Jester's Privilege

Reflections on my first year of writing.

Pierrot — Antoine Watteau, 1719.

Hello? Am I making sense?

I have been asking this question to myself and the editors of my work incessantly this year. This has been my first year I’ve ever shared my writing in a public sphere. Before March, I wouldn’t have considered myself a writer, or even as someone who was “good with words.” At that time, I was still drowning in my own thoughts, and the memories I didn’t know what to do with.

I’ve tried working in almost any artistic medium imaginable. Words intimidated me the most. They felt ephemeral, and intangible, but recently I’ve come to the (obvious) realization that words are quite a physical material. Once you write them down, they can be crumpled up or folded into a paper airplane, or a crane. Words are as malleable as clay; they can be harvested straight from the earth, and spun into pots for catching rainwater.

It feels absurd to hold such reverence for something I previously gave little thought to. I've spent at least half of my life fully on the currency of Jester’s Privilege. At some point in my early twenties, I began to notice the chatter around me didn’t make much sense. I also noticed that the things others found urgent (spreadsheets, umbrellas, credit scores) didn’t align with what I found urgent (memories, embodied existence, climate change) at all.

If you listen closely, you’ll notice that the words spoken by most people out in public are in service to invisible, immaterial forces. You’ll hear words and phrases such as algorithm, and gig-economy, but you’ll never hear them speak of gardens. Recently, at my office, there have been talks of a “cloud migration,” which I am told is mandatory—but I’d prefer to stay here on the ground, thanks.

As a jester who has now matured, who reads the classics and has begrudgingly accepted the burden of caring-what-others-think, I’ve had to lay low for a while and reconsider my approach. My old ways of linguistic flippancy are finished. I assure you that this is not out of compliance, but a need for tact—to recruit others into a new order of Jesters Privilege.

I hope you’ll join me. Jesters are essential, yet endangered in a world bent on reducing the unfathomable nature of our universe to binary code. Three centuries after the Enlightenment and with oceans full of garbage, it's clear that an over commitment to "logic" is its own kind of foolishness.

William Blake, Monotype. 1795

Consider this image of Isaac Newton hunched over his scroll and compass on the bottom of the sea. William Blake created this monotype in a time when the myth of the enlightenment had solidified in collective memory. Standing as a lone jester in an sea of the “logical” and “enlightened,” Blake made the bold statement: “Art is the tree of life. Science is the tree of death.”

If I were to say these words today, my entire character would be called into question. We know that science has brought enumerable gifts, and alleviated much pain and suffering. It is certainly not the tree of death. But with these words, Blake was challenging science as the solitary mode of perception people in his time viewed reality through. He knew that the perception made available to us through the arts—the intuitive, lived dimension of life—was equally real and important.

These insights offered by William Blake remain poignant, but still overlooked. The jester’s work is arduous, thankless, and no one considers the courage it takes to commit oneself to such a vocation.

I can see how this invitation might be unappealing. I’m working on my pitch. It is sad but true—the jester’s path is never an easy one. It is fraught with constant dismissals and embarrassment. Somehow, as a jester, you know that it is worth the risk.

It is true— When we offer our deepest thoughts and reflections, it’s disheartening when the message falls flat, or when a partner and conversation is not on the same train. When an earnest idea is met with confusion—or worse, silence—it’s far easier to stay quiet than to persist and work through the misunderstanding.

“The fool who persists in his folly will become wise.”

-William Blake

However, through a commitment to foolishness, we are paradoxically offered a broader, more comprehensive understanding of our lived experience.

I’ll do my best to explain. My partner and I have been decluttering our apartment, lately. In the process I’ve found a smattering of loose pages and notebooks underneath the bed and hidden away in drawers. Ugly, crumpled up pages covered with feverish, scrawled sentences. Many are unremarkable, boring even, but all reveal a new layer of perception emerging that I did not have access to before I began to keep notebooks. That Blakean layer of perception that might cause others to think I might have a couple screws loose.

While gathering all of my notebooks and papers into a pile, I flip through them, and see that much of these are unintelligible nonsense. Wacky phrases. Baseless assertions. The contents of these notebooks are largely unusable, fragmented, and meandering.

In each notebook, I see a beginning and an end, each with a slightly different writer. I also see a tension between the reality of who I am and my ideal self. Who I was in the "real" world—the one cussing out the driver who almost ran me over in the crosswalk—seemed at odds with the old-timey hobo persona writing about a dollhouse and fairytales on Substack. Yet, these two selves were apart of the same whole.

Reading these fragments I’ve scattered across my house this year, I see that each page shows a writer who successively clearer, more concise, and more confident in its authority to name the world and the experiences within it.

I can see in these notebooks small moments over time where I allowed myself to encounter written language as if it were a new and novel invention. A physical material. I allowed myself to babble like a baby, spell words wrong, and imagine impossible things.

This was often an uncomfortable exercise, but I discovered that If I can sit in the discomfort of adult playtime, and give up the need to be understood, I create more space for understanding.

So—good writing starts with a comfort with being misunderstood, and it’s always excruciating and uncomfortable. Got it. What isn’t often considered is that being understood is a relatively new luxury in the expanse of time and human history, one that we take for granted every time we share a language with someone.

Think about it. Speech was invented about 100,000 or 200,000 years ago. We were pointing and grunting at at the grass, the sky, and the mountains for tens of thousands of years in frustration before the names for these things could be collectively agreed upon. Naming things must have taken up a great deal of time. In a whole field of flowers there must have been many days spent among loved ones, pointing and naming the flowers one by one until we arrived at Lupine, Laurel, and Aster.

Writing must be a continuation of this ancient naming ritual. Even as we have an agreed upon copy of Webster’s Dictionary, there is always a varying degree of distance between personal and collective definitions of all of the things that make up our shared material and immaterial world.

We can still not turn on the news and agree on the names for hero, villain, or genocide. How do you name those?

The ritual of naming is, as it has always been, a collective act that shapes our shared reality. When words become static and mechanistic, they create a reality that mirrors that same rigidity and lifelessness.

I know that my words are far from perfect; my trains of thought tend to change tracks abruptly, and rarely ever arrive on time, or in the destination expected. I worry that you as my passenger might get motion sickness from the ever changing perspectives and time periods we traverse together.

The problem with words is that they tend to morph into each other. We get bogged down in the details of spelling, grammar, syntax, and prioritizing finished pieces that are tightly polished and presented as complete. Words are of little use to us now in this form, when the names for things can’t be decided on.

I did not think I had the credentials to name things until I started to write. In my notebooks, I’ve released a deluge of old memories I’d previously been able to name: homelessness, abuse, and manipulation, to name a few. With the right name, what once alienated became a point of connection.

You, whoever you are, are also endowed with the gift of naming. You can rename the plants, and all of the animals on the ark, and even yourself, if you’d like. It can be your little secret world, but I highly suggest sharing it.

Happy New Year.

Jeremy

“The sleep of reason produces monsters” Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes