Channeling Our Inner Fool

by Paula Davidoff

Since we began our separate quarantines, my grandchildren and I have spent some hours telling and listening to stories in a virtual setting. Last week, I told them The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship, a Russian folktale that begins like a three brothers tale, but gets rid of the two older, cleverer brothers very near the beginning of the story. After that, the tale follows the eponymous Fool as he acquires his flying ship and collects a series of helpers on his way toward his goal of winning the Tsar’s daughter to wife. 

When the story ended, Emma, who recently celebrated her tenth birthday, said, “I don’t get it. The fool doesn’t really seem foolish.” 

Children are brilliant. You tell them a long, complicated story and they hit at the crux as soon as it ends. My response to Emma’s remark wasn’t great. Socratic-aspiring grandmother that I am, I didn’t want to fill her up with my thoughts about her idea, so I just told her that her question was very insightful and that she should think about it some more. Not to be outdone by her older cousin, five-year-old Magnolia chimed in, “Next time you should tell us the story about Dummling.” 

Are everyone’s grandchildren as smart as mine?

Emma and Magnolia got me thinking about the archetype of The Fool, and I hope the thoughts that follow will open a conversation about the character. 

Before I told my grandkids The Fool of the World, I showed them The Fool in the Rider-Waite Tarot deck which portrays the character as a young traveler who seems about to step blithely off the edge of a cliff. In the picture, the Fool is looking skyward, and he seems either unaware or unconcerned that his next step will send him hurtling into a dangerous-looking unknown. The card (as long as it turns up right-side-up)  is usually interpreted in a reading as lucky and, I think, it’s a good representation of the Fool in folktales. 

As his story unfolds, we come to see that the Fool of the World is not, as Emma wisely noted, foolish. He’s different and he approaches life with a kind of innocence. He doesn’t complain when his mother sends him on his quest dressed in rags with a meal of dry bread for his journey. Instead, he sings “because the trees were green and there was a blue sky overhead.” He might represent the poet misunderstood by his community or the Grasshopper to society’s Ants. People don’t understand him, so they think he’s useless. But he has some skill or inner strength that enables him to obtain his goal. 

The character can’t, however, simply represent the poet because, as students of folktales know, the archetypes have universal appeal. And everyone, politicians as well as poets, Ants as well as Grasshoppers, should be able to identify with Fool. In reality, we are all at the edge of a precipice and have little power to control where life’s next step will land us. So, what can Fool teach us?

The Dummling story Magnolia referred to is Grimms’ The Three Feathers. In this story, a king sets tasks for his three sons in order to determine which of them deserves to inherit the kingdom. To set them on their way, the king steps outside the castle door and blows three feathers into the air. Two of the feathers fly off in different directions, but the third simply blows straight up and floats back down to the ground. The two clever brothers run off after the feathers that are going somewhere, leaving Dummling standing right where he started, staring down at the feather which landed at his feet. 

Then, looking down, he discovers a door. The door has always been there. He and his brothers must have trod countless times upon it as they came and went from the castle, but only now, as he is forced to look down, does Dummling see it. The door leads to an underground chamber, so Dummling must not only closely examine the surface of the familiar, he must enter it, go down deep to find the aspects of his nature that will make him a worthy king.

In the story of The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship, God only knows how the Fool acquires the ship which is the Tsar’s bride price for his daughter, but once he is on board, he goes about collecting travelers who end up helping him attain his goal. Because one method of story analysis involves seeing every character as an aspect of the main character, I think these travelers offer some insight into the kinds of strengths we fools may find if we, like Dummling, stop and look deeply inside. The Fool’s traveling companions are: a man who can hear every sound in the world by putting his ear to the ground, a man who can traverse the earth in split seconds, a man who can shoot things that are hundreds of miles away, a man who can eat huge amounts of food, another who can drink huge amounts, and two more men, each with magical objects. The first of these has a bundle of wood that, when scattered, will spring up into armies of soldiers; the second has a bundle of straw that, when spread around, makes hot things cold. 

My first thought about these travelers is that, except for the last two, their skills are just exaggerations of things most people can do naturally: hear, walk, see, eat, and drink. The fact that they are magnified may mean that, to use them to our best advantage, we need to consider them more carefully, that is, not take them for granted. Intransigent fools look without seeing, hear without listening, and walk, eat, and drink with no intention. 

The objects carried by the sixth and seventh travelers – wood and straw, respectively – are also natural objects, but they’ve been arranged, tied into bundles, through artifice. Bundling makes weak objects stronger; it’s harder to break a bundle than a single stick. Fool needs to collect his strengths and use them together if he is to succeed. 

According to Steven Olderr’s dictionary of symbolic meanings, a bundle of wood symbolizes strength and authority. To reveal his true nature and establish that he is not as dim he seems to the general public, Fool has to assert some authority. In Three Feathers, Dummling accomplishes this through the superiority of the objects he brings his father. The Fool of the World conjures armies to the same purpose.

The bundle of straw is more mysterious to me. One straw is a symbol of weakness, but a bundle can be a sign of danger. The bundle of straw, picked up before the flying ship enters the Tsar’s compound, may serve as a warning of things to come. At one point in the story, when the Tsar attempts to kill Fool, his life is saved by the magical straw.  Also, straw, though useful for many things, is the inferior part of the stalk, the chaff without the grain. So, the straw could be a warning about the fate of a Fool who doesn’t seek to understand himself. That Fool will remain a fool, a husk devoid of human spirit. 

The Fool of the Tarot is poised to fall. I think his attitude reflects neither unawareness nor lack of concern about the future. Like the Fool of the World, he is enjoying the world around him, looking up toward the trees and the sky. In his right hand, he carries his worldly belongings vagabond-style, a bundle wrapped in a cloth hung loosely from a stick. In his left hand, he holds a rose (completeness, beauty, heart). He holds both items carelessly. He may lose them at any moment, but he understands that grasping them won’t change his fate. Fool knows he can’t control where his next step will land, so he looks to the sky and, perhaps, controls the only thing he can – his thoughts.

Listening to An Other

by Paula Davidoff

A couple of weeks before Thanksgiving, Gerry Fierst and I co-taught professional development workshops for upper grade teachers. To begin each workshop, we told an African folktale about a man who married a woman from the sky. As in many tales about other-worldly wives, the woman’s consent to wed comes with a condition. Her husband must not open a box that she has brought from her homeland. The man breaks his promise and, to his surprise, finds that the box is empty. When his wife confronts him with his actions, he replies, “I don’t understand why it matters. There is nothing in the box.”

When she heard this, the sky woman’s eyes filled with tears. “You’re wrong,” she replied. “That box was filled with sky – with light and air – everything from my homeland that I hold dear. I’m not leaving you because you opened the box,” she continued, “I’m leaving because you couldn’t see what it contained.”

When workshop participants talked about the story, they related it to their own teaching and their students’ learning. Their remarks could be summarized as follows:

1.    Many of my students don’t see the value of what I’m offering them, and

2.    I sometimes forget that each student has unique insights and experiences that affect his or her perception of my classroom.

The workshop took place on November 10^th and, after waking in the wash of election results, it was good to spend the morning immersed in work with thoughtful and enthusiastic teachers – telling stories, teaching and learning, dwelling in the timeless aspects of human experience, and reflecting on how we, as individuals and as a collegial learning community, can help our the youngest generation effect a positive change for their future.  However, we live in the present and, even as we walked back to our cars after the workshops, Gerry and I talked uneasily about what changes the immediate future might hold.

In the days and weeks since that workshop, I have heard from many friends who are depressed and frightened about the future. National news has been dotted with accounts of violence that may or may not be related to election-wrought fear and anger. And, in the few days preceding Thanksgiving, I heard more than a few radio bites about the less disturbing subject of how to avoid unpleasant holiday dinner table conversation. Through all of this, that teacher workshop has been running through my mind.

Although I love teaching professional development workshops, I almost always anticipate them with trepidation. I fear encountering the unfriendly faces of people who will proceed to talk and text and grade papers while I’m trying to teach. To make matters worse, I also tend to measure the success of a workshop by the responses of the most disengaged participants. I want everyone to be involved and, although I really do understand the frustration teachers feel when given one more thing to do, I don’t understand not taking a chance on what might be an opportunity to learn something new.

But in the weeks since that workshop, I’ve been questioning my own willingness to take that chance. I’ve become uncomfortably aware of the many times I put down the newspaper or turn off the radio when someone is expressing an opinion that doesn’t jibe with my own. Like the sky woman’s husband, I assume the contents of that box are not worth a closer look.

 In that workshop, I also told The Three Feathers. In this story from the Brothers Grimm, a king gives his three sons a task that will help him decide which of them shall rule after his death. The older two of the sons are quick witted; the third is not.

To start his sons on their quests, the king blew three feathers into the air, saying, “As they fly, so you shall go.” One feather flew east and one feather flew west, but the third feather flew straight up into the air and fell quickly to the ground. Laughing, one of the older brothers ran to the east and the other ran to the west, leaving Dummling to stand where the third feather had fallen.

But, as it turns out, the third feather has fallen on a hidden door that leads down a staircase to an underground chamber, and it is there, in a spot he has trod upon through his whole life, that Dummling finds what he needs to win the contest. The princes are given three trials and each time Dummling brings his father something extraordinary, while his brothers return with the first thing that crosses their paths.

The teachers in the workshop had a deep discussion of The Three Feathers. They understood the story’s metaphors and, so, talked about the importance of looking deep into one’s own thoughts and reactions, as Dummling looked beneath the surface of his familiar landscape. They also talked about how crucial it is for teachers to value their students as individuals, to discern each child’s talents, weaknesses, and misgivings about learning.

The king in The Three Feathers doesn’t understand that. He hands over the fate of sons to whichever way the wind blows. Dummling, the least valued child, is lucky to find himself forced to look within to find his way, but then, he’s probably used to learning hard. The older sons, who are given slight direction, don’t understand what is at stake once they’ve been sent on their way. Because of their quick wits, things have come easily to them. They haven’t encountered the obstacles that are an essential part of deep learning and, when put to the test, they have no way of judging the value of what they find.

Sometimes learning is unpleasant. It requires time, patience, and practice. It requires reflection. It can also require doing things you don’t want to do, like listening to people you don’t agree with and giving them a real chance to explain themselves. Listening only to what one want to hear limits growth. Since that workshop, I’ve decided to try to be more like Dummling, to look deep and, perhaps, learn to find something of value in things that, at first glance, seem empty.