III
“We are fools for Christ’s sake.”
In the lowness of the base, we find the heights of heaven reflected; in their reciprocity there is a kind of ex-creation. The fool’s sensitivity to the carnivalesque springs from the theological tradition that his puns and jokes seems to subvert. The figure of the fool in the tarot deck thus, becomes a holy fool. How can we make sense of this relation?
Every card in the Tarot deck is repeated and inverted by another card. For the card of the fool, this is card twelve The Hanged Man- a card which pictures a Christlike figure hanging off of a wooden cross by his feet. His head, which dangles close to the ground, is enveloped by a radiant halo. Where the Fool represents laughter and possibility, the Hanged Man is a card of suspension and paradox, a figure that seems to be at a moment of absolute surrender and penitence. The bawdiness and excretory joking that we have encountered in the fool has undecidedly developed as a figure contradictorily transfused with holiness, and one who suffers for our own folly and holds it up to us as if in a mirror.
It might help to reiterate that carnival, as a distorted form of liturgy or public worship, is that form where rigid tyrannical hierarchies are distorted, reflected, and overthrown- albeit only temporarily. The figure of the fool stands in for that last bit of carnival that cannot be destroyed, the irreducible remainder who carries the carnival spirit, and suffers these reveling pressures of the finite world for us, even when its time has ended. The fool possesses, like in cartoon characters like Bugs Bunny and Wiley Coyote, a quality of resilience that means that even when he is beaten it does not seem to injure him. It is a resilience of the spirit that might complement the physical litheness often associated with the jester. He never seems particularly perturbed by an anvil descending on his head, never stopping to consider the cruelty of his punishment or beg for mercy: Like the comic characters in cartoons who may be cut to shreds, smashed flat, riddled with holes, or stretched into a thin line, yet which suddenly spring back into their original form, the Fool always, wretchedly, seems to persist.
If the carnival occurs as a crisis in cosmological time, then the fool is the savior of this possibility, the possibility of the beginning of the end, the opening in history where light pours in. Though the grotesque body of the fool has often been thought of in terms of darkness, night, and shadow, Bakhtin reminds us that in the pure folk sense of carnival, the feasting and excreting body is associated with lightness, dawn, and luminescence.[1] The holy fool then becomes a Christ-like figure, an icon who lowers and empties himself for the highest ends, one whose humiliation becomes humility and whose jokes and puns are translated into proverb, whose bodily pangs of hunger and desire are testaments to the irreducible pressure of grace. After having discussed the foolishness of carnival and its relation to poetic language and the body, we will turn finally, through the theosophical writing of Simone Weil and figure of Surplice in ee Cummings’ novel The Enormous Room, towards this figure of the Holy Fool, the Grotesque Christ.
“Purity is the power to contemplate defilement,” writes Weil, a philosopher known for her mystic relationship to the affliction of reality and its relation to God’s distance.[i] Though her asceticism may seem to be the farthest degree away from the sensuous excessiveness of Bakhtin’s carnival fool, both seem to share an attention to the extreme limits of the being human in the world- the self-canceling and emptying at work in carnival laughter and the naked, vegetative egoism that is for Weil, the utmost sanctification of one’s vertical distance from the heights of grace. Each mode of reading the world is “work in which the body is a part.”[ii] Both are bound to earthliness and the humility of the flesh, by the gravity of matter, by the patient acceptance of contradiction, incompatibility of truth. In the card of the Hanged Man, where the fool is himself turned upside down, is an image of awakened attention to the impotency at the heart of reality’s struggle with itself, the cross is a way to give space to incomprehensibility.
Cummings’ novel The Enormous Room is a semi-autobiographical account on time spent in French prison camps during the first war, which describes the prison as world turned upside down where dirty and degraded men are joyous and holy. At the margins of this reversed utopia a heartbreakingly pathetic Christ figure whose repulsiveness and piety seem to bridge the expulsive lowness of the body (Bakhtin) and the descent of divinity in (Weil). Surplice is described as disgusting, filthy animal covered in excrement- but he is also a transient beast, untouchable in his venerability: “Take this animal. You hear him, you are afraid of him, you smell and you see him and you know him- but you do not touch him.” He is childlike in his naiveté and oblivious to dirt, as if he were a three year old still picking up anything he finds on the floor or paddling about in feces.
And now take him in dawn’s soft squareness, gently stooping to pick chewed cigarettes from the spitty floor…watch him scratching his back (exactly like a bear) on the wall…speaking to no one, sunning his soul
Poor Surplice is a fool without a carnival, transplanted into the concrete walls of imprisonment. His sole usefulness exists in volunteering to carry buckets of excrement to the sewer every day. He is the one who is always silent, forgotten, ignored in the background, responding with wide-eyed astonishment whenever anyone speaks to him. He carries around a childish toy, a harmonica, as one last relic of the festiveness Surplice internalizes. And despite his lowliness, his “unobstreperous affinity for excrement, ” Surplice is also a figure of divine innocence: “religious with a terrible and exceedingly beautiful and absurd intensity.” Surplice is exalted to saintliness; both befouled and blessed, he resembles the absolute baseness of spiritual affliction, the figure of Christ as the lowest common denominator of the flesh.
Christ on the cross is for Weil the most humble, human, low part of his mission: “the sweat of his blood…the sense of being abandoned by God.”[iii] I argue that the self-emptying of God on the cross, which we will explore in further detail, is not far from the excretory ex-creation of the fool in carnival. Weil refers to the carnal attraction of the material world and its lateral forces as gravity. Gravity draws us away from holiness, it preserves the distance between God and the created world- the truth of God for her is experienced as absolute alterity. Grace is the only force that opposes this gravity, a nourishment that comes from the opposite direction, from the heights of heaven. In short, Weil calls for a kind of self-emptying, like Stein’s excreation- “May God grant me to become nothing.” Creation was for God, not a means of establishing his power, but a means of distancing himself, emptying his love into the matter of the world so that humanity could be.[2] God thus establishes his presence and his absence simultaneously, creating a metaphysical pun whereby God annihilated his closeness to creation so that we could be- where I am, He is not. The incarnation of Christ doubles this divine distancing- for Weil, the Cross is the very substance of the world. God has poured himself into the suffering of the crucifixion so that the mystery of His love can only be found in moments of crisis and contradiction- the “cruciform nature of the world.” The cross is essence of ex-creation, or de-creation as Weil refers to it.
Decreation is a matter of turning the world upside down and apprehending the absolute goodness that can come from this reversal. For Simone Weil, the first person pronoun I is an index of our ontological distance from our creator. Where we find ourselves reduced to mere creatures by the gravity of matter, de-creation is the process by which this distance between the beast and the deity is crossed. Just as Christ eliminated himself on the cross and we eliminate what materially fills us in the act of excretion, de-creation involves an elimination of the I, where the limits of the self are ecstatically breached and excrement, the irreducible remainder of our creature-hood is released from the body. If we are to continue to understand excrement as the remainder and undoing of creating/eating, it is also what makes our bodies immortal in the fertility of the earth.
If this is so, then Christ as the material sacrifice of God is also like a piece of excrement, the excreation of God is the contradiction of a love that is materialized only through the humiliation of his son. In this sense, assertion of ones baseness and gravity becomes a revival of its reciprocal relationship to grace.[3] According to the Christian tradition, out of his love, God emptied himself on the cross. He effaced himself for the sake of human freedom. He gave us the world in exchange for his company.
Bakhtin points out that carnival laughter “asserts and denies, buries and revives,” just as the crucifixion was both an assertion of divine love and the denial of God’s power, both the burial of a deity and the death of sin, an eschatological promise of revival and resurrection. The carnival laughter is the spontaneity of laughter at the entire world, and thus is directed even at the one who laughs- it is a self canceling laughter, a joyousness where one laughs at the distance between the poles of the self and of faith: the rational ego drops from the body like a piece of ripe fruit.
Why would Simone Weil say that Grace is a descending movement, when we also know that gravity is the cause of excreation/ excretion’s descent? Because God’s erasure of himself on earth was a descending movement. To efface one’s self if “to come down by a movement in which gravity plays no part.”[iv] Love is cast downward. The fool in his divine folly seems to de-create reason, instead of destroying or annihilating the boundaries and demarcations of order in the external world, he lets them pass through his body and descend into the lowly and un-created, the purely unformed and excretory place of pure paradox.
The fool figure seemed to appeal to Weil, regardless of whether she was consciously aware of his theological significance in the context with which we are working. Two weeks before Simone Weil died in a sanatorium in 1943, she wrote a letter to her parents after having seen a production of King Lear, wondering about the “unbearably tragic” quality of foolishness with which she felt her own paradoxical methods of telling the truth were kindred:
There is a class of people in the world who fall into the lowest degree of humiliation…who are deprived not only of all social consideration but also, in everybody’s opinion of the specific human dignity, reason itself- and these are the people who, in fact, are able to tell the truth. All the others lie…Because no one [in King Lear] is aware that [the fool’s] sayings deserve the slightest attention…since they are fools- their expression of the truth is not listened to. Everybody is unaware that what they say is true. And not satirically or humorously but simply the truth. Pure unadulterated truth- luminous, profound and essential. [v]
The fool’s degradation, similar to Christ being laughed at on the cross and forsaken by God, is evidently a necessary condition of knowing the truth and speaking it, but also of not being heard. The paradox of speaking the truth and not being heard is at the heart of the cross; Weil abides by a kind of logic where every truth contains a lie, and to speak the very paradox at the heart of the world is humiliating. Every pun and paradox demands that one must suffer to speak it.
Surplice, in The Enormous Room, is a heartbreaking character because he embodies not only the filthy excess of the body and the kaleidoscopic madness of pun and paradox but also absurdity of loneliness. The fool is a forlorn mark of the laughing madness of solitude, one who must carry around the unbearable secret of the sacred essence of profanity. He preserves the eternal and private carnival because it is his duty.
Inasmuch as Surplice, being unspeakably lonely, enjoyed any and all insults for the simple reason that they constituted or at least implied a recognition of his existence…His duty was to amuse; amusement is indeed, peculiarly essential to suffering; in proportion as we are able to be amused we are able to suffer; I, Surplice, am a very necessary creature after all. [vi]
To bear the weight of telling the truth even when no one listens is enormous- because the fool must suffer in his divine innocence for the sake of all other’s amusement. Because he must allow his “luminous and essential” truth to become the butt of everyone’s jokes, degradation comes to be seen as the supreme act of selfless love. In this passage, we find that Surplice’s suffering is part of necessity, the need to feel the truth of our common humanity and materiality and neediness. The fool incarnates this truth through self sacrifice and love. But since that whole truth- that only suffering can fully open us to this amusement and joy- since that whole truth is the reverse of wisdom in the world, it becomes true by definition for Simone Weil that only fools can ever speak it fully.
What Simone Weil calls decreation, which according to her is similar to digestive sense in which Stein calls for a lowering of language, could perhaps be thought of at these two forces of humiliation and amusement turning toward each other, intersecting with each other, the self relinquishing its monopoly of the life instinct, ceasing to absorb only the positive energy of laughter, but also orienting it across that deathly, negative, apocalyptic instinct of the carnival. There is room here to read Weil in terms of the linguistic and social materialism of Stein and Bakhtin. Decreation involves turning the world on its head, a “reversal of the positive and negative,” where the fool empties his subject hood so that he can become the fulcrum of humiliation and love.
May that which is high in us go downward so that which is low can go upward. For we are wrong side upward. We are born thus. To reestablish order is to undo the creature in us.
Reversal of the objective and objective.
Similarly, reversal of the positive and negative.[vii]
The materialization of the divine within the body de-neutralizes the punning contradictions of truth and language- and then renews them. Like the seed that must be buried to sprout forth, like the clearest and cleanest of truths that is found only in the throbbing bloody guts of the world; words must flop in the mud before they can come to life.
To de-create as the fool does, through love of language or of thought, is to make innocent what is offensive, erotic, or vulgar. We must accept the topsy-turvy movement of the carnival within us- this involves giving ourselves back to holiness, to the universe, to the very matter that forms us and our words. As has been mentioned, Weil’s God is not ever-present but entirely absent; in creating us he decreated himself and withdrew at an infinite distance.[4] Like Surplice, the sensitive body feels his love in the luxurious surplus of life, but cannot know his truth: “And now take Surplice, whom I see and hear and smell and touch and even taste, and whom I do not know.”[viii] The wisdom of the fool is the naked truth at fulcrum of the cross; the object that is so paradoxical that the mind cannot touch it; it can only wait to be penetrated by it.
Thus decreation, excretion and excreation are all a matter of holding up the bestial and vegetative creature-ness of human existence as marks of God’s absence and his love.
In her paradoxical language, Weil makes this clear when she says that “there is every degree of distance between the creature and God…Matter, plants, animals. Here evil is so complete that it destroys itself; there is no longer and evil: mirror of divine innocence.”[ix] To reverse the distance involves bringing God back to the lowly baseness from which he withdrew in order to pour his love into it. “We are at the point where love is just possible…the love which unites is in proportion to the distance.”[x]
The finite solidity of the world which the carnival is submerged in is precisely the
We began with the fool as a testament to the weightedness of the carnival spirit. Now, the Fool, whose element is air, is also a body at the mercy of the immaterial.[5] He is given over to the diaphanous texture of light and grace, caught in a wafting surge of weightlessness. The subtle filminess of his body corresponds to every particle’s secret wish for softness. The distance between the heights of the good and the lowness of laughter creates enough room in the universe for all matter to dissolve and escape the spirit of gravity. Strung out on the cross, he incarnates a loving tolerance for the absence of God and a patience in suffering the recklessness of contradiction: “the care with which the rain is wrong and the green is wrong and the white is wrong. There care with which there is a terrific sacrifice and plenty of breathing.”[xii] Like the deck which is always shuffled anew, the Fool empties and fills himself eternally. He is the laughing exuberance of empty space.
Works Cited
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky.
The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha. 1 Cor. 4-10.
Butler, Bill. The Dictionary of the Tarot.
Cummings, E E. "Surplice." The Enormous Room.
Joyce, James. Ulysses.
“Feast of Fools.” Thurston, Herbert. The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume VI. Published 1909.
Kristeva, Julia. Revolutions in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller.
Milton, John. "
Pollack, Rachel. Tarot: Complete Illustrated Guide. 2nd ed.
Radin, Paul. The Trickster: a Study in American Indian Mythology. 4th ed.
"Reglement." Federation De Francais De Tarot. Federation De Francais De Tarot. 15 Feb. 2008
Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. Mineola:
Stein, Gertrude. Tender Buttons. Mineola:
Weil, Simone; Miles, Siân. "Introduction." Simone Weil: an Anthology.
Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace.
[1] Another topological inversion of high/low in the carnival of the fool complicates the relationship of lowness to grace and grotesque to holiness. John Milton’s Paradise Lost, a Christian epic poem about Creation and the temptation of Eve makes clear the vertical poles of Christian theology. The vertical dimension of
[2] In book 7 of Paradise Lost, Adam appeals for Raphael to explain Genesis to him- in this sense he is calling forth his own origin or beginning, perhaps to extend his Reason beyond the Garden, where the distance between his being and God’s was not yet so great. But at the same time, there is something interesting going on with the work of separation and division- in the sense that thru out the entire poem, there is a repetition of various divisions and separations. An obvious example of course, is Satan’s separation and repeated fall.
God’s creation of the earth is one of dissociation and division, where he separates the various essences that comprise Chaos:
“Again, God said, let there be Firmament
Amid the Waters, and let it divide
The Waters from the Waters: and God made
The Firmament, expanse of liquid, pure,
Transparent, Elemental Air, diffus’d
In circuit to the uttermost convex
Of this great Round: partition firm and sure,
The waters underneath from those above,
Dividing… (VII, 261-9)
And later:
“Be gathered now ye waters under Heav’n
Into one place, and let dry land appear.” (283-4)
He continues to multiply the world with various discrete geographical elements, vegetation and animals by extracting division among them. The creation of man is the highest distillation of his efforts- God literally creates vertical space between Adam and the animals by designing him upright. Creation here, at a base level, is primarily the act of setting apart elements like earth and air and drawing distances among them. The pattern of the division of matter here rhymes somewhat with the topographical estrangement of heaven and hell.
[3] Even in creating the universe as a mark of love,
God’s work in Paradise Lost is that of deliberate differentiation- his will enacts itself through attraction and repulsion. As soon as he creates Adam, he proceeds to multiply the distance between them. Adam’s consciousness begins with sensing the space surrounding him, feels a deep loving connection with a creator. He turns to nature, thinking it might be God, and calls out to it, receiving no reply. God doesn’t demand obedience or praise from Adam, it wells up in him as the first sensation. In a few moments, he comes to experience a self and the movement granted by his bounded form in the place surrounding- “Here had new begun my wand’ring” (VII 300-1). God presents himself as a shape, but not so that Adam can bind himself to Him, only to tell him to go even further: “thy mansion wants thee” (296). With strange detachment, God pronounces his “stern interdiction” (VII 332) and demands that Adam perform his own brand of creating difference by naming all the creature of the earth. Sensing his solitary singularity and the vacuity surrounding him in this lonely though plentiful place, he calls out for a companion: “I found not what methought I wanted still” (355). By conferring Adam free will and by creating therefore the requested Eve, God proliferates the dividing expanses further by showing generosity enough to confer upon Adam another object of desire to obey, one who is not Him. Adding the proverbial insult to injury, even the creation of Eve carves out distance and vacuity in Adam’s own interiority, for what else could replace the missing rib but space?
[4] After the fall, death becomes the numb guardian of time, and the laws of the vertical (light=height=purity=good) are transposed by the attractions of the horizontal (nostalgia, home, death, desire). Humankind is drawn closer to baseness than to ethereality; in our fallen wickedness we are prone to horizontal attractions, not vertical ones. Eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil conferred not rational knowledge of evil, but experiential knowledge of evil: “they came to know good only through evil.” Resigned to death, Adam and Eve are more obedient to the stubborn solidity of matter than God’s divine distances of space. Simone Weil pronounced that “evil is the shadow of the good,” an incompatible though inescapable corollary. Being fallen, we can only ascertain good and evil in terms of their contradiction on earth. We are blind to the higher good that usurps the moral/material inconsistency of the world and unifies it on God’s level- this unity is not accessible by way of human experience.
[5] For the Case deck, he is the breath of the beasts in the fields; for the
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