The Cosmic Joke and The Fool

There is a theory which states that the moment the universe is clearly explained, it will disappear and be replaced by something far more bizarre and inexplicable…

There is another theory which states that this has already happened…

Douglas Adams, ‘The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’

When I have written ‘cosmic’, the printer often makes a mistake and prints ‘comic’. There’s a kind of unconscious wisdom in that.”

G.K. Chesterton

You went to the universe for answers, and its only reply was cosmic jokes. Neither ha-ha funny nor weird funny, they’re the kind of joke you’d need a sense of humour as broad as the universe to get. The only guarantee in life is death. The only way our lives have reason is because they end. All life is predicated on the consumption of other life.

In the face of it all, you have to laugh.

It’s ridiculous. To paraphrase Twelfth Night, if it were played upon a stage, you’d condemn it as an improbable fiction.

But audiences do find improbable fiction quite entertaining. For a time, we can be unburdened by our serious sense of self, our proud minds and scared egos, and believe in something we know is fiction. It’s called metaxis; the suspension of disbelief which allows us to enjoy the story, pretending it is true, pretending we are a detached, invisible observer. It is a child-like state of naivete where we pretend that we don’t know better.

It is difficult to recall the time in our lives when everything was a new discovery because we hadn’t discovered a name for it at the time. As we learned we attached names, purposes, or personal memories to the repeated patterns. Pretending we don’t know is an attempt to recapture that Eden where, free of the limitation of meaning, everything was extraordinary and humbling.

“It is one thing to describe an interview with a gorgon or a griffin, a creature who does not exist. It is another thing to discover that the rhinoceros does exist and then take pleasure in the fact that he looks as if he didn't.”

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

To see the commonplace, every day, mundane, colloquial, and expected as if for the first time, every time must be delightful. Why would you condemn this improbable fiction for being a fiction, when instead you could revel in every magical element without preconception or prejudice? We should aspire to the level of belief and complete engagement of a child in their imaginary games, absolutely committed, but flexible enough for the rules and language to evolve and suit the game.

It is pointless, purposeless and has no meaning outside of itself – the child’s play, I mean, not life! Oh no, life is soooo much more serious and meaningful. Only nonsense is meaningless, play for play’s sake, making words for the joy of the sound and feel of words in your mouth.

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

Lewis Carrol, The Jabberwocky

Nonsense. Like the kids’ games, it means nothing. Sure, in its own universe, it makes sense, but what’s the point? It’s absurd, but we’re in on the joke – we know it’s all made up. Not like our ‘real’ world…

Waitaminute.

Surely we’re more serious than a child’s game, or poetry? A child is only a probationary human, and poetry, like all art, isn’t serious. The American Theatre director Anne Bogart said “All art is a brilliant, beautiful waste of time.” A person’s belief system can’t be unserious. Most of all, a belief system makes sense… in its particular universe… like the Jabberwocky would make sense in the Wonderland universe…

But needing to make sense restricts possibilities and assumes a universe defined by reason where there is an expected, but unknown meaning. It doesn’t include the impossible or incomprehensible, even though all that is known and now possible was once considered so. It also doesn’t include the possibility that there is no meaning. If there is no meaning, then anything is possible, nonsense is as important as sense.

And yet we stop teaching children nonsense. We teach them the difference between sense and nonsense, and which is more important. We teach them that they are working toward a future goal and there are steps along the way that indicate degrees of understanding, experience and worth. These lead to some point where the purpose for all of this training and preparation is realised, and satisfaction is achieved. “Don’t worry, it will all makes sense at the end.” It makes sense that after all of these steps, this evidence of our worth and sacrifice, that there must be an answer, otherwise why would looking for it be so important? There can’t be no answer. That’s not science. 

Except consciousness is more important than that; it’s so important that we are not told the answer, but are left to learn. If we are open to learn, then we are not waiting, or wanting to be given the answer at some point in the future. Instead, we find the answer in every moment. We don’t play a child’s make-believe game with the intention of ‘winning’, we don’t count on the future to have any answers because the only certainty we have is that death will occur and for a lot of people, come as a surprise.

The game makes no sense so it can go anywhere. The more flexible, intuitive, and accepting we are, the more possibilities we can enjoy. If we believe the stories that everything makes sense and is serious, then everything in our lives takes on a seriousness, a profundity, a reverent, solemn gravity. According to Chesterton, in spirituality there is lightness, levity, frivolity. “The Angels fly because they take themselves lightly. And if that be true of angels then what of the lord of angels?”. I don’t know where Tom Robbins found the word approfondement to describe ‘playing easily in the deep’ in his essay In Defiance of Gravity, but if there isn’t a word for the phrase there should be.

The Stoics believe it is what it is.

The Existentialists believe it is what you make it.

The Absurdists believe it is amusing or at least tragicomic. 

Poignant. Wry. Ironic. Sad, but funny. Clever and lame simultaneously like a dad-joke. In today’s parlance lolsob.

Everything is playing its own game – the nature game, the physics game, the religion game - but we think we stand apart, not realising that we’re not only playing, but that we came up with the game to begin with. The best we can do is play for the joy of playing. Why? So that the game continues! Because it’s fun and literally awesome. If we can suspend our disbelief so readily and so often in our everyday lives to consider imaginary things real, then we can see real things as if imaginary, everything as extraordinary and even the loss of our innocence, ignorance and naivete as delightful. We start to see how flexible our belief system can be and play with it. 

Come play.

The Fool

The Fool is the one who, in their nature, cannot help but play in the liminal spaces of society. The origin of the word fool can be found in the Latin word for a bellows, follis and the Sanskrit word vatula, meaning inflated with wind and, like the bellows fanning oxygen onto the coals to make flame, the Fool, inflated with life, ignites bright flashes of ideas. What people do with the flame is not their interest.

The Fool, much like the naïve child, the magician, the jester, the anti-social and the insane is a fringe dweller, dismissed by polite society due to their unpredictability. It is the Fool’s Paradox to be free of social expectation and therefore free to speak the truth, but like Cassandra, have no one listen to them because they are an outcast. The truth is held by the one society threw out, and now the Fool takes what is discarded by society and presents them back as truth. The Fool doesn’t fear saying what needs to be said; the unpopular, the vulgar, the secret, or the hard truth that those in power could never admit. 

The Fool is cunning and often associated with the Trickster who uses wit and guile to throw people’s hubris back at them. The Trickster may act like a fool, but they are using their costume as camouflage, a disguise. They play up to the expectation because the Fool doesn’t elicit the same defensive reaction. They have no authority, no way to take agency or power away from the listener who can simply walk away and dismiss them. The Fool can be curious more than judgemental and through that dissemble an argument without even engaging the content of it.

The King knows those in power - the dominant in society, in any group, or even, according to Jung, in the psyche – will reassure to maintain their own importance, while the Fool will challenge, question, and irreverently show the hypocrisies and paradoxes of power. The King keeps the Fool around because the Fool is the keeper of all things unconscious and repressed by the culture and, like a shaman, bring this into the consciousness by saying the unspeakable or unthinkable. They mock the reverent and corrupt sense even through the language of the songs, riddles and koans they use.

When the King needs to weigh all sides of a problem, they listen to the Fool who represents the part of them that is not burdened with intellect, reason, fear, or pride. The King matches wits with the Fool playing at riddles and by the absurd rules of the Fool’s universe, resurfacing with an answer from this subconscious part of themselves that is humble enough to not take themselves too seriously.

The Fool can be the unconscious, unfiltered wisdom of the child pointing out the Emperor’s new clothes, naïve, humble, open-hearted, unselfconscious, free of preconception or expectation. They can also be mischievous, gullible, short-sighted, hypocritical, distracted, treacherous, lazy and dumb.

The Fool is one who looks at their audience as if they are the absurd ones; poor simpletons who obviously don’t understand. In the audience’s reality everyone is insane, but the ones who admit it are locked up. In an absurd world, the ‘sane’ person appears the fool. The Fool sees the world as it is and how people resist so strongly what is so undeniably reality, even if that reality shifts and changes fluidly. These poor idiots that try to possess things and own them, demanding that life conform to the condition of their satisfaction, clinging to things that were never theirs. The illusion of what they cling to traps them, but they refuse to let go. 

The Fool doesn’t live in the past, identifying with their experiences, nor do they believe that all will make sense and be revealed in time; that the result is the goal. Consequently, the Fool is one of few not living in a fiction future, a slave to success or in fear of failure or loss.

Free from time outside of the moment, free from social expectation, free from preconception, free from the limitations of everyday language and behaviour, the Fool, once they see themselves as such, even frees themselves of identity. In another irony, they become a representation, the kind of symbol that they themselves are adept at reading. The Fool is the part of us that knows the mechanics behind the magic, the lies that we tell each other and ourselves and paradox that to you have to let go in order to gain control. They are the impulse to lean into chaos, to joyfully engage in every moment, accept hypocrisy, subvert the reverent and choose joy.

The Cosmic Joke destroys ego because it makes the individual the punchline; the Fool.

Like the Fool, it is not cruel, but it is self-effacing. Humbling, not humiliating. It destroys duality by embracing hypocrisy. It defies temporal authority by existing without desires for the future or attachment to the past. It is subversive and irreverent because it believes that if a Fool is in charge of creating meaning, then anything is possible.

When told a Cosmic Joke, the Fool laughs and goes on to tell others, who hopefully also laugh, and a new game begins, for no reason except it is a game and the universe is inviting us to play. 

Come and play.

“The enlightened fool is the one who sees the ego trips of society and can still find joy and laughter in its midst. The fool is often the enlightened one, the one with crazy wisdom, with laughter and jokes as their weapon, they cut through mundane conformity and bring to light the latent child-like bliss bubbling just beneath the surface of all seriousness.  The fool possesses a wisdom that is out of reach of the conformist. A playful attitude in touch with enormous amounts of creativity.”

Alan Watts