‘The Vision of the Fool’
[An excerpt]
In a respectable practical society, where everybody is useful, the poetic imagination in man is an anachronism, an irritant which disturbs the chemical sleep of habits of such a society by making it conscious of the degradation of its mechanisation, by the appearance of extraordinary desires; by overshadowing it with the supra reality of poetry, by unsettling it with a thirst and a hunger for eternal beauty, just at the moment when this society thought that everybody was satisfied. This is the affirmation of poetic imagination, which is, and always will be, the natural activity of the poet and the artist...
We have lived to see everywhere the triumph of the enemies of the imagination, the despisers of the spirit, the philistines. We have lived to see the church become the corpse of Christianity. The church which believes in war in wartime and in peace in peacetime. Seeing that this is about the most convenient position the church could take up in this age the only thing that need be said is that it has nothing whatsoever to do with the passion of Christ, nor with His martyrs and Saints; when they lived they were crucified. No one would think to crucify the church; there is nothing to crucify. Potency, integrity, and fertility of faith are the only things that can be crucified, because they are faith. The crucifixion of the poetic imagination in man by the Machine Age is a religious fact. And modern society has succeeded very well in rendering poetic imagination, Art, and Religion, the three magical representatives of life, an heresy; and the living symbol of that heresy is The Fool. The Fool is the poetic imagination of life as inexplicable as the essence of life itself. This poetic life, born in all human beings lives in them while they are children, but it is killed in them when they grow up by the abstract mechanisation of contemporary society and by the teaching of the norm of the ‘ordinary man’, ‘the man in the street’. Today, these abstract phantoms have come to tyrannise all the natural creative speculation that exists in beings that are human. This norm of the ‘ordinary man’ is in reality the philosophy of mediocrity, into which with a sigh of relief, the general heavy inert mass of mankind desires to sink.
This is the deadly myth of the ’little man’, the law abiding citizen who obeys all laws faithfully no matter what the laws are. The ‘little man’ who’s servitude makes all wars possible. No individual can make war without the consent of the mass will of the ‘little man’. Wars happen, because the ‘little man’ carries them out, and makes them happen. The ‘plain and ordinary man’ has made philosophy of mediocrity a power, and this philosophy has an army, armed with guns, bombs, gas, atomic rockets, and other effective instruments for the destruction of the human race. They will allow the artists and the poet a place in their society if he’s a respectable earnest educationalist, who’s reassured the populace that he is really an efficient, sensible fellow, like any other dull righteous worker, and that Art, Poetry and Religion are not so difficult or important; they too can be made mediocre.
Modern society rejects the Fool because of his faith in the essential holiness of life itself; contemporary society has mutilated the holiness of life by concentrating upon almost everything else but that, and by its neglect of the very means by which the sense of the holiness of existence can be developed, namely Religion and Art.
The artist is a Fool, and Art is a cosmic folly by which purity of consciousness can be attained. For the Fool, the artist, and the priest, are the victims of the radiance of life. The true priest is a Fool whose purity of spirit is the folly by which the world grows and becomes enlightened. But modern society, by its concentration upon Science to the point where it threatens to sterilise the growth and life of the human psyche, has outlawed the priest, the artist and the Fool; and has consequently outlawed an entire field of human vision. Proof of this is the condition of society, which in spite of scientific efficiency and other scientific outlook and education, is bankrupt, and full of faces that were once human……
…But there always exists in society some men and women whom the Fool touches, who respond to the Fool. For the Fool awakens the Fool in others, but in many the Fool is stifled, or sleeps. There are human beings living in isolation and loneliness in the society of men who realise suddenly that they belong to the Fool, that they exist in the Fool, and that in the Fool, they have found their race and their kind, to whom they belong; and that they are united in the communion of all Fools, which includes the communion of Saints, the communion of all creative souls, and the communion of the visible with the invisible. They are united in the enigmatic and universal compassion of the Fool. The Fool is near to them, and is their emblem. The Fool is the symbol of the lost ones of this world who are destined to inherit eternal life. The Fool is not a philosophy, but a quality of consciousness of life, an endless regard for human identity; all this lives in the fun of the Fool. The Fool is the essential poetic integrity of life itself, clear and naked, overflowing in cosmic fun; not the product of intellectual achievement, but a creation of the culture of the heart. A culture of the genius of life. I believe that there is a life, and in the human psyche, a certain quality, an inviolate eternal innocence, and this quality I call the Fool. It is a continuous wisdom and compassion that heals with fun and magic. It is the joy of the original Adam in men.
Cecil Collins was born in Plymouth, Devon. He had a mystical outlook and was influenced by the prophetic writings of William Blake, Eastern philosophy, and by the American artist-in-residence at Dartington, Mark Tobey. Collins and his wife Elizabeth came to teach at Dartington Hall from 1939–43. In 1947 Collins settled in Cambridge and in that year published his book The Vision of the Fool. This art and writing from the darkest days of World War II, offers a philsophy of art and life that sheds some rays of hope on the madness of civilised man.
Painting by Cecil Collins, “Blue Angel Dream”