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?

Steidl, mostly--

from www.steidlville.com

Metapost

Earlier I was fooling with my post for Sunday. It had certain pronounced leanings toward transcendence and also gardens, and then somehow suffered metamorphosis and turned into a rhymed, metrical poem. Thus it departed from the blogger-plane of existence. And that is The End, or perhaps a beginning, as it travels on and I start another post entirely.

How to Make a Book with Steidl

Last night I watch a documentary about German publisher Gerhard Steidl, and though it is a bit repetitive and hypnotic in the way of many documentaries, I found that the repetitive and hypnotic elements perfectly fit the account of Steidl's obsession with perfection in the making of books. It's also rather exhausting to contemplate his dedication as he travels from Göttingen to Vancouver and New York and Los Angeles and Nova Scotia on quick work trips, visiting photographers, artist, designer, and novelist. (The film features Steidl with Günter Grass, Karl Lagerfeld, Edward Ruscha, Robert Frank and June Leaf, Khalid Al-Thani, Martin Parr, Jonas Wettre, Joel Sternfeld, Jeff Wall, John Cohen, and Robert Adams.)

Directors Gereon Wetzel and Jorg Adolph capture Steidl's confidence in his own skills and book-creation lore. They convey his love of the book, his determination to catch every aspect of book pleasure--the fragrance of different papers (if treated properly in printing), the sound of one heavy page falling onto the others, the touch under the hand, the instinctive grasp of how to make book design fit its subject. The publishing house that is Steidl reaches a rare level in the quality of paper and printing, and the freedom to pursue any design. It is very impressive to see.

The film also made me appreciate how lucky I am to have done book covers with interesting artists. In particular, I felt how lucky I have been to do books with Clive Hicks-Jenkins of Wales (Thaliad and The Foliate Head) and some first-rate book designers, including Elizabeth Adams and Andrew Wakelin and Burt and Burt.

Addendum: After reading artist Marja-Leena Rathje's comments, I have thought to mention that Clive has a number of fine-art books with the UK's marvelous Old Stile Press. You can scroll through posts on both those books and the ones with more commercial printing by going here. All are beautiful.

Passion

"All our books are designed and produced under the same roof. These days, very few publishers run their own printing presses. I, however, firmly believe in this noble tradition, as it enables me to follow and oversee every aspect of a book, from the artist’s initial idea to the final product. Thus, I can ensure a quality standard that would otherwise remain elusive." -Gerhard Steidl

Steidl found his vocation as a printmaker at the age of 17. I love that--love that he found his passion at such a young age and has held to it so long. I feel perfectly congruent with that sort of obsession! It won't be long until he will have been in the business for fifty years . . .

The ideal in twilight...

Vignette for Thaliad
by Clive Hicks-Jenkins (Wales)

The time we are given

Will they say of our time in the arts that people chose surface glitter over the glow of transfiguration, shallows over deep-sea depths, flat screens over multiple dimensions? It is harder for artists to achieve in eras when the trivial and the ephemeral crowd the culture, and when artists often run after such things?

Beauty

Achieved beauty in art breeds more beauty. In some sense, Shakespeare was the glory shining out from his wonderful contemporaries.

Foolishness

Foolishness, I embrace you. I marry you. I let you fly free and then return like a boomerang bird to my hand. I am willing. I put on the Fool's mask and see.

Response

The sun burns; the moon reflects light back. So the reader or viewer or listener and the artist stand, each shining at the other, making a circle, a bond, a marriage.

Kingdom

I choose to believe that inside the great world of what is called the arts, a kingdom stands. I aspire to be a citizen, with all the rights and privileges thereof.

Travel in time and space

Past the limits of desire. Past understanding.

Transformation

The most potent action of art is a kind of lifetime's self-transformation as beautiful creations pour through the artist, leaving a residue in the soul. Art is not just about making something outside oneself; it is about soul-making. It is the transformation that comes to the willing soul when power sweeps through... Just as prophetic utterance changes the prophet, art changes its maker. How hard is it for such things to happen when most no longer believe in the strange, intangible soul?