the uncontrollable fool king for an hour or a day. My body is an uncontrollable fool. The fool, like the trickster, in many religions is a sacred being, the one who can mediate between our quotidian lives and the divine. It's the fool in us that induces "alternate" states of consciousness, which in fact aren't alternatives but necessities. The fool is an open mind, the imaginal desire that convinces us of our changes of heart- and the fool is the one who incites to take the risks that make our hearts change. As an idea with a history, the fool has many names. My favorite example from this history is that of Socrates, whose daimon guided him to his own death as the proving, the refining, truth of his "foolish" love of life. If we've learned to distrust our "foolish" intuition, this ability to be instructed by some wordless inner mentor, it is because of our phobia ofthe body and our fear of life's uncontrollable topsy-turviness. Standing mute, with an idiot grin on his face, the fool is perched on the edge of a cliff. If he thinks a thought at all, he will back away from the cliff with a gasp. But if the fool is truly foolish , he' ll leap, silent and trusting, into the void of the unknown. My body may be wordless, but it speaks loudly. The powerful surges, the subtle traces that course through our stomachs, knees, palms, and loins are the signs we must interpret to know our bodies' intentions. Like little proletarians, these signs do the work of bearing the information from the inner stuff of us to our conscious selves trying to get by in the world. Like proletarians, these messages from the body are often socially unacceptable, impractical, revolutionary, life changing, messy. The body does not live by the time of the clock but by the spiraling seasons of the sun and the gravitational phases of the moon. The body is our creative well, and its laws often run askew to the axis of jurisprudence. If some of us are capable of negotiating a treaty, or enforcing a silence, between the laws of nature and the codes of culture, I am not. I learned to avoid conflict early in life, that the best offense is a good defense. My defense was to be silent in the world and lead a noisy interior life. That's where I break the laws of nature and transpose the codes of culture. All sorts of biographical data could filii #21
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