Let this particular question from Lear’s fool sink in for a moment as we step beyond specific literary criticism. For the question encompasses the destruction of the world, in the same way “what’s next?” might ask us to move on from something already finished. “What does this mean?” That question implies that the ‘this’ in the question has already happened, or is already happening, already in motion.
How now? What now? How do we proceed now? How is the cosmos in this instant, uncle? Where are we headed, and why am I in this handcart (as the popular bumper sticker asks)?
John Moriarty mentions this particular question in terms of “Nietzsche’s discovery and subsequent collapse”*, the alpha and omega of the universe rolled into a simple sort of “How d’you do?”
Let’s look around outside the usual plays and passages for a moment, just to see what might have slipped through the cracks. Let’s see, if we can, what might have fallen away unnoticed while we looked too closely at what was in our hands. That’s where all the interesting material (and immaterial) is anyway. In the magician’s other hand, the secret sword of the Tai Chi master. Whether it be Chen, Yang, Wu, Sun or Hao, the secret sword is always there. Universal balance, because you can’t just hold a sword in one hand and hope to see a complete picture. We need a magic wand to truly see.
Traditionally, fools performed this function on many levels–the function of seer, I mean, in a social sense, and in a broader sense as well–perceiving what was either hidden or beyond the social of reach of others, who might have to be more respectful than a fool had to be. A jester’s marotte (the stick with a jester’s head) signified not only the office, but multiple perspectives. Sometimes a marotte had both a happy and a sad face, an echo of the comic and tragic masks of drama, signifying that the jester could see both ways, or many ways, at once.
A fool or jester not only reveals the workings of the great mythologies directing the scenes around us, but also points out the myths by which we might be navigating our own lives, especially when those myths might be the wrong ones–myths running counter to our own best interests or the interests of those closest to us. The fool is both social commentator and illustrator. In a sense, the fool may constantly endanger herself in the doing of her job. Sometimes, we recognise the fool’s wisdom, and sometimes we snort in self righteous indignation, threatening and stamping while our would be enemy stands powerless on a molehill, wearing a paper crown (but we were talking about Lears, not Henries):
http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/video/306725/Ran-Movie-Clip-Lord-And-Master.html **
In John Moriarty’s autobiography, nostos, he describes his ‘way’ or hodos. He says, “My hodos has been a mythodos, a road measured not in miles but in myths, sometimes in many myths simultaneously.”* Life often seems like this, like a molten field of many myths all around us, constantly changing, bubbling, melting together and sometimes trickling away in parts. Joseph’s coat of many colours, effortlessly blending qualities of admiration and resentment. Constantly, we struggle for apprehension, for understanding, for a sense of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ or just an indication of which way to go. And sometimes our perspectives remain at war with one another even as our world remains both incendiary and eternally fluid.
In the old stories, the holy, avenging angel of righteousness carries a flaming sword–the “fateful lightning” of the terrible, swift sword in the Battle Hymn of the Republic. The angel of darkness carries a flaming sword too–a sword that smokes and shrieks as it moves through the air. When they meet, they meet in the most dangerous of terrains, the ever shifting landscape of the world’s perpetual creation and destruction.
A bit heavy handed? Perhaps. But this scene is the death of friendship, the demise of love, and it marks the dimming of the light in the universe. (Of course, I hardly need to tell you that. Most of you saw the picture.)
The artists of Hollywood can express both subtlety and over the top excitement, but this is because they have been tasked with convincing the audience to buy a ticket to the film, or perhaps rent the film later. This does not invalidate the broader metaphor (nor the extended Buddhist metaphor of light cutting through our perception of existence–but more of that another time). In fact, if we return to Kurosawa’s Ran, the burning world returns, along with the vision of hell around us as particularly malevolent forces of change marching through our existence.
The sword of Damocles (the sword suspended by a single horsehair above the throne), goes along with power. Great power and authority. Great danger as well. Not just from others, but also from ourselves.
Worldly power promotes not only the possibility of hubris, but also of a worldview, a perspective too often based on assumptions. We begin to believe that reality must be exclusively a certain way. That a certain religion is the only way, or a certain perspective is necessarily ‘correct’, even if it condemns others who do not conform somehow (although they may be hurting no one). We become convinced that the world works a certain way, and perhaps that we are also a certain way, that we are either this person or that person.
Yet all these worldviews, when held to be absolute and exclusive, shimmer like horizons on a desert. Their heat rises from the hell that can materialise anywhere, on the edges of our existence, on the margins of our personality, in near or far corners of our mind, or on borders between faiths or countries. Economic sabers rattling. Threatening. Spluttering. Blustering.
When the world begins to bluster and flicker so do our limited attentions dance. They settle first on one thing, and then on another. We stop reading. We focus only on what may further our aims of personal fortune and power, as though those might actually save us. All around us, our own bleeding former kingdom lies broken, steeped in tears and sorrow. We remember lapwings and starlight, but that memory alone cannot coerce that old golden light to return. We stuff our mouths with platitudes, with the rhetoric of nobility, of greatness. Blaming others in our climbing, we claim things out loud to those we think of as stupid masses, things that we would never tell ourselves at home.
These words become ashes. Empty. Burned away in the light of whatever reality might lie outside of them. Washed away in storms on the heath. The reality of what Lear is, of what we are, and what the heads of state really are as well. It all comes thundering silently across our lives, the great beast stalking us. Perhaps it is Don Quixote’s knight of mirrors, but perhaps it is the error in the cave, our own shadow.
One day Yanguan called to his attendant, “Bring me the rhinoceros fan.”
The attendant said, “The fan is broken.”
Yanguan said, “If the fan is broken, then bring me back the rhinoceros!”
The attendant had no reply.
Zifu drew a circle and wrote the word ‘rhino’ inside it.****
Like the fan in the koan, we humans live in a broken reality, a reality that includes dissatisfaction and no having of the cakes AND eating them! You’ll spoil your appetite.
Appetites. There’s the rub. Ooh, there and a little lower.
(Yeah, okay. I’m following here until we get to that rhino thing above. Then, I just don’t get it. What the hell does any of that mean?)
The typical answer may be that Zen koans like the rhinoceros fan are designed to break logic, but they do so by cutting logic off at its very stem. That logic, assumption, even perception, may all be mistaken in ways that diminish us and our experience of reality. King Lear seems like this. His belief that he may give away his power and keep his titles and authority is founded in foolishness. We can see it. We sit outside the play saying, “Don’t go into the spooky, dark room alone! Don’t be trusting your sycophantic daughters with your butcher knife and hockey mask! Just don’t. Don’t open that door!”
We can see it, but Lear cannot. The aging king is trapped inside his own play, with only a few people (his fool and Kent) to tell him the truth. But maybe Shakespeare is telling us how much we are trapped within our own individual plays as well. Maybe part of the point is not just how an aging man may make mistakes, but how mistaken we might be in what we really believe, in what we are absolutely certain must be true.
In the case of the rhinoceros fan, only Zifu’s action seems to accomplish anything. Zifu is the only person who actually does anything, although that action, like most actions in the real world, may still seem like very little in the big scheme of things. But that’s part of the point too. Action is all that saves us from the terrors of our own (so often misplaced) convictions, but from what does action ultimately save us in the end?
Some clever material. Good acting. Thanks to Amazon, even Armageddon may be reduced to a smart and slick television series, ripe for inveterate binge watchers. We can all sit at home, subscribed to our corporate overlords’ services, and laugh at the end of the world. At least it employs the actors.
Still, there’s always a more sobering side. The pretty wife can’t always slip her husband’s soul out of the knot by asking the devil a question he can’t answer (in the most well known case, asking which end of her new ornate bonnet is the front). We don’t often, don’t usually, get off so lightly. Our sins become our scorpions, filling our minds, homing in on us from all our pasts.
We believe that we seek truth in the world. In fact, perhaps we seek something else. Comfort? Along with all that power and riches material that has already been mentioned. Too often, perhaps, we seek some universal justification for the worldview, the perspective, that we already have. There may be some deal with the universe, some bargain of which we are largely unaware, but it also may be true that there is no bargain. That if we seek to cut some kind of deal with a power or powers greater than ourselves, that all bets are off. We cannot force perspective. We can only allow it.
In The Revolt of the Angels, Anatole France writes of the moment that Lucifer the fallen angel becomes Satan the adversary. “In these silent realms where we are fallen, let us meditate, seeking the hidden causes of things; let us observe the course of nature; let us pursue her with compelling ardour and all-conquering desire; let us strive to penetrate her infinite grandeur, her infinite minuteness.”****** Like much of Satan’s rhetoric, it sounds almost reasonable until we realise that he also seems to be describing not just a quest for understanding, but a rape.
Seeking the hidden causes of things? Evident causes may be complicated enough. It might be best simply to seek life. Quiet. Unassuming. With whatever affirmations we may have resting in ourselves and not imposed on others. That may be where we should build the house. In that neighbourhood. Where we can picture just how life should be, how it certainly will be. Where the neighbours look so nice. Just like us.
*Moriarty, John. Nostos. Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2001.
**Ran. Directed by Akira Kurosawa. Japan: Universal Pictures, 1985.
***Star Wars – Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. Directed by George Lucas. USA: Lucasfilm Ltd., 2005.
****Cleary, Thomas. Book of Serenity: One Hundred Zen Dialogues. Boston: Shambala, 2005. Koan 25.
*****Good Omens. UK and USA: Amazon and BBC Studios, 2019
******France, Anatole. The Revolt of the Angels. Mrs. Wilfred Jackson, trans. London: J. M Dent, 1941.