The Joker is Wild

The Joker is Wild

In certain realms of Faerie there has been a long artistic discussion of the Idea of the Joker, and the Idea of the Fool. No one really craves, or even needs, a resolution. The joy is in the flights of the poetic, given that there are a many of manys in the Ways to Seeing. Although, … the intoxicated poets want little to do with law-book poets, a feud several millennia old, which is – sadly – a tale for another time …

Re-considerations of these riddles arose soon after a remarkable joker-performance by the actor: Joaquin Phoenix. Many had believed Heath Ledger’s joker-performance could never be topped. There was a sigh then, among a few of the attending Fae, when Tiger-Saucy suggested that Joaquin’s work did not top Heath’s but rather bottomed it, given that it told the tale of the rite of passage before the Becoming.

A crude mind would view the fires, that Joaquin reveals&endures, as something horribly evil. Only raw evil can become a Joker, as played by Heath, who is not only an expert at creating chaos, but feeds on his creations with joy and laughter. Alfred, Batman’s mentor sez: “some people just want to watch the world burn.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbPiIwFOQtU

I know – personally – a lot about the Fool, having been one often, and also a student of the Tarot, the first book, where the Fool card can’t seem be in the same place or order from deck to deck. The idea of the Fool has been variously inscribed, one friend having called it – besides the Fool: Amor, or Love. The Fool does seem, in the image/symbolism, to be walking into danger … such as stepping of a cliff, or crossing a river on the back of crocodiles. The unknown is always potential … but then we take the step, or cross the river, and there you are – on the other side … the past behind us.

If you can believe Google, the Joker card was born, in America, during the Civil War. It is most often used as a “wild” card, being able to impose its will on a game. Since the Spring of 1940, when Batman #! appeared, the Joker has been used in DC comics lore as the supreme prankster of lawlessness, wearing “whiteface”, with floridly red lipstick.

Before going further, let us call to mind circus clowns and their makeup. For some folk, there exists a serious phobia about clowns. If we were a follower of Carl Jung, there might even be a name for this darkness potential of human beings.

If the Fool is Love, is the Joker Hate? For a simple minded moralist, one is an idiot, and the other the spawn of the devil.

If there can be anti-matter, why can there not be anti-love? Anti-love is not hate, it is callous indifference. It is not giving a shit about another’s pain. The Joker knows pain, has eaten pain all their life, and finally said “enough is enough” … with a bang, a fire, a large dash of chaos, and above all an absolute artistic surety that the whole thing is absurd, from beginning to end.

Often, the Jokers make chaos, without which the Fools would have no reason to rush in where angels fear to tread. In a certain sense, the human Wild that is of the Mother has two extremes: One destructive, and the other constructive. Each is a locus of danger, in part because of the tendency to reckless and impulsive behaviors, consequences be damned.

How many people dream of their enemies getting COVID-19 and dying?

Right now, to a certain degree, protests draw into their chaos-generation (refusing to follow laws) – both “types.” If your life on earth seems already to be hell, why not join in the dancing around the fires? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgrM4_JMi9w