Virtue 11: Holy Mischief - Light the match - The 12 Virtues of the Primordial Artist

This is part 14 in a series exploring the 12 virtues that can free artists from cultural enslavement.

ATTEND

If we are good boys and girls, and do exactly what we are told, we will follow our parents expectations, follow our teachers expectations, follow our cultures expectations, and live lives of consumer success. We will perform well on tests, we will accomplish tasks given us by our peers and bosses, we will keep up with the Jones’s, we will be “normal.” We will fit in. We will have a retirement. We will not rock the boat. We will maintain the status quo. We will not be renewed. We will not reveal insight. We will not shake off false masks. We will do exactly what we are told, from childhood through til death. Obedience to cultural norms and human masters is an enslaving force. Obedience to simulacra – even our own when they become dead and obsolete – will trap us in dead forms. What we need is a way to free ourselves from these masks and systems. We need liberation.

Johnstone said, “without mischief, there will always be something slavish in your work.” This is a crucial insight.

ENVISION

Mischief is the 11th virtue of 12. It sits in the midst of the Child Archetype. It is a crucial facet and crucial activator of freedom for the artist. Freedom is required, freedom is necessary, freedom is what keeps the artist able to commune with the Great Mysterious and act independent from human expectations.

I’ll admit that mischief is hard for me. Because I take life pretty seriously most of the time. It is a continuous practice for me to shake things up, to laugh at forms and static definitions, to loosen the mask.

Mischief is a manifestation of love. Mischief as a virtue, as holy mischief, is an enactment of a certain kind of love – the love that can cut away dead wood, can burn down dead things, can liberate the true from the false – it is, as my ex-wife put it (credit where credit is due) apocolove.

In King Lear, we have a hero who has lost touch with reality. Lear lives in a world of simulacra and power and status. Lear is retiring, but does not really want to give up his power. The least his successors can do is flatter him to the full extent of their verbal ability – to coddle his ego and elevate him one last time. When his sincere, true, loving youngest daughter fails to do this, he disowns her, cruelly and with a great ugliness, and sets in motion his own catastrophe. His aid and partner in this katabasis? the fool.

I have a vision that the fool or mischief maker is the part of us that senses what is real and what is false. What is alive and what is dead. What is Mystery and what is simulacrum. The fool detests the false, and with playfulness, with irreverence, and with love and loyalty to the true, they kick and scrape at the dead wood of the tree so that those branches can fall, and make room in the canopy and in the tree’s circulatory system for the living branches to thrive. The fool is up in that tree, our tree, and is kicking and scrapping off our falsehoods in the name of god.

The fool enacts love of self – but with the ability to shake up the self, to challenge the self away from complacency and self-smugness. The fool helps the self “not take yourself so seriously” while still retaining a sense of sea-of-love saturation.

The fool enacts love of other – ultimately the mischief that the fool enacts is out of love of other – love of their essential nature, love of their growth, love of their limitations and love of their potential. Love of their emergence as a mysterious collaborator, not just a “normal member of society”.

The fool enacts love of god / reality by playing with the norms while yet shaking them up, indicating the great mystery behind the norms, comparing and contrasting the simulacra and the mysterious like a kid playing cards, like playing with dolls. The fool keeps perspective.

There is physicality because the best lessons are acted out, the tough things need to be shaken off bodily, the true katabasis usually involve broken bones, and we must fail with a bloody nose or we don’t know we’ve really failed.

There is courage because the mischief maker might get in big big trouble. Certainly the principal won’t be patting the naughty kid on the back. Nor will the cop.

There is alternation because the mischief is by definition oblique. It is surprising. It is here and then there. It fakes you out with a jab only to knock you out with a left hook. It is soft and gentle just before it throws a pie in your face.

Mischief is pious, because ultimately it is serving the Mystery behind the forms. The mischief maker, when at their best, is transparent to nature. Acting like a forest fire acts, acting like a flash flood, acting like a tidal wave, shocking the hell out of the villagers, pleasing the terrible law.

Mischief is excellent, because to be that funny, to be that articulate, to be that clever, to do that dance, takes work. You want to see excellent mischief take a look at Harpo Marx. Chaplin’s “Tramp”. George Carlin.

Mischief is poetic – it is ultimately gifted to the god – it is an offering of chaos that demonstrates a higher order. A disruption that ironically creates new growth, new freedom.

Mischief embodies desire, because the fool must act on personal impulse, not even knowing what the results will be. It is desire without reason, desire without rationality. A strict rationality might be tempted to never disrupt anything, to simply keep everything status quo, forever.

Mischief calls on Abandon, the 12th virtue, because it sets the stage for the unknown. It creates the catastrophe that will send the practitioner into the uncharted void. It is the launch point, it is the explosion, it is the chaos energy that will send the hero, the artist – outward. It is lighting the match.

In Navajo culture, the mythical Coyote is the epitome of the Mischief energy. In one of his crucial stories, before the Holy People had made the decisions about how life would be, they debated whether human beings should die, or whether they should live forever. Many of the Holy people felt that immortality would protect humans from suffering, sadness, pain, and would allow them to create great works that could span hundreds, thousands of years. Coyote disagreed. He felt that without death, there would be overcrowding, there would be terrible competition for resources, there would be ultimately a loss of appreciation for life itself, as the immortal humans began to take life for granted, since they could not loose it. As the debate went on and on and on, Coyote left the circle and on his own initiative closed the door to the underworld. This act made it impossible for humans to freely travel, and made it so that death was now inevitable. The door could not again be opened. The Holy People were enraged by Coyote’s impulsive action. Yet over time, the realized he was right.

Coyote is acknowledged as the character embodying impulse, destruction, chaos, and evolution. Through recklessness, Coyote – often unwittingly – enables the growth and higher development of the Holy People and humans alike.

If we follow simulacra we will be rewarded by the culture and patted on the head like good dogs, but we will be living falsehood. If we are in a very beautiful culture and the simulacra are very well aligned to the primordial we may be lucky. It may even appear that we are living good, aligned lives. But deep down, if we have intermediaries between us and Reality we will be living a half life. We will be living a wooden life.

I see the persona as a wooden mask. Some of our masks are more flexible than others’. More joints and flex points, More plates. Plates for cheek, for forehead, for mouth. More articulation . More similar to our real face. This Inter-face with the culture is perhaps necessary, perhaps not. Johnstone called it the “public relations department” of the self. If our mask is very tight we will never be able to shift our status, shift our personality, be funny when usually we are serious, be low status when usually we are high. This hard, full face tragic mask will be like a coffin that we are living within. Peering out through small eye holes. Seeing but not expressing. Increasingly numb and frozen. Like an Iron Maiden, our persona will trap us for our whole life, and never let us go. It will draw strength from us and even see to be alive – but ultimately it is a simulacra too.

A slightly more articulating mask is better. It can form more, better, it can express more. It can have some variety. That’s good. The interface might be more accurate, more analogous.

The mischievous fool says – fuck all the masks. Fuck all the wooden bullshit. Fuck the simulacra IN GENERAL. What if we kicked this over, What if we knocked this down. What if we set this over here on FIRE. Oh, I happen to have this lighter fluid in my back pocket. LOOK AT IT BURN!

On one level we might think of the fool as destructive only. But if someone is acting only in a destructive, nihilistic, atheistic way, they are not making the most of this virtue. The anarchist can be enacting the holy fool – as long as they sense there is something essential that needs to be released, revealed, retained.

When pioneers were traveling across North America in the 19th century, they might have to set up a temporary home to survive the winter. They would build a house that could survive the winter and wait for spring to arrive. When it arrived, the night before they were to set off they would pack all of their things and set up tents outside the house. Then they would burn the house down. In the morning, they would rake the ashes and collect the nails.

They would rake the ashes and collect the nails.

They knew that while wood might be renewable, nails were not. Nails required blacksmiths and money and civilization and coal. The nails were worth keeping.

In my experiences of burning down houses, the key question always is: what is essential? What is worth keeping?

The holy fool burns down the house – but they protect the nails, they collect them, they remind the King what is essential, they use riddles and puzzles and tricks and jokes to remind them, because their ego may be too clouded, too opaque to listen, to hear, to see. But the holy fool does not burn for no reason. They burn for love, for truth, for Mystery.

Johnstone said, “if you have no mischief, there will always be something slavish about your work.” And this he was saying to improvisers, who you would think would be the most free artists in the world. Even they, he saw, could fall into the trap of being “good boys and girls” who follow directions and only do the polite things and protect their egos and the egos of each other and never want to really shock anyone or the audience with truth or powerful topics.

Mischief is part of renewal, is part of shaking out the essential, is part of keeping loose, keeping free, keeping the yoke off. “No man is my master” is tattooed on the forehead of the fool.

Despite the fact that they may be in service of a King.

In their irreverence and refusal to pursue high status, they are free to speak the message of the god. They are free to see the connection others are not able to see. They are free to think the thoughts they are not supposed to think.

Mischief in it’s simplest cultural sense, is the antidote to control structures. Mischief preserves the agency, freedom, joy, life force of the individual. It enables one to play with the forms rather than obey them. To play puppet show with the masks rather than die a quiet death entombed in them. And really what’s getting shaken up is the ego. The expected norms and expected results and expected respect according to our stations. Mischief turns all that on its head on purpose. To reveal a deeper truth.

Artists are fools. We are both more important and no more important than that. We must be able to embrace our fool-quality so that we are not entrapped in high status bullshit. The willingness to take risks, to fail, to be mocked, to speak truth to power, to throw away the cultural false gods, to ignore the norms, to ignore the “no entrance” signs.

It’s basically a virtue that’s saying – stop being so up tight! Fuck around a little! The world’s not made of glass! See what happens when you shake it up!

I constantly have to remind myself to be loose, to be mischievous, to be free of attachment to the forms I am working with. It is a challenge I return to daily. My own tendency is to seek ideals and beautiful forms and create frameworks out of them (as you can see). The mischief maker feels disruptive and careless, reckless. Yet I am reminded that the holy fool is not interested in destroying the mystery, they are interested in promoting it.

Promoting the irony, promoting the unsolvable, promoting the riddle that has no answer, promoting the perspective that is irresolvable. Calling into question fixed ideals like justice, right and wrong, duty, propriety, acceptability, good behavior, “how a daughter should behave to her father”. The fool burns all of these things, in order to witness the face of god shining in the flames. Liberating the human mind from the simulacra that entraps it.

DIRECT

Solo

The Fool

Stand and find your center. Invite the holy fool into you.
Let him look around, what does he see? How does he move – let him go, let him move around, let him make some mischief.
Integration: How does this energy contrast your normal persona? What is the fool up to? Is the fool energy cruel or playful? How does the fool energy relate to your art?

Opposite Day

Ask, What if the opposite were true? What if it was upside down? What if we reversed it? What would the opposite of this be?
Integration: these questions can be applied to everything around you. What is it like to take lightly the accepted norms? The accepted definitions? How can this apply to your work?

The fool’s puppet show

Stand and find your center. Invite the fool. Let him present masks. Tragic, Comic, the Boss, the Shop keeper. Let him present parts of your own persona masks. Let him present and freely change between the different masks, let them be exaggerated, let them me “natural”.
Integration: how is it to change masks? How is it to play with the masks? How does your persona feel about this? What is the application to your art work? How does this connect to self love? Where is the love in this activity? How does it connect to physicality?

PAIRS

The Fool’s Repetition Game

Play the Meisner repetition excercise. You sit or stand across from each other and name things you observe. When A says, “you’re looking at me”. Be says “I’m looking at you.” Gently allow it to progress into a fools repetition game. The observations become more oblique. More poignantly observational. “You’re on top of the World” “I”m on top of the world?” “You’re wanting love” “I’m wanting love?”
Note: It’s important that the fool energy be grounded in love, grounded in piety. To be simply cruel is not fulfilling the virtue and is incomplete. The power of the holy fool and of mischief is in “saving the nails” and this is done with love of self, love of other, piety, courage, desire, etc.
Integration: How was it different to bring the fool energy into the Meisner excercise? How did it change the observations? How did it change the feeling? Was it threatening? Was more see? Was the fool right or wrong? Was love present or was it just cruel?

GROUP

Anniversary Party

A scene where a family has gotten together. Normal things are discussed, everyone has roles. One member is designated the holy fool. At a certain point in the scene, that fool energy is invoked, and they serve the truth, not the norm. They say what is latent, rather than what is expected. They break the dead branches off, to reveal the living. They set fires to clear the underbrush. Remain loving.
Integration: How was it when the fool energy was invoked? How did it feel to be the fool? How did it feel to be the “normal” character and be challenged by the fool? Was love present? How does it feel to serve the deeper truth / great mysterious rather than human norms and expectations?
Variation: This scene can be any number or setups.

Holy Irreverence

A scene of obvious seriousness – a death bed, a funeral, a child at a principals office with the parents and expulsion is on the line. How can the mischief energy be used to contrast the seriousness? How can holy fool energy be invoked to contrast the somber?
Integration: What was the effect of invoking holy fool energy? Did it break the scene? Did it help in some way? How can this be applied to your art?

CURTAIN

Mischief is one of the most volatile virtues. It is like a hose that might suddenly turn on and soak you just as easily as soaking your peer. Mischief does not differentiate between friend and foe, nor does it protect those it knows best. It’s loyalty is to the truth and to the mystery that exists beneath all of us, beyond all of us. Mischief is willing to light the match to let us remember who we truly are.

Mischief is crucial for the renewal process of the artist. The irreverence keeps us from living in museums of our own achievements, of our own importance. Mischief keeps us humble by burning down old forms, by allowing us to be new again, the forest to be awake and alert and clear and fertile. The ash becomes fuel. Fertile void, And the essential survives. Burn it down, let it go, speak the truth, cards fall where they may. What the fool takes away was never worth holding onto anyway, though it may be painful to let it go.

I would also say that it is the fool that takes things from us that we cannot let go of. It is the fool at the control desk of the Katabasis that tears us down at mid-life, that seems like unfathomable tragedy, that appears unfair, not the right time, not right. The fool is behind the curtain pushing buttons in seeming random order – forcing us through hook or through crook – to let go of old forms, to become new again, to see the world with fresh eyes, to witness again the mystery evident in the oblivion.