Roberto Benigni and Giorgio Cantarini in the 1998 film Life Is Beautiful
As I stumble for words to write this post, I am the creaky tin man reaching for his oil pump. Atrophied prose coming through rusty wires. For much of the last year, my reflections about the world and my place in it were too jumbled and raw. Why add more discordant noise to the madness. So I didn’t write at all and I can feel how sluggish my craft has become.
Instead, I have spent too much time staring into the abyss that is the non-stop information deluge coming to a smart device near you. I experience the dopamine hits as the addictions they are and I’m increasingly uncomfortable with their hold on me. It’s time to break the pattern, but the ruts are deep and the rocks under my oil pan a near miss.
When I sit with the discomfort long enough, I see that my addiction to staring into the dark abyss is also an addiction to having a ‘darkness’ to vanquish. My sense of worth, even my sense of belonging, depends on being the vanquisher. The darker it gets, the more I feel called to do something about it, but I can’t get off the starting block.
After a good cry near a couplet of willows that grows at the edge of Lake Washington in Colman Park, my heart remembers Roberto Benigni in the film “Life Is Beautiful.” The movie came out in 1998, the year I was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was one of those films that thrust me up on its shoulders and carried me out of the hell realm I was stuck in. Using one of my smart devices as portal to said abyss, I watch the movie again wondering how it would come through 25 years later.
The film is about a Jewish Italian father and his 6 year old son who are carted away to a concentration camp towards the end of WWII. The father, played by Benigni, makes everything wonderful and ridiculous. Even as they are getting into the crowded train with none of their belongings, he turns the whole thing into a game so his son will see it through a prism of adventure vs one of fear.
There’s a scene where they have just arrived at the camp and Benigni volunteers to translate the German’s commands into Italian for the new arrivals. Without knowing German, Benigni translates the fierce rant into silly rules for earning points in this make-believe game, the winner of which will be awarded a real tank! Throughout their stay in the camp, he masterfully transforms all the horrors they encounter with comedic brilliance, preserving the innocence of his wide-eyed little boy to the bitter end.
‘Life is Beautiful’ won a slew of film awards that year. Clearly it made its mark. After my second viewing, I’m sifting through the message in the hero’s story and wondering if I am willing, even capable, of rotating the prism through which I look out at the world. Because my prism gears are also rusty and won’t budge.
What confounds me is how Benigni’s sense of himself -- his ‘why-am-I-here’ -- appears to depend on nothing at all. From a materialist perspective, he has no striving complex, no grand ambition, and nothing to prove. He has given up the plague of constant ‘efforting’ and simply chosen to respond to the world with delight, improvisation and bemusement.
He is a vision of the archetypal fool, the court jester who seems ‘free of all societal encumbrances, without even a path to guide him, yet whose impulsive curiosity urges us on to impossible dreams.’[1]
Here in my bog of inertia, my dreams are eclipsed. My doubts intensify. The question that haunts me, and leaves my body aching and contorted upon waking most mornings, is what the hell good am I if don’t suit up and try to change the trajectory of this dystopian tidal wave swallowing us whole? I have tried to help before, goddamnit, so why not now?!
The truth is part of me is dying. I do not know what to do, or even who I am, if I don’t have an injustice to rectify or a dehumanizing world order to defeat. And my ego is being invited to ‘zero out.’ I know this because I’ve been here before -- more than once faced dissolving careers, relationships and world views. I also know I’m in the most excruciating part of the passage where there is barely a light visible in the tunnel. I can’t see anything, much less an ‘impossible dream.’
In my peripheral vision, however, there is another more radical question I haven’t even allowed myself to consider that is ‘what if there was nothing to fix?’ ‘Impossible! Absurd!’ says my rational, logical left brain. ‘Look at the chaos! The madness!’
Yet as I repeat the question and let it be true for the length of an inhale, an exhalation carries off a caravan of chronic pain. A tendril of light seeps into my psyche’s murky shadows. And for a moment or two, I look out on to a world that is more wonderful and also more ridiculous. This radical, ultimately spiritual, question is my tin man’s oil can and the fool has conjured up just the right amount of mind altering magic.
Unfortunately, within a culture that takes material success, credentials, and access to system spoils as central to what we should be doing with our ‘limited time offer’ called life, the fool is considered a sideshow. Worse, an irrelevance. There is dismissal even disdain for the child-like antics of the fool, unfit for the serious endeavors of leadership and large institutions.
And yet the fool is essential and needed, now more than ever. He brings the beginner’s mind to vexing problems such that we can see them anew. She speaks without concern for social morays, saying what must be said while everyone else is too self-conscious to do so. He breaks up the rigid formalities of our overly scripted reality with non-sensical but healing diversions. And her presence ‘serves for the ruling powers as a constant reminder that the urge to anarchy will always exist in human nature and that it must be taken into account’[2].
In the film’s story, where Benigni’s fool is tested by unthinkable challenges within one of the worst hell realms in our history, he achieves miracles not possible through our idols of reason and logic. In fact, reason and logic yield nothing in the face of genocide. They offer no spiritual relief, no refuge from the suffering. In such times, it’s the fool who may yet offer a true balm and perhaps even a modest salvation.
So as we watch the various existential threats close in on us from all sides, let us not forget the power of the fool. Even as I write this, I hear the cynics retort, thus the title of this piece. But if we leave the fool relegated to the sidelines, or project him or her only onto the comedians, the children or the mad hatters of our world, we disown our most humanizing guide, uniquely designed for these dark times. He is guiding me through my own dark wilderness as we speak and, like a muse waiting for our attentions, is poised to befriend us all and liberate our ‘impossible dreams.’
Yes, I realize our planetary metrics are in the toilet and the scale of suffering immeasurable. But the fool would ask are you laughing enough, especially at yourself? Is your court jester ready and available at a moment’s notice, even in the board room? Will you rotate your prism to accentuate life’s absurdities for just a few hours? Can you make more room for the random, the illogical and the inefficient and stop worrying about having everything ‘under control?’ And, for the love of god, as my dog Stella would ask, can we simply ‘play more and bark less?’
Standing at a precipice where there may be little left to lose, and with no clear way out of an old world crumbling around us, our true folly may be to ignore the innocent fool whose universal language of vulnerability, humility and unlimited imagination has the potential to re-weave us. And none too soon.
[1] Nichols, Sallie. Jung and the Tarot, An Archetypal Journey. Page 34. Samuel Weiser, Inc. York Beach, ME. 1980
[2] Nichols, Sallie. Jung and the Tarot, An Archetypal Journey. Page 30. Samuel Weiser, Inc. York Beach, ME. 1980