INVEIGHING AS I GO -- NUMBER THREE -- WELCOME ABOARD THE SHIP OF FOOLS (PART TWO)

INVEIGHING AS I GO – NUMBER THREE – WELCOME ABOARD THE SHIP OF FOOLS (PART TWO)

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© June 5, 2011

REFERENCE:

This second part attempts to give the reader a sense that, as Solomon is reputed to have said, there is nothing new under the sun.  John Doone in The Triple Fool” reflects, I am two fools, I know, for loving, and for saying so in whining poetry, who are a little wise, the best fools be. Indeed.

We are wandering through the new century passengers on the ship of fools without a pilot, unaware that we’re going nowhere.  It is a concept centuries old, interpreted again and again by writers, philosophers, songsmiths and troubadours.  It occurred to me the allegory resonates because our folly is that we are lost but don’t seem to know it.         

THE ARRIVAL OF THE COURT FOOL

The Ship of Fools harkens back to pre-Christian times when wealthy Greeks and Romans employed professional buffoons to amuse them at their banquets. 

These obsequious clowns were known to pagan Europeans as “parasites.”  The word is a derivation from Greek meaning “meal attendants.”  A parasite, whether trained for comedy or stylized for stage, was no fool in the ordinary sense.  He had to have sharper wits than most to survive.  He was often cunning and unscrupulous sensitive to the changing mood of his patron and inclination to paranoia and conspiracy. 

These court jesters were hangers-on to the rich and powerful like iron filings to a magnet.  They became the patron’s personal staff flattering or waxing obsequious as the case required.  

They were often ugly and of defective physique which magnified the charm of the patron.  Bodily shortcomings often masked perceptive intelligence.  They used this with incisive and teasing effectiveness.  Often of an artistic temperament, they could be melancholy and moody. 

The Court Fool has much in common with today’s professional comedians, actors, commentators, pundits, consultants, advisers, politicians, columnists, and filmmakers sympathetic to people from the highest to the lowest.  The Court Fool could also include novelists, poets, playwrights, historians, and musicologists from hard rock to classical composition. 

Social reformers anxious to gain the ear of the patron favored Medieval Court Fools as they knew how to build alliances with great men.  Court Fools were nothing if not great actors feigning being feeble-minded for the sport of the patron’s dinner guests, or dissembling pretending to be crazy in order to generate applause.  They could be on cue coarse or impudent, sane or mad, learned or stupid, pious or prophetic. 

The ideal Court Fool possessed, in addition to bold wit and moxie, a palpable repellent aspect as ugliness lent credence to his persona.  Dwarfs and the exceedingly tall, the overweight and underweight were recruited with an eye towards the repulsive. 

Court jesters learned early what worked and what didn’t, how they could get into trouble and how to influence.  Some became so full of themselves that they lost their advantage and their lives for their folly. 

IN PRAISE OF FOLLY

In an uncanny way, the Court Fool turned out to have more sense than his patron.  Many of these bold rogues, hideous, witty, solitary, defiant of authority and generally beyond the reach of any serious chastisement tended to be admired and enjoyed romantic reputations. 

IN PRAISE OF FOLLY (1509) is a piece of virtuoso tomfoolery and satire critical of the hierarchies of the church and aristocracy.  Erasmus, feeling he might come to some harm, published it surreptitiously in France.  He composed it in a week while visiting his friend Sir Thomas More in England. 

In the book, Folly praises self-deception and madness and moves to treat corrupt abuses of the church satirically, and lords of the manor with the guile of Court Fools. 

Erasmus used this guile in the creation of Folly.  Sir Thomas More could have used such guile.  He instead opposed Henry VIII of England’s intended separation from the Vatican of Rome over the church’s opposition to the king's marriage to Catherine of Aragon.  More was tried for treason in opposing the king, and beheaded. 

Erasmus stayed in the church and led the counterreformation.  Ironically, his book was one of the catalysts of Luther’s Protestant Reformation.  In a manner of speaking, Erasmus, More and Luther were court jesters during the Renaissance.  They were going against the grain of the established order. 

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History not only repeats but also mocks itself.  We have discussed the current court jesters Glenn Beck and Michael Moore (Part One).  They have had their share of death threats.  Moore now travels with retired US Navy Seals for his personal security. 

Novelist Salman Rushdie’s THE SATANIC VERSES (1988) was issued a fatwa (death sentence) by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, forcing him into hiding for years.  The Dutch film director Theo van Gogh was assassinated by a Dutch-Moroccan Muslin in 2004 for his film SUBMISSION, which criticized the treatment of women in Islam.  He was 47. 

There are legions of high profile Court Jesters such as Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern, one is short and fat, the other tall and gangly.  Limbaugh makes Beck look like a moderate, Stern makes Hugh Hefner of PLAYBOY fame look like a saint.  . 

COURT JESTER CULTURE

We have been besieged by the Court Fool to the point it is impossible to separate the town clown from the academic gown, the flippant interloper from the assiduous scholar, the everyday worker from the cloying parasite. 

Frailties and foibles have merged into a central narrative to create a thriving industry.   The prudent and reckless are engaged in hypocritical self-worship that finds marketing schemes appealing to them as the moral and licentious become indiscriminate.  Look no further than the latest headlines on the movers and shakers.  

The fool cult of the medieval aristocracy has acceded to the money class, the civil religion of pharisaical self-indulgence. 

Personal trainers motivate us to eat and exercise as we should when we should be able to do it on our own; psychologists and psychiatrists listen to us when no one else will for imagined illnesses; mature adults look for instructors in every sport because they can afford it; television pundits tell us how to save when their fortunes are built on the telling; sports commentators tell us what we have just seen as if we hadn’t; commentators slant the news in support of advertisers; catering services are engaged in everything imaginable because we can afford them; advice columnists use insights into their own failures to generate our solutions; comics make us feel good about ourselves often at their own expense; talk radio personalities barf and bark like their medieval progenitors, but make millions for the barfing; while reality television is right out of the fifteenth century Fool’s Court. 

Not to be outdone, national governments, the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, The Hague Court of International Justice, and loose bands of malcontents designated as terrorists act out their ebullitions with contempt or hostility, as if exempt from serious control or criticism.  Our baser instincts are on display on the Ship of Fools.

THE SHIP OF FOOLS

The ship of fools as allegory has fascinated artists and raconteurs for five centuries.  

This was the framework of the SHIP OF FOOLS (1494) by Sebastian Brant.  It inspired the sixteenth century Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch’s famous painting “Ship of Fools.” 

Brant’s ship sets off from Basel to the “Paradise of Fools."  His book acted as parody to the “ark of salvation” of the Roman Catholic Church. 

Katherine Anne Porter used the allegorical device for her best selling novel, SHIP OF FOOLS (1962).  She showed the world of the early 1930’s in microcosm, and how the Second World War came about.

The ship of fools is an ocean liner crossing the Atlantic bound for Germany from Mexico.  Porter’s novel became a successful 1965 film of the same title with such stars as Vivien Leigh, Simone Signoret, Jose Ferrer, Lee Marvin and Oskar Werner. 

French author Michel Foucault’s MADNESS AND CIVILIZATION: A HISTORY OF INSANITY IN THE AGE OF REASON (1964) used the “ship of fools” as a symbol of the consciousness of sin and evil in the medieval mindset. 

During the Renaissance, there were vessels populated by humans of deranged or frivolous minds, oblivious to the conscious world, as if without a pilot.  These ships of demented souls sailed through rivers and canals of Europe in the hopes that the calming waters and isolation of this pathetic cargo could restore some to health.  For some, it did.  Unfortunately, the ship became an exciting sideshow to towns and villages when the “ship of fools” docked.    

Not to be outdone, popular culture has identified with the “ship of fools.”  The group, Starship, has a line, “Don’t tell us you need us, ‘cause we’re the ship of fools, looking for America, crawling through our schools.”

The Doors and the Grateful Dead had a song called “Ship of Fools.”  So did Van Der Graaf.  Wang Chung has a line in a song, “On the edge of oblivion, all the world is Babylon, and all the love and everyone, a ship of fools sailing on.”

There are many more references to the “ship of fools” in literature and music, folklore and historical commentary.  

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In my imagination, I see us all on this “ship of fools” sailing around and around Lake Neverland, never coming to shore, bickering and belittling each other impervious to the damaged caused, the wasted energy, or the confusion manifested and perpetuated, ad infinitum, while unconscious that we are on this ship or that we are going nowhere. 

John Updike’s HUGGING THE SHORE (1983) put me in mind of this longing for the shore never touched, a shore never found.  Updike gives evidence in this volume that he is adrift on “the ship of fools” in Lake Neverland stuck in the human comedy of detachment, when such detachment is not real but only the folly of the mind.

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