The Fool & The World
There's no earthly way of knowing / which direction we are going...
People are strange. If you’ve gone any stretch of life as a language-oriented being on this planet, you know how unpredictable the human element can be. There’s a reason Murphy’s Law is colloquially referred to as law and not Murphy’s Occasional Phenomenon. But I suppose the point here, not to bury the lede, is that people are just as prone to surprise you as they are to disappoint you.
Few archetypes embody this feeling, this notion of human unpredictability and risk, more than the Fool. The Rider-Waite Tarot deck’s representation of the fool as one poised on the precipice of a great leap into the void, insouciantly (un)prepared for what awaits him, has since the early 1900s become synonymous with foolhardiness, faith, risk, possibility, and new beginnings.
You’ve undoubtedly seen it. The gold color is meant to represent jouissance, potential, reward, financial blessing. And stylistically it has much in common with Italian renaissance painting. Giovanni Bellini’s “St. Francis in Ecstasy” comes to mind, with the open posture of its leapsick lover and his dog, bearing witness and in urgent need of ASPCA rescue.
The Fool is a bit of a joker, the trumpiest of trump cards. It represents the very beginning or the very end, the null point of pure potential, the event horizon—often marked as non-number ZERO in the sequence of Major Arcana. Juxtapose this with the last of the Major Arcana cards, number 21, the World. A card of completion.
It is a card of symmetry, of balance. The blueness of the background (blue-green in this scan) represents stillness, rest, the tranquility of open sky or clear water. Her central figure is literally above it all, above the world, suspended and wreathed in a royal purple shawl, a baton in each hand. At each of the four corners of the card are sentinel figures representing each of the fixed signs—Aquarius (the man), Taurus (the bull), Leo (the lion), and Scorpio (the eagle). In some interpretations, these are a tetramorphic representation of the four major Evangelists (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John). It is, upright, a card of grace.
The Fool’s encounter with the World is, in tarot, the completion (or beginning) of a cycle—one’s triumph over the gravity that determines the fool’s trajectory. Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon” comes to mind.
He leaped. As fleet and bright as a lodestar he wheeled toward Guitar and it did not matter which one of them would give up his ghost in the killing arms of his brother.For now he knew what Shalimar knew: If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.
The Fool’s desire for and first/last encounter with the world is essentially one of misreading. The fool (and the card’s querent) can’t see what’s coming, what’s over the edge. “After Tarot” is a funny deck for this reason. One can interpret the Major and Minor Arcana as the Fool’s various trials and victories in the vast gamut of experience. But, at the zero point of experience, one cannot make any kind of pronouncement about the world and the people therein with complete accuracy or certainty.
I think, speaking personally, we’re often tempted to think in concrete terms of good and evil. It’s useful for us. We place limits and boundaries and categories on the noumenal substance of things within and beyond our five senses in effort to stabilize our own shifting sense of identity and relation. But these limits, boundaries, categories, often fall short of the thing’s raw truth. It will defy your expection. And it’s the fool’s endeavor to make of the world what he’d like it to be (rather than allowing it to be what it is—the essential physis of its self-governance).
This is not to refute something like absolute truth or the importance of moral codes. It’s only to say that nothing is ever quite what it seems—the source of both our existential disquiet and our metaphysical grace.
Perhaps this is the significance of Proverbs 5:3-6
Trust in the Lord with all your heart
and lean not on your own understanding;
in all your ways submit to him,
and he will make your paths straight.
We are always the fool.
(Foolishly:) let's goooooo