The Scrap Drawer: In Praise of Folly
Erasmus, Ram Dass, Orlando, Party Girl, Orlando, The Brave Little Tailor, Rilke, and a doll house party!
The Scrap Drawer is a monthly 'quilt' assembled from fragments—disparate thoughts, quotations, inspirations, photographs, works in progress, and bits of life. It is a space for awareness of the interconnectedness of all things, people, places, and times.
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Dear Someone,
If there is one thing you should know about me,
it’s that I’m really fun at parties.
I don’t say this to boast. It is simply a quality I possess—or a role I have been assigned. It is a gift that I have eschewed as I’ve grown older in the pursuit of a more refined and “mature” self image.
Since I have shed my jester’s costume and slipped into business casual, I have gained access to healthcare and a 401k. But, as the stock market has taken a nose dive this month, I am forced to reconsider the tradeoffs of my sacrifice.
On the surface this way of life seems frivolous, but being fun at parties is how I have earned my keep in life. It is a path fraught with blunders, and yet it is how I know all that I know, and everyone that I know. This is the foundation I have built my life upon, and one that has proven more firm than a life in line within the values of the DOW or the NASDAQ.
Being fun at parties has never landed me a job, and it certainly hasn’t helped me to keep one. But this talent of mine has won me friendship, and a wealth of fond memories. I would call the years of bar tabs I racked up, and even the many nights I locked myself out of my apartment an investment.
I once gravitated towards the center of the party, but I now tend to stay on the margins. At parties these days, I prefer the roar of conversation and laughter wafting from a window while I sit on the stoop.
Its not that I’m shy. I have no problem with being seen. It’s just that I spent so many years traveling outside of myself that I neglected the journey inward. I now find myself so entangled inside of my own consciousness that I cannot seem to muster the levity required of party conversation.
You might say that now is not the time for parties— that there is too much suffering to justify one. But I know that all the best parties are elegies. Wherever there is a celebration, there is nearly always someone crying in the bathroom and on the curb outside.
There is always a sadness one feels at parties. There is the absence of the friend. The back pain that reminds you of the aging process you cannot stop. The otherwise happy song that triggers an indescribable sadness.
I fear my trade is a dying art, but I know I am not a rare breed. I write this not only in celebration of myself, but in celebration of folly itself as an indispensable teacher.
Though I do not have a formal degree from an institution, I am a lifelong student of folly, and there is much to be learned from trifling.
This month was my birthday month, and I spent it, in large part, in the pursuit of folly. Here is what I found!
1. In Praise of Folly
The renaissance theologian Desiderius Erasmus published In Praise of Folly in the year 1509, boldly pointing out the foolishness he saw in every rank of the human race. From the kings, to clergymen, to common folk, no one was exempt from his satire.
Erasmus saw the danger of the hubris taking root in the collective psyche during the renaissance and produced this brilliant work of satire to expose it.
The narrator of the text is Folly herself, personified. She goes to great lengths to assert her own value, as she claims that no one else will. Although life itself would be unbearable without her, her importance is often diminished in the pursuit of the other virtues.
When speaking of her origins, Folly says:
If you also want to know my birthplace, as people think it matters a lot in judging noble birth nowadays where an infant uttered its first cries, I wasn’t born on wandering Delos nor out of the waves of the sea nor ‘in hollow caves’, but on the very Isles of the Blest, where everything grows ‘unsown, untilled’.
2. The Dollhouse Project
I’ve had some major creative breakthroughs this month in regards to my doll house project. After a year of needless perfectionism and intellectualizing, I finally came to accept that all I need to do was get down to the level of this toy house and play.
And so I made a tiny bed from balsa wood, and a small braided rug out of yarn, rented a macro lens, and assembled this scene from my collection of tiny things.
For this image, I threw together this scene intuitively with dried marigolds from last summer, four leaf clovers given to me by a friend who seems to find 3 every day, knick knacks, ephemera, and landed on a hybrid form which feels like the key to pushing the project forward.
I must be building my own personal Isle of the Blest— place for my mind to run free outside of the constraints of adulthood.
Through my folly this month, I learned that my creativity thrives when uncultivated: unsewn, and untilled.
3. Orlando
It seems to be a tradition around my solar return to re watch Sally Potter’s Orlando. I was introduced to the film and Virginia Woolf’s novel at 30.
In the novel, Orland says:
“I am growing up. I am loosing my illusions—perhaps to acquire new ones.”
It is helpful to repeat this phrase to myself every year, in order to shake of the rigidity that usually comes with growing older. It helps me to accept that there is always a side to my situation that remains unseen.
4. The Big Ice Cream Cone in the Sky
In the summer after I graduated high school, I picked up a copy of Ram Dass’s Be Here Now at a bookshop in Seaside, Florida. I fixated the page with an image of a giant ice cream cone looming over a landscape. The paged asked in big, bold letters: WILL IT EVER BE THE BIG ICE CREAM CONE IN THE SKY?
Ever since, I’ve reflected on this image whenever I felt myself tackling the problem of impermanence.
“You gotta keep eating it yet it melts & melts that’s the problem you gotta keep eating it cuz it will melt”
Later on, I tattooed this image onto my arm so as not to forget it.
I absolved myself for a time, or so I thought, of the human problem of impermanence. There was indeed no eternal ice cream cone, and yet there were infinite flavors to choose from. How could I ever grow bored?
As a youthful, bright eyed westerner, I took this metaphor as an invitation to gorge myself. I gave myself stomach aches and diabetes. I couldn’t let a single morsel of experience melt without trying it.
Sometimes you just have to let it melt.
5. Gather & Patch
When my therapist says the words “inner child work,” something deep inside me recoils. Childhood is a topic I’ve always approached in therapy with a cold, clinical matter-of-factness—a way of staying outside of myself.
I have not been able to keep up the same defenses in art therapy. At a certain point in this therapeutic relationship, I found that my art improved only when I let my guard down and gave up my pretensions.
It is transformative to be given the space and time every week to be seen and heard in the most whole hearted, earnest part of yourself. A space to state your deeply embarrassing desire to dedicate your life to making up pictures and stories that you aren’t sure if anyone will read.
The pursuit of art is the pursuit of folly. Once again, folly’s value is belittled. I would have thought this desire would leave me with the way current events seem to foreshadow catastrophe. Yet I feel even more compelled to do so.
You won’t understand why until you discover arts ability to connect what is thought of as deeply personal is actually widely resonant, told and retold throughout the ages through myth and folklore.
I’d like to create a space for others to be seen in their art. That’s why I’ve created Gather & Patch, a space to explore methods of building a therapeutic creative practice.
I’m on a break right now, but please let me know if you’d like to join in the future.
6. Trouble
presented a challenge through his newsletter to tell a 49 word story about a time I got in trouble. In an earlier challenge, he invited us to share our life stories in 6 words. These prompts also come with an opportunity to get to know other writers over a group call. I really appreciate the community he’s building there. I chose to use my 49 words to reflect on a time I got myself into cosmic trouble. Sorry, mom!
"Only a quick trip" I say, clutching a fistful of mushrooms. Soon, strobing blue-red flashes across undulating wood grain, pulsating bass claustrophobic, step out, roommate projectile vomits onto a tree, with a face of vibrating rainbows, looked at my phone and became a Pierrot clown on the world stage.
7. The Brave Little Tailor
How does the underdog rise above their circumstances? Through their wit, of course. Power isn’t often about brawn, but about perception. When we are small, power often feels out of reach, but all one has to do attain it is to play with scale.
In the fairy tale The Brave Little Tailor, a tailor kills 7 flies that land on his toast and jam. To commemorate his triumph, the tailor crafts a belt for himself, embroidering the words “Seven in One Blow,” and leaves home to find his fortune.
On his way out into the wide world, he encounters giants who read the phrase on his belt as a challenge, not knowing the seven referred to were flies, not men. The giants challenge him to a series of games to prove his skill. While they squeeze water from boulders, he squeeze water from cheese.
Eventually, word of the tailor’s exploits reaches the king, who—both impressed and uneasy—summons him to court. Suspicious that such a small man could be so mighty, the king sets him to a series of impossible tasks, hoping to be rid of him without bloodshed.
The king commands the tailor to catch a unicorn that’s been terrorizing the countryside. Unbothered, the tailor goes off into the woods to find the unicorn. When he came across the unicorn, all he had to do was duck behind a tree and let it charge at him.
And so, the tailor wins his fortune, the king’s daughter’s hand in marriage, and a place in the palace.
8. Party Girl (1995)
Mary is a party girl with a lust for living—and the Dewey Decimal System.
No one will take her seriously. Not even herself. But, she does contemplate the larger questions in private, reads The Myth of Sisyphus, and secretly hopes for a higher calling than “party planner.”
No one sees the real Mary. She his patronized for her thriving social life and designer wardrobe. Her outward appearance seems to be a contradict what is typically expected of librarians, but maybe what the library needed all a long was a party girl!
9. To Put Aside One’s Own Name like a Broken Toy
I met my partner with my eyes closed on a dance floor. Now he reads to me while I sew. We met in December of 2019, only a short few months before you-know-what happened. There were suddenly no dance floors, and no place to go but inward.
This passage from Rilke’s Duino Eligies has stuck with me throughout the month, as I reflected on aging, death, and decay—and how to have fun with it.
“It's strange, of course, no longer to inhabit the earth,
no longer to practice barely learned customs,
not to give roses and other auspicious things
the meaning of a human future;
to be no longer what one was in infinitely
anxious hands, and even to put aside
one's own name like a broken toy.
Strange, to no longer keep wishing our wishes. Strange,
to see elements, once related, flutter
loosely in space. And being dead is toilsome,
and full of the retrieving needed if little by little
we're to feel a bit of eternity.”
10. A Doll House Party!
For my birthday this year I threw a party in a doll house.
I asked my friends to bring over their favorite tiny things. We made little scenes, and I stayed behind the camera for most of the night, observing a room full of thirty-somethings engage in fully uninhibited play.
When I photograph the dollhouse on my own, I’m painstakingly meticulous—every object carefully chosen and precisely placed. But at the party, the house quickly unraveled into a joyful, unplanned chaos I would never usually allow myself.
Throughout the night, I overheard everyone making up goofy stories and laughing together. It was priceless—to watch grown-ups relish absurdity, together.
Sometimes the mess of life is the masterpiece.
So much to love here--from being a student of folly, to Be Here Now--great book--to ALL the dollhouse photos and for creating a dollhouse event where you showe other adults how much they long to play and be silly. All great art making my friend--I salute you!
Jeremy I LOVE the dollhouse scenes. WOOO! Party in the dollhouse!