Fool For Love

“When we are born, we cry that we are come

To this great stage of fools.”

----King Lear, Act IV, Scene 5

Dear Readers,

This week I am sharing an old, un-published essay that I forgot about and found recently in the shadowy depths of my computer. I think when I wrote it about 10 years ago I was still too shame-identified to actually expose the suffering I went through.

Why are we sometimes ashamed of our pain? Do we think it’s too much for others to handle? Do we think vulnerability makes us weak? I’d be curious to know what you think after you read this story. Maybe my self-exposure will even encourage you to release something you’re ashamed of. I’d love to know.

Fool For Love

I have been a fool for love, been fooled by love, and loved a fool, a paint-splattered artist with alligators and unicorns spilling out of his fingertips, claw-foot castles sliding down his laughter to splash in a pool with elephants and polar bears and human-animal hybrids unidentified by science, but instantly recognized by children as inhabitants of the land east of the sun and west of the moon. He was ten years younger than me and lived with his mother. His clothes, from thrift shops, often included skin-tight snakeskin-patterned pants and booty shorts that even gay men wouldn’t wear in New England (well, maybe in Provincetown). He was usually shirtless, too. To say he had a fine physique was to underestimate the power of words to shape-shift a man into a jaguar. “He’s like an Adonis,” one friend observed, eyes glazed, in a voice that sounded like Marilyn Monroe singing Happy Birthday to JFK. There were lots of us who fell for him, including straight men like my aforementioned friend, some just happened to take off their clothes and walk into the moonlit ocean hoping he would follow, some didn’t, and since he probably would have gone around pants-less if he could, this was usually a pretty good bet for getting his attention.  (One of the few jobs he seemed to be able to stick with was nude model for life drawing classes.) Another one of my friends, less impressed, called him a “walking boner.”

“Comedy is carnival’s cousin,” writes Jay Griffiths, “And carnival is always upsetting the applecart, annoying the pants off the bourgeoisie, overthrowing the status quo.” That’s what it was like being in a relationship with Doug—a carnival, a three-ring circus with elephants and trapeze artists, lions and trick poodles. I tried to be the ring master—we had free rent because I was the caretaker of the house we lived in- but it was no use.

“The empty handed painter from your streets,” sang Bob Dylan, “Is drawing crazy patterns on your sheets,” in “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue.” He would draw anything, including people who sometimes lifted up their shirts for a quick sketch on lower back or bicep, a tribal tattoo that marked them, until it washed off, with some of his madness.

Meanwhile, there was paint on my sheets, just like in the song, and on the light switches and banisters. As soon as I pointed out to him why it was important he didn’t get paint on the walls, there they were again, cobalt streaks up the stairway, him laughing like Woody Woodpecker, saying sorry as he ran back down. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I was in love with a capital “F” Fool--a Jester, a Trickster--all those capital letters signifying  a Tasmanian Devil-sized dose of archetypal schooling for me, who had asked for it, for sure, but hadn’t thought it all the way through.

But how could I? How can you know what it’s like to have otters in your attic or raccoons ruffling through your kitchen cupboards until you do?

Trickster authority Paul Radin (scary combination of words), describes Trickster as being:

…at one and the same time creator and destroyer, giver and negator, he who dupes and is always duped himself. He wills nothing consciously. At all times he is constrained to behave as he does from impulses over which he has no control. He knows neither good or evil yet he is responsible for both. He possesses no values, moral or social, is at the mercy of his passions and appetites, yet through his actions all values come into being.

And Jay Griffith’s could have been writing about life with Doug when she said:

The Shakespearean Fool lives at court without fee, is paid spontaneously—or not. Being penniless, he is priceless. Never selling out, never fettered by a wage, the fool is wildly free, he can’t be bought or directed by money. The fool is paid in laughter and in love, through gift, charity, that lovely word linked to ‘caritas’ (“to love”) and to grace.”

And scholar Alan Garner, in his collection of Trickster stories describes our character thus:

If we take the elements from which our emotions are built and give them separate names such as Mother, Hero, Father, King, Child, Queen, the element that I think marks most of us is that of the Fool. It is where our uncertainty lies. For the Fool is the advocate of uncertainty: he is at once creator and destroyer, bringer of help and harm. He draws a boundary for chaos, so that we can make sense of the rest. He is the shadow that shapes the light. Psychology calls him Trickster. I have called him Guizer. Guizer is the proper word for an actor in a mummer’s play. He is comical, grotesque, stupid, cunning, ambiguous. He is sometimes part animal, and always part something else. The something else is what is so special. He is the dawning godhead in Man.

Before we get too serious here, I have to say he had matted hair and a beard that caused people to make jokes about Osama Bin Laden. He did not have a driver’s license. When I met him, his modes of transportation consisted of bike and three boards: surf, skate, and snow.  (Or my car.) Once I got thrown out of a health food store with him because he got caught grazing the bulk bins—not that he was trying to hide it. He left a trail of granola on the floor after him as we were scolded out the door.  

He surfed—even when there were no waves, or in waves that weren’t really ride-able, while the other surfers stayed on shore and called him crazy. Once when he bobbed out of the water like a penguin to where I sat on the beach with the other surfers, blue eyes blazing with crazed joy, one of them asked him where the ‘shrooms were. It was inconceivable to him that Doug wasn’t on drugs.

Little did they know, in the technical sense, he was sober. Arrested for drunk driving three times, he went to jail for a month when he was 20, turned 21 behind bars, and hadn’t drank alcohol, smoked pot, ate mushrooms or tripped on acid for six  years--and his brain wasn’t fried because he had done all those things in his youth, he was just born that way like the Lady Gaga song.

Although he liked to perform, he was not a performance artist. No true fool is, for the fool isn’t trying to make a statement. His words haven’t caught up with his body. He’s tripping off a sidewalk that opens into a sewer with a smile on his shit-stained face.

He was a fool in the truest sense-leaping off waves, mountains and sidewalks, despite some injuries so bad they’d put him in the hospital. My brother called him “Doug the Drug,” because I was so intoxicated. I had no shame and didn’t try to hide it. Another friend called him “Drugless,” instead of Douglas, because of his ironic sobriety. That same friend sometimes called him Rasputin because he had the pale blue eyes and intense stare of the legendary “mad monk,” who had healing powers and so much influence with the Russian Czarina Alexandra nobles of the court had him assassinated, although some say it was the British, who must have seen his mesmeric hold over the Czarina and other members of the court as a threat to empire—and he was—mystic wanderer, sexually promiscuous, drunken, and supposedly an accepter of bribes who didn’t come through on his word. What could be worse to a nation that believed it was destined to control the world? Or to a person, who perhaps didn’t think she deserved to so much, but wanted to, for the same reason as an empire—a fear of losing boundaries.

Rasputin was a much better comparison than the humorless, fanatical Osama, who reduced truth to a straight line that eradicated the pleasure to be had in multiple points of view, let alone pagan fertility rites. They say they had a tough time killing him. (Rasputin. As far as I know the Navy Seals who riddled Osama with bullets had no problem.) Poisoned, shot in the head once, he was said to have lunged for his assassin when he bent to check to see if he was dead, which provoked a volley of shots which should have finished him off. However, as the story goes, he was still alive when they finally threw him in the frigid Neva. When his body was pulled out two days later, the official cause of death was pronounced as drowning, despite the bullet hole in his forehead which can be seen in photographs on the internet. It was said that when his body was placed on a fire, he sat up and stared at those gathered to watch him burn.

It is hard to kill a fool. You might say it’s impossible, for the fool gives us the permission we desire most of all—to be drunken, promiscuous, unboundaried--to be in our bodies but in touch with God. And Rasputin was a good spin doctor, too. Supposedly he told his followers it was crucial to give into temptation because the humiliation it caused purged a person of vanity. I don’t know if this only happened if the miscreant was caught, or if just being humiliated for one’s self was enough to cleanse one’s soul. In any case, this mythic man had a daughter who lived until 1977, and was a dancer and tiger trainer. Clearly, he was a good father.

My fool laughed like a loon—not a crazy person, but the bird that calls out from lakes on summer in a tremolo yodel, shaking the New England night to its core, a long, eerie, insane call you either love or hate, but definitely notice. No hiding for him, but he could also disappear in plain sight—into something else—a baboon, for instance, or a marmot, so it was hard to hold him accountable for anything he did, like full body hugs with blond sorority girls while wearing loose shorts with no underwear. People were either hugging him within five minutes of meeting him or running away like they’d been sprayed by a skunk. I was one of the huggers, but for me it was less than five minutes. Two, tops, maybe less--and I loved the way he smelled—salty, greased, funky, feral.

We met in the local coffee shop. I breezed in on my bike from the beach, same as I did every day and noticed him sitting at a table that seemed much too small for him, even though it was the same size it had been for all the years I’d been coming there, facing the door so that everyone had to see him if they wanted to get a double-shot iced soy mocha. He was wearing shorts, a t-shirt with the sleeves cut off and a smashed trucker cap, all, except for hat, a little too small, muscles evident like the Incredible Hulk’s when he’s about to burst out of his human clothes. At first glance I thought he was a hot redneck stoner. Newly sober, I was disappointed. I was so done with that, but he kept staring until I looked back. This guy is really stoned, I thought, but pretty soon, as I said above, we were hugging—close, as in full body contact. Dolphins leaped out of the water and spun inside me. Now I’m not normally a hugger, even with people I know well, so I had no idea hugs like this were normal for him. I thought I was just really inspiring. I didn’t know how many “relationships” were started in just the same way in coffee shops up and down the east coast.

I don’t remember what our first words were, but pretty soon I learned that he had come to the island to visit his college friend, but not knowing where she lived or worked, he’d wandered into the café figuring someone would tell him. It turned out she was a friend of mine and I knew where she lived. I gave him directions and promptly set out to seduce him by calling her and making plans to meet them both later that night back at the coffee shop.

Newly sober, I was contemptuous of bars. Of course, she wanted him, too, and he was gentleman enough to turn me down that first night (after a naked moonlight swim and a make-out session in which I literally pushed him backwards out of a bar), to sleep with her. I saw him the next day and gave him a book of my poetry and my phone number. He wrote it down in his sketchbook with about a hundred other numbers, but I didn’t care. I was ready to leap off a cliff for him head over heels. I knew he would call. I had complete trust.

After he left, I wrote him a wild and reckless letter declaring my passion. After a period of about a month where I did tarot readings regarding our future and recited affirmations in which he was already my boyfriend, a period in which he had adventures which I couldn’t have cared less about when he finally contacted me by singing gibberish into my answering machine, but which would prove to be important later on, he invited me to visit him in New Hampshire, which he thought was a better idea than him visiting me, since he wanted to sleep with me now and not his original friend on the island. He didn’t say that, but I got it. I hoofed it up to the White Mountains where he now had a room in the basement of a lesbian couples’ house. He told them he had a partner and they were delighted, probably because he was genuinely sincere and respectful. Like all good fools, he could turn it on and off, adjust himself to his audience. And he wasn’t trying to fool them. He called me his partner before I was without irony because he was lonely, too.

There wasn’t a bed of course, but he had a record player like the one I had as a kid that came in a case you could latch and carry with you, and about four records from a thrift store, one of them the African enchantress Miriam Makeba, which impressed me; tubes of paint of course, magic markers, charcoal, pastels, scrap wood, paper bags, and cardboard to paint on, and heaps of dirty clothes. I, at 35, thought it was all terribly romantic. He was working as a snowmaker at a small ski mountain nearby, a night job which he rode to on his bike. His thighs were not foolish at all, but heroic. I didn’t know then what stamina it took to leap off mountains every day like it was normal.

We fell in love on that trip--for real. Electric Lady Land lift-off love. I was so high I laughed at the thought of drugs. On a rock in the middle of a stream outside a Mexican restaurant in New Hampshire where I’d just bought him lunch with no shame or apology on his part we declared it. For a few moments, in that stream, we were deadly serious. It took all the courage he had for him to tell me that I was being arrogant and self-righteous in my dismissal of drunks, something he knew because he had done it himself when he’d first got sober. He told me because he wanted to love me. I just needed to shut up.

I was just trying to fill up silence, make him like me. I only knew how to impress, but he loved beyond that, able to see the shamed girl who’d forsaken herself in the shadows of my childhood bedroom for some reason that it’s not even necessary to know. All that matters is that I had abandoned the wild horse that let me ride him into the surf, and my belief that I was worth loving, although I never quite forgot that horse. I carried a small bamboo flute around with me (still do) and played it outdoors, music uncontained by walls that made people stop in the street in delight and disbelief. Once I played for Christopher Walken, who has a house on the island, the two of us alone on a remote beach. He didn’t approach to say anything, just sat on a rock dressed head to toe in black on a hot, August afternoon. When I finished, I lay down on my towel and went to sleep. He was gone when I woke up. It was hard to tell if it had really happened or if I’d seen it in a movie.

Doug knew why I had to disparage drunks and stoners, because he had done it himself. What he felt for me was not disdain, although there was annoyance at my jabbering, but empathy, the ability to feel what someone else was feeling, a gift common to fool, artist, and shaman--shapeshifters who heal in the spirit world. I could barely hear him above the water. Afraid I would be hurt, he had a hard time getting the words out. If I had the wrong reaction, he would have asked me to drop him back in the lesbians’ basement and I would have never seen him again. The wrong reaction would have been to defend myself. But as the Buddha said, “truth spoken with kindness can change our world,” and my world changed that day.

In The New Earth, Eckhart Tolle says:

“When someone blames or criticizes me, that to the ego is a diminishment of self, and it will immediately attempt to repair its diminished sense of self through self- justification, defense, or blaming.   Whether the other person is right or wrong is irrelevant to the ego.”

For one of the first times in myself, even though I had to fight not to because I was ashamed, I didn’t react defensively. I responded from my heart and he heard me.

Now, I am not one for eradicating boundaries. Why would I want to forget the feel of my skin against his? Or kick over the stonewalls holding back thickets all over the island that hide deer and birds that sometimes emerge to enter into one of my poem. Without boundaries, I’d be like Sleeping Beauty, asleep inside a forest of thorns.

And what about pen and paper, fingers against keyboards? Magic pours through boundaries. Fairy rings, stone circles—portals into other dimensions where our imaginations are stretched to a limit far beyond what we believed they could contain. 

Permaculture, a way of creating sustainable human systems modeled on nature, affirms this. In nature (ourselves included), edges are the most fertile zones. A body is a boundary, and a book, both open into worlds we couldn’t discover without edges. There, in that stream, water parting around the rock where we sat to swirl downriver, was not a time to defend myself, it was a time to open my heart, and I did, accepting his words, feeling shame rise within me, letting him see it, and love it if he could.

And he could. Although he was gifted with words, he told me with a picture. It came in the mail after I’d gone back to the island, a paper bag scroll tied with twine. I unrolled it and saw my forsaken inner world drawn in black sharpie, lines filled in with white paint (it might even be white-out, used to erase typing mistakes. He would use anything at hand—mustard, dirt, coffee grounds.) There I was, freckles on my nose, almond eyes slanted sideways watching polar bears snowshoe on whitecaps as I played for them on my bamboo flute, music summoning shark fins to break the surface, and birds who skimmed the waves in curlicues. He saw me. And more--he made me visible to myself.

 He saw the tigress who could tear out his throat if I chose, and the goose who read him bedtime stories, and the whale who swam to land’s edge every day because she was in love with an elephant who came to trumpet in the surf. He saw there were two swan ballerinas inside me—a white and a black, and a Yoruba woman summoning my gods in a trance, dancing in the center of a circle, lifting off earth on wild ululations. In truth I wasn’t on earth, I was between worlds--with him--in dreams he gave vision to in the drawings he dropped like litter all around the house.

We ended up living together—a sure recipe for disaster for two artists more alive in their dream worlds than the actual, which required bills to be paid and food. He set up a studio in my basement where he painted all hours of day and night while I wrote upstairs. We would run up and down in both directions to make love as much as possible in one of our animal forms—on the stair landing, kitchen counters, bath tubs, on the living room rug-and sometimes—ahhh—we were the same species.

At last I had a companion in my solitude, both of us wandering into our own worlds to create, coming back home to each other. He often took me into his, and I wanted him to come into mine, but I felt his resistance. I was a little too much Inanna on her way down to the Underworld. He knew intuitively I needed to be stripped of some more clothes until I was naked and hung upside down on a hook to rot by my dark sister Ereshkigal.

I don’t blame him for being scared, who wants to be the one to strip someone’s illusions away, even if it’s for their own good, but I was hurt anyway. I wanted him to be delighted, jubilant, joyful, but my world was none of those things. It was too severe, too harsh, puritanical even, and I was ashamed of it.

In the Tarot, The Fool is represented by the number 0, which isn’t a number at all, but a circle representing the lack of a number, something that can’t be counted because it doesn’t exist, a slippery trickster sliding out of view before we can pin it down. Mathematicians call it a place holder, something used to move numbers around, pushing them from right to left, but the esoteric vision of the zero is much more: 0, as non-number, is pure potentiality, it holds a place for us to be whatever we want, not that this is easy.

Look at any tarot deck to find the Fool—he carries all of his possessions on his back. Head in air, one foot on land, the other steps out over an abyss. You would assume the fool is going down, which society generally deems as not good. “He’s going down,” we hear people say about an adversary. “She feels down,” meaning depressed, or “we have to put our cat down.” Then there’s “down on our luck,” and “I look down on you.” The general consensus is that going down is inferior to going up. You never hear anyone get the glory for going down a mountain, it’s always the ascension that’s trumpeted and festooned with laurels, book deals and movie rights.

I was no different. I didn’t choose to go down, not with my intellect at least—my soul—that’s another story—this one in which my fool, Doug, betrayed me in the usual way, with at least one girl (I only know about one, but I suspect there were others. Like Rasputin, he enjoyed spreading the madness around.) She was younger than me. of course. Someone he’d met in that month gap when I’d backed him out of the bar and chased him down in the New Hampshire woods. Nobody had cell phones then and he actually gave her my landline to call him. One night she dialed that number and asked to speak to me, not him, and told me the truth. She’d been in a relationship with him all the time I had been with him. I thought he was leaving the island to go snowboarding in New Hampshire, but he was actually just driving from the ferry to Providence where she was a student at Brown.

My heart didn’t break, it shattered. Like they say, I dissolved into a million pieces. I went fetal. I was devastated far beyond the appropriate level of loss you’d expect from a relationship of six months. The only thing that helped was that he was, too.

What happened next surprised me. I didn’t shift out of my grief into anger, throw all his clothes and pot plants out the window like I’d done with another cheating boyfriend. I slid further into grief-- surrendered to it completely. I didn’t know I had that much grief inside me—lifetimes maybe—one betrayal opened into another like Russian dolls, except these dolls kept getting smaller and smaller. I kept opening them up until they were invisible to anyone but me. I felt like the whole world had betrayed me. My skin was so thin it hurt to walk in the sun. My eyes turned away from the glare and sought comfort in the dark, and I saw there were layers of it waiting for me, that I would never reach bottom, but that if I wanted to begin with the first layer, the dark would help me.

The first step was forgiveness, not of Doug, but of myself. Why did I, who was the victim, need to forgive myself? Because I knew, with a knowledge that felt as true as looking at myself in a rearview mirror tripping on mushrooms, coming back to the tin refuge of my car after hours of walking the island as a deer, seeing myself behind the veil I wore to cover my vital essence in the mundane world, that I had chosen this with my soul. And why would I need to choose to be hurt so? Because to love someone who has betrayed you is to love without conditions. (And of course we all know who was good at that, another bearded, wandering wildman named Jeshua who became Jesus Christ by loving so radically he lost his life for it.

Fortunately, there’s another way to unconditional love besides dying on the cross—to love a Fool. Once I realized this, my love for Doug expanded. A spring began to flow inside me that burbled like Antonio Machado:

Last night, as I was sleeping,

I dreamt-marvelous error!-

that a spring was breaking

out in my heart.

I said: Along which secret aqueduct,

Oh water, are you coming to me,

water of a new life

that I have never drunk?

I couldn’t hold the water back, gratitude and tenderness burst out of me in tears loud enough to wake the world.

I’ve heard the storyteller Martin Shaw say in telling “The Handless Maiden,” that there are some tears you only shed a few times in life, tears that are the earth’s tears, and the ocean’s, tears that swell on spiderwebs at first light, that break when the sun rises all the way over the horizon, slow tears falling from a tree’s crown, flowing down bark rivers and leaf veins. Tears that have witnessed the death of thousand year old sequoias and the evisceration of mountaintops to steal the land’s condensed, hard-earned wisdom stored as coal. Tears that cut through mud that sparkled like diamonds.

Devastated, another story called me, “The Descent of Inanna,” ancient Sumerian epic in which our heroine hears a call from below and willingly chooses to go down to the Underworld where she is promptly killed by her sister Ereshkigal before she can even get a word out. Inanna, Queen of Heaven, is not rescued by a hero like Gilgamesh. Her uncle Enki, god of water and mischief himself a trickster, creates two comical little creatures, the kurgarra and the galatur to bring her the food and water of life that will enable her return to her kingdom. They fool Ereshkigal by pretending to commiserate with her as she fakes the pain of childbirth. She likes this, and grants them a boon. They ask for Inanna’s corpse and while she is not looking sprinkle it with the magic food and water, restoring her to life.

Inanna, now Queen of the Underworld as well as the world above, honors her debt to Ereshkigal by sending her husband Dumuzi, who hadn’t seemed to miss her that much, down to take her place, which is only a punishment if you still believe that going down is undesirable. (Sexual connotation noted and encouraged.)

Viewed archetypally, Dumuzi is being given a great opportunity for growth. Indeed, he has company soon because his sister Geshtinanna offers to share his fate. They each spend half the year in the dark, thus having an easier time of it I would imagine—six months of the year in the light to integrate.

In other times, even in Western culture, when our souls were sick, we went to shamans for healing. They were called witches, and thousands, maybe millions, were burned at the stake. It wasn’t safe for those who could journey into the spirit world, but that didn’t mean shamans disappeared, they just went underground. Our souls needed them too much. They did not abandon us. Shakespeare knew this.  Jay Griffiths writes of how in Shakespeare, the shaman morphs into the fool, “able to speak truth to power…..twisting the words of a king to wring out his honesties,” and in our times into the artist. Combine the fool and the artist and there’s no way you’re not going down if you dare to leap into bed with one. I dare you to surrender your heart for shattering. You will be the better for it, and so will the world, for as Griffiths says, “Shamanism is universally concerned with the well-being of both nature and human nature, and the relationship between them.” She goes on to say that:

 In the Amazon, the shamans’ rituals unleashed in me a force of empathy that was exact, sensitive, and enraged. The pull of my imagination was tautened by all the aspects of the occasion: the medicine, the night, and the shamans’ songs until, the torque twisted most surely, I lost my singular self and stepped across the border in a wild, charged, ferocious apprenticeship to a jaguar.

Griffiths is writing about ayahuasca, a plant medicine used by Amazonian shamans to heal body, mind, and soul. I drank ayahuasca and experienced profound healing. I have the utmost respect and reverence for it, but not everyone wants to or can travel to the Amazon, and though I have consciously sought the path to other worlds, not everyone desires to be transformed. That’s why the Fool is so important. Human beings are going to have to transform if we want to continue on Earth. The logical mind resists this, wants to stay on the straight and narrow in the world of deadlines, schedules and bills that provide a false sense of security. But that choice is being taken away from us. Every day I read a new headline about another right being taken away from humans that don’t fit the white patriarchal ideal. And Earth is rising up, too: tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, record breaking fires and floods. Soon, none of us may have the choice to be here, including the fascists who think they are more powerful than nature. Nothing is more powerful than nature. Not even guns.

We need the Fool. When we are close to no longer having a choice, the Fool appears stage left to stimulate our right brains into timeless states of ecstasy that have us walking out over the abyss before we can ask our GPS for directions.

Transformation is part of life. We hear it all the time, but how many of us actually believe it. I read somewhere recently about three ways people see change. To paraphrase my forgotten source, there are those who resist change because the current paradigm is working for them, those who desire change because the current paradigm is not working for them, and those who change because they enjoy it. Most of us are one of the first two, but if we look around us, we see that everything is constantly changing: traffic lights, soil run-off, digital clocks, weather. Even the most committed couch surfer or fundamentalist Christian is going to have his world shaken up at some point. For some it might be the explosion of a divorce, for others the implosion of a nervous breakdown, but our wild souls will rise up to be heard, like it or not. The shamanic experience does not require hallucinogens, or even a person that knows he or she is a shaman. It is available to each one of us through our relationships, through our daring and willingness to love beyond the borders of prescribed consciousness, until our consciousness becomes so immense we have gnosis--we know--which is different than having faith.

With gnosis, we are aware we are connected to every jaguar, oak leaf, mote of dust, homeless bum, George W. Bush, gazelle, Target cashier, circus elephant, Noh puppeteer, and clown in all of existence: past, present, and future. Once we know this, we exist, as Griffiths described when she became the jaguar’s apprentice, in the grace of empathy, able to shape-shift through our emotions into a jaguar, into the traffic cop who gave us a speeding ticket, into the lover that has betrayed us all, into the Fool who is so ferociously present at the edge because he knows that’s where life is most fertile—so he steps off, maybe even flies for a few breaths--(Doug off the sidewalk, off a snow-covered rail, off a wave that will crash on the beach in three seconds)-- into the unknown. Death may meet him like hard pavement or a boulder under a wave. It doesn’t matter. The leap is life. We are born to live it.

He made the librarians laugh in the middle of winter by doing a dance he invented called “The Frankentard,” in which he stomped around with his arms and legs straight out with a glazed look on his mug. (To their credit, they didn’t know what the dance was called.) He stripped off his clothes on a beach in February and galloped like a centaur into the ocean. (He liked to act like a horse, stomp his feet and whinny. He said horses turned him on. He liked to stop on New Hampshire back roads when he saw them standing in snowy fields and whisper into their necks when they came to the edge of their fences.)

When he ran back out he did not put his clothes back on right away, but let me photograph him leaping in the air with his penis twirling around.  Even the cops smiled at him when they told him to stop skateboarding in the middle of the street in front of the liquor store. He was always very polite to them and he wasn’t faking it. He got it—why they had to tell him to stop, and why they wanted him to—it was true, an accident could occur. As soon as they pulled around the corner he threw his board into the street and leaped after it, because that’s what Fools do.

I remember him saying as we came to an end that he knew from the beginning that loving me was going to hurt, because he was going to hurt me. He said at the time it was because he didn’t think he was good enough to love me—he was aware of his shadow, even though I was too dazzled to see it. If I hadn’t been so dazzled by him, I might have been able to see all the ways he tried to warn me, all those times he made himself vulnerable through his drawings, through little poems on scraps of paper, but I’m not going to share his specific hurts with you, for even the Fool deserves some privacy off stage, but I will say that there is pain so close to the heart’s surface in every fool because the fool feels our pain, even when we cannot. The fool knows how much it hurts, because he hurts himself and his great gift is to offer us another choice besides a castle filled with bloody corpses, the inevitable end of tragedy. Comedies end with marriage, with union, and if a Fool finds himself stuck in a tragedy, he at least lightens the mood for a few acts. In the best plays, we laugh our way through the drama until we are moved to tears we’re not sure are tears of grief or gratitude. As Griffith says, “Playing the fool is serious business.”

The body and soul cry for each other, separated by our thoughts. They want us to remember we are married to every grasshopper and leaf, every bird and feather, every grain of sand and beach boulder. We are never alone. The world waits to speak to us at the edges. The more you leap, the easier it gets to hear it.

One night we were sitting across from each other on the floor of the living room lit by a candle to “soul gaze,” a practice where you look into another’s eyes without speaking or looking away. I wasn’t having any trouble, but he was. He started crying and broke our gaze and when I asked him why, he told me it was because he had seen my soul and it had scared him. I was hurt. I asked him what he saw. He said a white butterfly between my eyebrows. We didn’t talk about it afterwards, but from that point on he was moving away from me.

I’ve searched in the years since why the sight of this butterfly scared him so much. I don’t have an answer. What I do know is that during our soul gaze I couldn’t see him at all. I was too blinded by my own wounds. Maybe that’s what he was afraid of—that I couldn’t love him if I knew who he really was. A friend we shared, after we’d broken up and I still wanted him back so much I wore a cloak of grief that hurt to look at like sun on snow, said to me, “You can’t fall in love with the jester,” trying to cheer me up. I liked to tease him about his days on the road with The Grateful Dead, but truth was he’d absorbed a lot of archetypal wisdom from acid trips to Jerry’s lyrics and noodling guitar. Jerry was a cosmic jester, no doubt. A first class Fool who knew that laughter was deadly serious, a man who could laugh at himself, a skill I lacked.  

My first reaction was my grief was not a joke, but when I looked at my friend, a jester himself, traveling with his two kids in his VW van with his own grief, I knew what he said was true. The fool exists to break the trance which chains us to the insanity of mass consensus. Emily Dickinson understood this when she wrote:

Much Madness is divinest Sense-

To a discerning Eye-

Much sense-the starkest Madness-

‘Tis the Majority

In this, as all, prevail-

Assent-and you are sane-

Demur-you’re straightway dangerous-

And handled with a Chain-

For it is insane to believe there is only one way to see. It is fanatical. It is insane to straitjacket love, to believe it can only exist within the confines of monogamy, that betrayal of a monogamous relationship kills it. Not that I wanted to be part of a harem, but the options presented to me by society, which were basically to hate him for betraying me, dump him in righteous indignation and move on to someone else immediately, or to be even more of a fool by staying with him, didn’t feel right. That was not love. That was fear, and when we are most fearful, we must dare to look foolish. We must dare to love a fool, to fall in love with life again, to go back, like the Handless Maiden into the forest a second time, knowing that she will be lost again, that there will be more loss and death, more grieving to exit the shadow’s delusional spells that stop us from receiving the beauty of the white butterflies of our souls no matter if the people who witness our radiance collapse and run. We are the only ones who can abandon ourselves.

Jesus said the way to heaven was to become again like children. Remember how it felt to let go fo the day and fall into bed with no thoughts about tomorrow?

You can never go back to that moment you failed to love, but you have this one where you can love your failure. The Fool says there is always another chance. Take it. Love with abandon—your demons and addictions, your shameful acts and thoughts--all the ways you’ve betrayed others and yourself. Love is radical. It’s not a weapon or a shield. It can’t be attacked or defended. You can’t really know it until you leap.

I was a fool for love, I loved a Fool like a fool, but I was never foolish. I became wise like a child. Agape the Greeks call it-divine love-greater than what can be contained within one person, although it can flow through one, opening inward like flowers falling into a black hole.

“The lover who has just walked out the door, has taken all his blankets from the floor,” sang Dylan.

Betrayal will come as long as we need it to remember we are one. As long as we believe that life is better than dying. As long as we cling to the edge of the black hole we pass through to enter this world, we won’t see, as the abandoned lover in Dylan’s song does, that “the carpet, too, is moving under you.” If we let ourselves be lifted on this magic carpet, we open ourselves to believing that dreams are real.

“Leave your stepping stones behind, there’s something that calls for you. Forget the dead you’ve left they will not follow you.”

The Fool exists only in the present moment where all is possible.

“The vagabond who’s rapping at your door is standing in the clothes that you once wore.”

Boundaries intermingle, sometimes we’re the Fool, sometimes the one who needs the fool to remember to:

“Strike another match, go start anew.”

And yes, there is sadness.

“It’s all over now, Baby Blue.”

There always will be sadness and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Break my heart. Break, my heart.

Open, the world is blue and I am a baby.

A black hole is a region of space-time where gravity is so extreme it prevents anything from escaping, including light. The boundary around a black hole is known as an “event horizon,” and the event referred to is the “point of no return.” Once you cross the event horizon you are committed to falling into the center, called by physicists a gravitational singularity, which has zero volume, but contains all the mass of the black hole solution which gives it infinite density.

What happens when you fall into a black hole? According to physicists on Wikipedia, objects that reach the singularity are crushed to infinite density and their mass is added to the total of the black hole. Before that happens, they will have been torn apart by the growing tidal forces in a process sometimes referred to as spaghettification or the "noodle effect," which has been felt by the layman at Grateful Dead shows during Space when Jerry’s guitar solos reduce the listener to zero volume and infinite density, crushing their souls and rebirthing them in another universe. In the end, nothing can be lost. What we think we have lost has just changed forms.

Our bodies come into this world through a black hole, the cervix dilating like an eye, widening to absorb as much darkness as it can before giving its babe to the light. The poor babe’s head crushed by the birth canal. The soul’s leap from wherever it lives when it’s not with us into a body—does it hurt? I want to say no, but everything tells me it must. Inside our mothers, we could breathe underwater. After the umbilicus is cut, the crush of air which we greet with a wail.

Dear soul, if my body has betrayed you, please forgive me. You chose this, too. I offer you the gift of comedy—marriage. As a wedding gift, I will tell you a noble truth, the only real betrayal is to doubt the beauty of the white butterfly of your soul.  

In my favorite story of the many he told, Doug, my Fool, in human form is riding a chairlift up a mountain on a day so cold his beard is frozen. Moved by some unexplainable impulse, he sticks out his tongue to lick the cold metal bar suspending him above the earth. It sticks. Tongue to metal. He has to tear it off to free himself. Incredulous laughter follows him as he rides down the rolling, white mountain, leaving a trail of blood like crumbs in a fairy tale. Nobody follows. They couldn’t keep up. I know it hurt—he told me—but nobody laughed harder than himself.

The End

Kō aloha la ea,

Concentrate on love by way of the light,

Jen

works cited:

“Forests of the Mind,” Jay Griffiths, www.aeonmagazine.com

The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, Paul Radin

The Guizer: A Book of Fools, Alan Garner

The New Earth, Eckhart Tolle

“Last Night as I Was Sleeping I Dreamt,” by Antonio Machado, trans. Robert Bly

“It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” by Bob Dylan