Post #88: The Joker and the Fool

8 Feb. 2024

     Let’s set aside Jack Nicholson and Joaquin Phoenix, great as they are, and forget the blockbuster army of supposed super-heroes and villains in which our world is awash. Overcompensations all. I’m not interested. What I would like to know is what the Joker is doing in the deck of 52, or the Fool in Tarot cards, and what their presence might tell us about the kinks in our strange journey through human life.

     The inclusion of such wild cards in otherwise orderly games seems to imply something about the need for an occasional suspension of the rules, an upending of the usual pattern, a limited intrusion of chaos where fixed structures otherwise hold sway. As the Romans had their Saturnalia (when even slaves could play masters for a day) and the traditional Church year has its carnival, so a deck of cards seems to require a subversive component that undercuts the ordinary conventions. Jokers and jesters at court were allowed to mock the rule of kings themselves, and the Fool in Tarot is traditionally shown standing, or rather wandering aimlessly about, at the very edge of a precipice, his head lost in the clouds, his nether parts bared to the elements and the viewer’s eye.

     We need our human world more predictable than it would be by the vagaries of nature alone; our sense of safety and security requires it; perhaps our sanity too. It falls to the social order to meet this demand; it is the service that civilization renders to us by imposing its rigid structures and strictures. Alas, it can do so only at a price, and something wild and untamed within us forever resists the domestication, just as the Joker and the Fool refuse to be bound by the ordinary rules of the game. This refractory and recalcitrant element must remain as exceptional as the wild cards in the deck, or else the resulting disruptions would bring the house down. But these wayward faces of life too, like the stabilizing structures they both challenge and support, perform a valuable function, as safety valves, perhaps, or leavening agents, or sparks to the tinder.

     How overwhelming things can feel as soon as they slip from our control (or perhaps when our illusion of control is taken away), we all know only too well. It is the stuff of our waking dreads and dreaming nightmares. But there is another side to the coin: when things become too predictable and controlled, when it begins to feel as if you could look thirty years ahead and calculate to a penny your retirement income and monthly expenses, your vacation spots and your weekend routines, a mood sets in that is only very inadequately described as boredom or ennui—a deadening of the spirit, a sense of being locked in a cage, and be it ever so spacious and gilded. A kind of Switzerland or Sweden of the soul, one might say, minus the money-laundering and the gang warfare; scenes too outwardly pacified and bucolic to be fully convincing, let alone appealing: too much security, too much money, too much milk and honey.

     No actual country on Planet Earth is ever quite like that, I realize. But what I am talking about is still quite real: the sudden spike of aggression provoked, on the shores of Lake Geneva for example, not by resentment, but by the stultifying staidness of the whole damn panorama, and the corresponding brigand’s itch to set something valuable on fire just to disturb the hygienic tidiness and egregious affluence of it all for a few minutes, before the model firefighters rush out to prevent any smudge of smoke from sullying the thousand-dollar sheds and million-dollar garages. Better put your matches away when you are in such a dangerous mood; it’s time to play the Joker, or the Fool, perchance, but going all the way to prison for it might be a little extreme.

     What shape your wild card might take at the appointed hour, nobody can tell, not even you, ahead of time. When your stars align, light or dark, the unruly card will turn up and wink at you mischievously with glittering eyes, half-snake, half-gold. Play me if you dare, it whispers in your ear, and laughs at your confused hesitation. Meanwhile you may be trying to run your usual algorithms, hoping to optimize rationally, to hedge and protect yourself in the familiar manner of pseudo-prudent mankind—but all to no avail. The Joker defies your formulae and jeers at you with an insolent grin, while the Fool makes ready, while you do your blinking, to wander away. Make up your mind, Jack, and quickly: are you game or not? Use it or lose it, make your play or watch the chance pass away. Another window may open sooner or later, but this one will close if you dally with indecision for too long. Should you jump or shouldn’t you? Nobody can tell you that, not even your own best calculations, your precepts and principles, or your normally reliable rules of thumb. You are on your own.*

     And there’s the rub: it may be these moments, as much as, or even more than, the routines you establish and cling to the rest of the time, that define you. Right or wrong, win or lose, do or die—if you take the plunge you are not likely to forget it, for better or for worse. They are sure to make you feel alive, these terrifying jumps into the unknown, these flirtations with the Joker and the Fool, but be warned (if you are fool enough to need it): the surging pulse of life may take the form of fear and pain as much as pleasure and delight. Enter into this game and you must accept its terms: you will have nothing to complain of when you stumble and fall, scratching yourself up, or breaking a few bones, or getting burned. Speed kills, and so do heights; but they are exhilarating too; the very danger makes you appreciate all the more the precarious preciousness of existence. Even our humiliations, hideous as they are at the time, can help to put things in perspective, lashing you without mercy but then leaving you, by some inscrutable deeper calculus, better off despite everything—wiser and sadder, and more cracked, perhaps, but with more room for the light to get in (recall #9).

     Should you break up, break the rules, break bad, break the bank, risk breaking your neck or your skull? Or should you be a good boy—take out the garbage and the dogs at the usual hour, go to the dentist every fifth month on the first Tuesday, make your retirement contributions and a half-dozen insurance payments a week before every due date, and pay your taxes in advance? You decide. Nothing wrong, I would say, with behaving yourself for the most part, and doing right, and good, by others as much as you can. It comes out better that way for everyone. Cultivate a loving heart, above all else.

     Only know, Citizen Cleanly, that being too well-behaved can also become a source of regret. (“What possessed me that I behaved so well?” Thoreau mused at thirty, in Walden; this only a few years after burning down three hundred acres of forest on a camping trip gone wrong.) Take your chances, then, or refuse to do so whenever possible—it’s all up to you (a theme I shall return to in my next post, on the Stoics). But if you insist on playing it safe, please do not complain when others take a chance on their wild cards, and do not with covetous eyes look upon the prizes they collect as a result. They won their pot of gold, or honey, or whatever the currency was that day, by putting themselves on the line; you got to keep your cherished comfort and security.

     So much for heeding the Joker’s call in private, where it comes at your own risk and cost, and where you must answer for any harm done to others before the furies and the laws. Political life is another matter altogether: there you are not gambling at your own expense, but putting others in jeopardy by the very nature of things. To make governors of Jokers is, accordingly, one of the most reprehensible follies imaginable, as deplorable as it is reckless. In the life of the state there can no safe level of anarchy, only a gradation of potentially mortal dangers to the commonwealth. The lid must therefore be kept on at all cost, peace and order upheld unconditionally, lest the rumbles of unrest and the conflagrations of civil strife burn everything to the ground.

     All war is a horror, the bane of our human condition, but none ravages and uproots a society as much as civil war does. Whether any provocations at all can be grave enough to justify unleashing the demons of internecine self-destruction, is debatable (Hobbes thought not, with good reason); what is certain is that anyone who opens lightly and recklessly the gates of fratricidal hell deserves to be nailed to them by way of deterrent example, to seal them up again. Take counsel, then, in your private affairs, with the Tales of Harlequin, if you wish, or with your gambler’s manuals and almanacs, if you must; but in matters of public concern, hold fast to your copy of Hobbes’s Leviathan.

*Carl Schmitt theorized (at the outset of his Political Theology) that political sovereignty resides wherever the decision on the exception gets made. Perhaps one could argue, analogously, that the most sovereign personal freedom consists in deciding whether or not to do something that one would not normally do—that is to say, whether to follow the Joker or the Fool, or not.