April Fool

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A morning's musings from my muse.

Fool. From the French fol (or folle for the girls) or Latin follis meaning mad. There are other possible root words, but they seem unlikely.

But what is madness?

Einstein famously said, ‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,' which is – typical of the man – genius, but it doesn’t quite work.

Because we all do the same things over and over again. We call it habit, and there are good habits and bad habits. Then there are some habits that we all do together. Some so ingrained that we don’t even think of them as learned behaviour. Like wearing clothes. We all wear clothes. We'd none of us contemplate a day wearing nothing, and if we were to encounter someone walking down the street stark bollock naked, we’d think they were mad, wouldn’t we?

By that earlier definition, a fool.

Incidentally, nakedness is something that could apply to both men and women. Would it be offensive to consider a woman as being stark bollock naked?

Anyway. Brief excursion into the bushes to relieve oneself of waste thoughts, and back on track.

Clothing has to be a habit. It’s not ubiquitously the same thing everywhere you go. Spend any amount of time with the indigenous peoples of any of the world’s less ‘civilised’ cultures (quotation marks intentionally ironic), you might think some people consider clothing to be optional. Quite a few of the world’s tribes don’t feel the need for women to cover their breasts, others make use of gourds or similar to cover male genitalia in a way that suggests that what lies beneath is more impressive than it actually is. We had something similar back in the fourteen and fifteen hundreds called a codpiece.

The point I’m trying to make is that appropriate clothing has no absolute standard. It is merely what the majority of people think it should be.

And choosing to wear something else is insane, mad... foolish.

Or, depending on the degree of difference, maybe just eccentric.

Memories of Billy Connolly and his red velvet suit.

You need charisma to pull something like that off though, and that’s the way we change our minds about what is appropriate.

Habits take a long while to change. Someone does something different, they meet with opposition. Einstein’s mad men (and women) who object to new ideas because they are different. No consideration as to whether different might be better. It’s different, therefore it must be worse. Even those who aren’t so stuck in the rut of their habits feel uneasy because it’s different.

It takes momentum to hold out against the resistance of habit until what was considered unusual can be seen as just strange and eventually normal.

It’s easier to make changes by small increments, because they meet less resistance, less friction. A concept of a force that only exists to oppose movement, which grows with the speed of motion, so slower is easier.

So, the conventional view of madness is almost an opposite to Einstein’s definition. Madness is choosing to act differently from the crowd, choosing not to conform.

Regardless of whether or not that conformation is harmful, either to the individual or to everyone.

There’s a tribe in Central Africa that considers a meal incomplete unless it contains manioc, which is low in nutrients and, if prepared incorrectly, can be poisonous (it contains cyanide producing sugars), so where’s the sanity I that?

Sorry, another side trip into the bushes there.

Anyway, it begs the question, do you sometimes have to be mad in order to be sane?

Go back a few centuries, and the king would always have in his employ a fool. Was his purpose simply to entertain, or to remind the king he was merely a man?

Or was he there to provide insight and abstraction to the king’s pool of advice? To think outside the box of parochial, pedestrian thought?

Religion needs its heretics, people who will challenge tradition. Politics needs its satirists, people who will challenge the frequent idiocy and unfairness that passes for policy.

Society needs its madmen (and women, although all too often it falls to the women to provide the voice of reason) to steer us all by fairer winds.

Standing in front of the mirror, I feel a bit foolish. The norm in society is that men should be strong, rugged, independent. These clothes are designed to express the exact opposite. Flounces and frills express a delicacy, softer fabrics all too easily torn, skirts limiting my movements, inviting others to offer gallant assistance – a cloak thrown across a puddle that she might keep her skirts clean, a door held open that she might occupy herself with arranging her clothes to maintain her modesty.

She is in me though, and she longs to be a part of this world, to be seen and accepted. The world would have me keep her hidden, because she is different, but to hide her away over and over, day after day, and to hope that the distress of doing so will fade away, that is truly insane.

So, I will be April today. Foolish though it may seem I will move against the tide. Just because everyone else is going the other way does not make me wrong. For the sake of those like me, who stand widdershins in a turnwise world, who do not fit because they are not understood. For them, as much as for myself, today I will be a fool.

April Fool.

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Comments

are we foolish, or are we wise?

many cultures have believed that people who cross the gender lines are specially blessed by the gods, repositories of knowledge that can be gained in no other way. There is also the dress of male priests and wizards, who wear robes that could very easily pass for dresses, perhaps for the same reasons.

nice little essay, huggles!

DogSig.png

I would join you in madness . . . .

Emma Anne Tate's picture

I’d join your madness, if I could,
Did time and fortune not conspire.
Today the world will win and I
Will do those things that worlds require.
Put down my books and school my looks,
Disguise desire with drab attire.

If I could dance, with swirling skirt
In yellow, green, and pastel pink,
And laugh at those who’d laugh at me,
Deflecting scorn with saucy wink,
They’d call mad, and maybe bad,
But happier than they, I think.

Or better still, I’d simply sit
With all these women, just like you,
Dressed to please ourselves, and chat,
And share the things that women do.
A word, or gentle touch that might
Inspire the world with something new.

Emma

Well

Andrea Lena's picture

With Lady Bic at underarm
and gams she did behoove
to once again address the hair
and metaphorically remove

Burma Shave

  

To be alive is to be vulnerable. Madeleine L'Engle
Love, Andrea Lena

I love this reaponse

I read it before and loved it then and just as much, but in my haste I failed to respond.

Today my muse is humming. I wonder if she'll tell me som'ing...

Maeryn Lamonte, the girl inside

Spaghetti Grows On Trees

joannebarbarella's picture

And today I don my gay apparel. Will you grant me one day of being different?

In the words of Donna Summer

I feel love.

It's like I sang to you and you all sang back. Thank you for such a delightfully inspired response

Maeryn Lamonte, the girl inside

Perhaps wisdom, like beauty…….

D. Eden's picture

Is in the eye of the beholder.

Desiderius Erasmus once said, “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king,” can we further extrapolate from this that in a land of conformists that the one who dares to be different is queen? I think this may be a bridge too far for our society - but wouldn’t it be a lovely concept?

On the other hand, do we truly wish to be different? I, for one, do not. I prayed every day in my youth for God to simply make me fit in - to be one way or the other, truly male or truly female rather than somewhere in between. There was a song in the film Joyful Noise that always resonated with me; the song was sung by Queen Latifah about her son who was autistic, and in the song she asks God to “fix me”. That was my ardent prayer for years - fix me. I didn’t care which way - just make me one or the other.

Over time, I lost whatever faith I may have had, and I stopped praying. There is an old saying that there are no atheists in fox holes. It may be true that many pray in combat, but that is where I well and truly lost my faith. I didn’t pray - rather I railed and swore at whatever God or Gods may exist. For what deity would allow the evil which I saw, the evil which I committed on my fellow man to occur? But I digress.

My point here is that even today, after transitioning, I don’t wish to be different. No, I merely wish to fit in - to be seen as any other woman. Well, maybe not any other; I do dress to impress, and I do wish to be seen as attractive. Pretty even, but perhaps that stretches it too far.

But are we foolish to wish to be our true selves? Or are we wise to not deceive ourselves or the rest of society? For if I can teach one person what it means to be true to themselves, or what it means to be truly tolerant of others, than I am wise beyond my years.

If I must play the fool to be wise, then so be it.

D. Eden

Dum Vivimus, Vivamus

Interesting but do we conform?

I remember talking to a group from another country where conformity was highly valued that here we sometimes do things just to be different. Their strong vocal response was "Yes and it drives us crazy!"
Now your point is excellent and times are a changing!

At least two classes of people make a living ...

... 'doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.'

They are the Quality Control and (computer) System Test people.

Both "do the same thing ..."

"Same thing" is for consistency, to meet the chosen Standards.

And the Different Results are cherished, since a product or process defect has been found, or a hardware or software 'bug' has been found (hopefully) and fixed before reaching the Customer.

According to some obnoxious politicians

Wendy Jean's picture

Who think we are insane for being trans. And would like to lock us up for the sin. Sometimes a choice is not a choice it is the only thing you can logically do. So we persevere as always.

Har-de-har-de-har-har... :-)

Seems I/we get one solid har-de-har per two pages -- sometimes one per - maybe even a couple tears. This one has reminded me that I/we need to contrib BCTS some addl funds for the kitty as I'd be lost without her -- Jeanna Renee

I've met people who are 'paid good money' to do ...

... the same thing over and over, expecting different results.

These are the people in (Software) Systems Test. When they got different results, it meant that we programmers have broken something we had not meant to touch (with our fixes and improvements), or that our fix didn't.

System test reads the description of the new feature, independently from us programmers. If the tests of their understanding of the new system didn't match our understanding and implementation of the new system ...

Another company boasts of running the entire test suite - every night.

Perhaps just an 'urban legend' ...
NASA uses exploding bolts to keep rockets upright and attached (until instants before launch) to the launch pad. And NASA tests 97% of all the bolts from each production run - by exploding them. A different result - some bolts don't explode, means the whole batch is declared bad.

Oh, and an exploding bolt that doesn't? The rocket motors are powerful enough to break any bad bolts.
---
A lot of things that touch our lives have 'escaped' the mad-(wo)men in system/product testing.

And not just on April First ...