door in Jerusalem" by Ekaterina Boym-Medler, graphic designer and photographer, Russian by birth but now living in Israel. Photo courtesy of Ekaterina Boym-Medler and sxc.hu.