Thank you for bumping this thread forward again, jmd...I sat here on a quiet Sunday morning reflecting on Le Mat, The Fool....
and reading what everyone has to say...I have been listening to a series of tapes on various philosophers and philosophies..Plato was a few months ago...and I have always felt, more so as I get older, that the more I learn,the less I know...
An interesting reflection about the Fool came to me in the form of a man we have seen around our town for the 27 years I have lived here. He is very thin, somewhat slight of build, looks "weathered ,taught of muscle, somewhat Lincolnesque facial features...angular, bony.
He walks. He walks everywhere. We never see him in stores. We have never seen him driving, although I have seen him walking with a small sack of groceries? We see him at all hours of the day, walking...sometimes, I start at one point in town,shop and on my way home, he is almost into town...so he has walked miles in one direction while I have been about my business. He always wears dark blue jeans, with a long-sleeved shirt tucked in. The shirt is a solid woodsy color..sometimes, black, sometimes green. It's as if he only owns a set or two of clothes.
Where does he live? Sometimes we don't see him for months at a time. It's not necessarily that he goes away in winter, because when he reappears, it could be any season that we see him walking almost anywhere. The other day I saw him for the first time carrying something other than a sack. He had a portable leaf blower on his back, and was walking in my wooded neighborhood, but there is little to "blow"right now. He has a flat affect. If I pass him in walking and say "hi" ne nods his head and gives me an almost smile.
Over the years, my husband and I have created an identity for him. We figure he can't work regularly. We don't know if he works at all, or where if any place, he lives, since his garb, his not driving and probably not owning a car, suggest perhaps he has little money or perhaps a disability, but there is a wisdom about him. I have never heard him speak. He is always alone. He has lived all these years...somewhere on the fringes of nowhere. On Long Island, if you don't have a car, it is difficult to get around...there are some free buses and some main train lines into the city.
Anyhow, we named him at least 20 years ago. We call him
Walker. Now, as a think about his name...I think of Strider /Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings...Stride : to walk.
I somehow have the Fool in my inner imagery bank as one who walks all lands, who needs little, who doesn't work, who pops up and disappears, who may be wise or may be a fool...or perhaps we are the fools and this man has learned a simpler way of existence...or perhaps is ill and has a certain "cowardice" about engaging with society and life and people in general.
Then, I started looking up Le Mat and Le Fou in my French dictionary. No luck, just the modern definitions...certainly to get at some origin we need all the ancient references given here, so I went to the English side and looked up "fool."
There at the very bottom in the section of idioms, I saw:
Tu m'as vraiment fait marcher
You really had me fooled
And, of course, as we know..."marcher" means "to walk"
Don't know what this all means, but our Walker somehow reminds me of the Fool Card...lives nowhere, appears everywhere, goes about alone, on foot, wears the same clothes, is wise? or not? Sometimes when I see him, I think: "Perhaps the joke is on me, as I scurry around working to make money to live a more frenetic life. Maybe I'm the fool and this man has it really figured out."
terri