In praise of folly

Whisked from the Bourgeois' pointy head hat flies,
Throughout the heavens, reverberating screams,
Down tumble roofers, shattered 'cross roof
And on the coast - one reads - floodwaters rise

The storm is here, rough seas come merrily skipping
Upon the land, thick dams to rudely crush.
Most people suffer colds, their noses dripping
While railroad trains from bridges headlong rush.
-----Van Hoddis.

Comedy has a built-in factor of disunity, a return to the contingent, an appeal to individual experience and common-sense. In laughing, we turn to our friends.
-----Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals.

There is a curious relationship between the imperial function and the part played by the court jester, and this relationship seems to be associated with the fact that the costume of the jester, as well as that of certain emperors, was adorned with little bells, like the sacred robes of the High Priest. The role of the jester was originally of saying in public what nobody else could himself to say, thus introducing an element of truth into a world constrained by unavoidable conventions....in its own way it shatters "forms" in the name of the spirit that "bloweth where it listeth". Folly alone can allow itself to touch idols, precisely because it stands apart from certain human relationships, and this proves that, in this world of theatrical artificiality which is society, the pure and simple truth is madness.
-----Frithjof Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds.

A time that is set aside for the entry of "chaos" into the regular turning, the settled patterns of the world. The world turned upside down, topsy-turvy. Spontaneity and fluidity against the world's stillness and fixations.

Someone else's words, speech, makes it possible to generate our own: ethics, law, depend on quotes, authoritative statements and our response to them: dia-logue. In the beginning was the word, something that is there. But the word also initiates us into beginnings.

Carnival is purposeful heteroglossia and a multiplicity of styles. A new relation between people, and between people and the world; an 'unmasking' of what gives gravitas to all ceremony and rank.

Rashi: to be an errant, in error, on the way, never 'there'...a commitment to transience, to take delight in the most fleeting of things, to see the absurd in solemn pieties.

I've always believed in ambiguity, ambivalence, in-betweenness, imprecision or, to be more definitive, consistent, and /or precise, I should say that I have occasionally felt that way. No, the first formulation was correct, I think and at least better for all (some of ) its contradictoriness. Perhaps.

Even if God reveals His Face I'll still take "perhaps " and "maybe"
-------Allama Iqbal

A Variety Show: never play the same person twice...all personas, all activities are equally valid.

Bakhtin:
The clown in medieval times brings the level of conversation down from its lofty heights, looks askance at language's metaphysical claims and howls with laughter...the clown is an iconoclast of sorts, shattering the certainties of the feudal or the bourgeois world; he brings things back to the earthy, the bodily level and is a corrective to idealistic and spiritual pretense.

To 'degrade' is an act of toppling, a seeing through the flimsiness of hierarchies, of all that appears to be solid but is in reality nothing short of a mirage...the trick of Maya is to convince those in it that it isn't an illusion. If we do not do the toppling then nature will...

A monarch knows; a Socratic monarch does not. The jester's laugh is a form of disrobing of the emperor, an uncrowning; but it is done so that regeneration is possible and an equilibrium is restored...but that balance is an open one, and one that includes the "impure". The jester embodies the 'idea' of a permanent revolution.

Grotesque realism:

metamorphosis and ambivalence..."monstrous": contradictory, incomplete compared to the classical, completed, self-sufficient, 'official' self. To liberate oneself from one-self; from conventions, caricatures and cliches and the usual way of viewing the world: at the extreme: relativity, madness.Is laughter our first or second nature? The whole world a stage, foreplay, change and fluidity.The carnival is a feast (food for thought) that suggests a utopian freedom that looks toward a non-feudal, an unofficial, ephemeral truth.

Herzen: "laughter contains something revolutionary...only equals laugh."Seriousness terrorizes with its single truth, meaning.

Think about those last lines again...from a white male...are they true? Apart from laughing at oneself, is laughter fundamentally about inequality, about laughing at those who cannot answer back or is it about those who laugh at the seriousness of the men in pointed hats? Should we, then, talk about "appropriate" laughter, for surely we all recognize-at least on reflection, if not immediately- that sometimes laughter is in bad taste?

Folly: St. Paul? The world's seriousness...asceticism, like worldliness, is far too serious a matter. Is there, then, a 'proper' love of the world?

What sense is there in a 'sense of humour'?