which witnessed the appearance of Foolishness were more or less in agreement: One of the trio, the tallest, turned to pay the driver, adding as a tip a five-pound note and a red rosebud plucked from thin air. The three passengers walked a short distance away, dropped the small canvas bags they each carried, joined hands in a long moment of (apparently) prayer, and set about their performance. The cab driver shook himself like a setter emerging from a pond, put the taxi into gear, and drove off. The red rose he tucked into the side of his taximeter, where it gradually dried and blackened, remaining tightly furled but fragrant, until he plucked it off and threw it out the window over the Westminster Bridge nearly three weeks later.
He did not see his three passengers again, although as the summer passed he saw others like them. The original three, having bowed their heads and muttered in unison some chant barely audible even to the women who emerged from the toilets ten feet away, turned to face the Tower (and its tourists) full-face.
And an arresting trio of faces it was, too, glossy black on the right side, stark white on the left, hair sleeked back, and a row of earrings down the length of each left ear. Black trousers and shoes, white blouses and gloves, harlequin diamonds black and white on the waistcoats. The tall one alone had a spot of color: One of the diamonds on his waistcoat was purple.
What followed was a busking act such as even London rarely saw, street performance as one of the high arts. Part magic show, part political satire, part sermon, it seemed more of a dance done for their own pleasure, or a meditation, than a performance aimed at the audience—though audience there was, and quickly. The act of the three Fools was peculiarly compelling, faintly disturbing, wistful and wild in turns, austere and scatological, the exhortations of gentle fanatics, anarchists with a sense of humour, three raucous saints who were immensely professional in their direct simplicity. The bobby who eventually moved them on had never seen anything quite like it. He had also never seen buskers who didn’t pass the hat.
By the end of the summer, there were at least a dozen harlequin buskers in London, and others had appeared in Bath and Edinburgh. By Christmas, New York had its first pair, and the following summer they were to be found as far afield as Venice, Tokyo, and Sydney.
Then, around the second Christmas, the first tattooed harlequins appeared: the black half of their faces no longer greasepaint, but one solid and spectacularly painful tattoo from a sharp line down the center of the face, from the hairline to the chest. These half-and-halfs were the extremists, the most radical of a radical group, and although they never numbered more than a dozen, they were visible, confrontational, frenetically active, and disturbing: frightening, even. The other Foolish brothers and sisters contented themselves with the small tattoo of a diamond beneath the left eye, like a tear, but the handful of tattooed harlequins inevitably garnered the attention of the press, and the police. There had been arrests before, for such things as unlawful assembly and public nudity, but now the Fools (as they were known to the public through the various newspaper articles) began to collect more severe misdemeanors, and eventually felonies. One half-and-half in New York was so caught up in his performance that he picked up a small child and ran off with her, the little girl was greatly amused, the mother was not, and he was arrested for attempted kidnapping (a charge that was later dropped). Another assaulted a police officer who was trying to move him out of a crowded downtown intersection in Dallas. Four months later, the same man, out on bail but now in Los Angeles, reached the climax of his performance by pulling a revolver from his motley and shooting a young woman dead.
It was the death, too, of the Fools movement. The young man had a history of violence and severe mental disturbance, and the Fools were not to blame for providing him with an outlet, but they were all comprehensively tarred with the same brush of dangerous madness, and within a few months they had dispersed. Fools went back to the everyday life they had so often mocked: Fools bought clothes, bore children, voted in school board elections. And six teachers, two lawyers, a magistrate, two actors, four clergy of various denominations, and a junior congressional aide all wear the faint scar of a removed tattoo high on their left cheekbone.
The modern Fools movement of the early seventies sprang from a soil similar to that which nourished earlier Fools movements: The Russian Yurodivi, the classical Medieval Fool, the buffoonery of the Zen master—all came into being as a warning personified, a concrete and living statement that the status quo was in grave danger of smothering the life out of the spirit of the individual and the community. A church which no longer hears its parishioners, a government which is operating with its head in the clouds, a people which have moved too far from its source: The Fool’s laughter serves to point out the shakiness of these foundations,- the Fool seeks to save his community by appearing to threaten it. The essential ministry of a Fool is to undermine beliefs, to seed doubts, to shock people into seeing truth.
However, I shall not trespass on the lectures of my colleagues by going any further into the larger themes of the Fool movement, and in addition, I see that we have run short of time. Perhaps we might take just two or three questions from the audience.
The question-and-answer session that apparently followed was not recorded, and Kate turned to the next article with a sigh. This one was composed as a written, rather than oral, presentation, a reprint from a quarterly journal, and had so many footnotes that on some pages they took up more space than the text. Kate didn’t think she really needed to know all about “Fedotov’s analysis of this Russian manifestation of kenoticism,” “Via’s exploration of the kerygmatic nucleus of Gospel and the generative linguistic matrix of Greek comedy,” or even “Harvey Cox’s dated but valuable
She contented herself with skimming, picking up interesting tidbits, mostly from the footnotes. “Holy Foolishness” was an accepted form of ascetic life in Russia, with thirty-six canonized saints who were Fools. Extreme Foolishness was used as a means of triggering Zen enlightenment. The Cistercian, the Ignatian, and the Franciscan orders of the Roman Catholic Church all had their roots firmly in Foolishness. (St. Ignatius Loyola regarded Holy Foolishness as the most perfect means of achieving humility, and St. Francis of Assisi was, as Lee had suggested, Foolishness personified.) There was an illiterate Irish laborer in the nineteenth century who lived the life of a Fool, and a tiny monastic order in the same country, founded about the time the tattooed harlequin in Los Angeles had murdered international Foolishness. The members of this Irish order, monks and nuns alike, wandered the roads like harmless lunatics, carrying on conversations with farm animals and then going home to pray.
So why not Erasmus, in twentieth-century San Francisco? Kate mused, turning to the third folder.
The loose papers it contained were a disparate lot, most of them handwritten, occasionally a mere scrap of paper, but mostly full sheets, though of a different size from standard American paper. The writing was in several hands, all ineffably foreign but for the most part legible. Some of the sheets were merely references, often with two or three shades of ink or pencil on the same page: titles and authors of books or, more often, articles. Kate glanced at these pages and left them in the file. Others had quotes and excerpts, with references, and yet others seemed to be Professor Whitlaw’s own writing, perhaps thoughts for the book outlined on one page, much scratched out and emended.
A number of the pages were as unintelligible as the second article had been, one academic talking to others in a shared language. Others, however, were obviously meant for popular consumption, as the transcribed lecture had been. Kate picked up a few of these and read them:
There is no place [professor Whitlaw wrote] for the Fool in the modern world of science and industry. The Fool speaks a language of symbols and of Divinity. We forget, however, those of us who live our lives conversant with computer terminals and clay-footed politicians, with scientists who gaze into invisible stars or manipulate the genetic building blocks of living matter, that there is an entire population living, as it were, on the edge, who feel as powerless as children and cling, therefore, to any sign of alternate possibilities. They believe in the possibility of magic, the reality of Saints, and would not be surprised at the existence of miracles. The Fool is their representative, their mediator, their friend.
Judaism doesn’t have fools,- it has prophets. Mad— look at Ezekiel. Poor and uneducated—Jeremiah. Laughingstocks all—poor old Hosea couldn’t even keep his wife from making a spectacle of them both. Jesus ben Joseph fit right in, preaching to the poor, the prostitutes, the scum, scratching his lice and calling himself the son of God—and the ultimate absurdity, God’s only son strung up and executed with the other criminals: A royal diadem made from a branch of thorns, a king’s cloak that went to the high throw, his only public mourners a few outcast women with nothing left to lose. Then, to cap it off, Christ the original Fool is decently clothed in purple, his crown traded for one of gold, he is restored to the head of his Church, and the transformation is complete.
But what consequences, when the jester assumes the throne? Someone must take his place in the hall, lest
