Exploring The Soul of Foolishness

Guest post by Brad Olson --

“When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools…” -- King Lear

Though at first blush foolishness might give the impression that it is pointless, in foolishness something extraordinary and soulful is finding its way into the world. There are important differences between the folly of villainy, the folly of madness, and the folly of a fool. Villainy holds no wisdom in itself but rather puts forward and answers to only an insatiable appetite for power. Madness abdicates reason and creates an insular and idiosyncratic world that, as illogical as it may appear to the spectator, is as ordered and understandable to the madman as a greenhouse is to a gardener or, as it is for Lear, a grave to a dead man: for as the old king says as he wakes from a restorative sleep, “You do me wrong to take me out o' the grave…”

Foolery, on the other hand, is not interested in power, nor is it interested in psychically terraforming one's experience of life in such a way as to create a self-contained, self-referenced, and self-deceptive illusion of existence. Foolery is chiefly interested in seeing the world from a perspective that destroys all illusions and allows us to, as Lear says, “…take upon [u]'s the mystery of things, As if we were God's spies. (Act V, Scene III)." I especially like this image: that fools (and all of us are fools at one time or another) are agents for divine espionage. And what is the espionage being perpetrated? We (myself and George Breed) will explore just this on Friday, February 20th at 7:00 PM at Mountain Waves.

Read Brad's full article on foolishness here.