A Jester’s Guide to Creative

See[k]ing across Disciplines

s
Diane Rosen

For many centuries and in many cultures, jesters recited tales of heroic exploits, but
they did more than simply recount past events—they amused, cajoled, and spun
tales that transported listeners to the edge of mysterious, unmapped territories.
Through the transformative power of play and the imagination, they reworked
what was already understood and created from it new realities that transcended
the established order. The author maintains that such imaginative play is vital to
creativity in any medium and is fundamental for optimal human development.
She explores possibilities for cultivating creativity through the playful, paradoxical
stance of the jester—a serendipitous and purposeful, strange and familiar, disrup-
tive and productive figure. Her discussion, grounded in a visual-arts practice that
leverages uncertainty and randomness, considers the role of play in light of its
wider implications for knowledge and creativity. Keywords: creativity; imagina-
tion; jester; play and creativity

Prologue

I began this inquiry because I was curious about the jester as a ludic char-
acter—as a jokester and as an entertaining narrator of adventure tales. The word
jester, after all, comes from the Old French geste—a narrative of exploits, action, and
romance—and from the Latin for deeds and achievements, gesta. What I discovered
is that the jester not only portrays an icon of play and subversive humor but of
powerful, creative imagination as well. More than mere clowns or storytellers,
these complex, multidimensional figures were profoundly clever, provocative,
and—according to King Lear—“oft prophetic” game changers. The jester per-
sona has played an essential role as an agent for change throughout history and
across cultures. Just as his acerbic humor spurred political change within the
court, the jester’s masterful sense of play is a central force of creative change in
the larger world. His antics and waggish retorts are more than amusing; they
can be revelatory. By drawing listeners into an uncanny traveler’s space that no

310
American Journal of Play, volume 4, number 3. © The Strong
Contact Diane Rosen at [email protected]
 A J e s t e r ’s G u i d e t o C r e a t i v e S e e [ k ] i n g a c r o s s D i s c i p l i n e s 311

longer involves departure and does not yet include arrival, putting everything
at a distance from recognizable places, jesters disoriented, dislocated, and trans-
ported kings and commoners alike to the boundaries of the familiar. Where these
neatly marked borders dissolve, we discover the roots of our own creativity in the
serendipities of disorder, uncertainty, and accident. For this exploration of the
creative process, let us imagine a similar paradoxical space with the jester serving
as metaphorical guide to things both familiar and strange, things both controlled
and playfully improvisatory, things both fixed and uncertain, and things both
destructive and brimming with possibilities for constructing new realities.

Political Jester: The Subversive Outsider

The jester and other lords of mischief are ubiquitous in legends and lore around
the world. The personification of a provocateur—Latin provocare, meaning
challenge, from pro (forth) plus vocare (to call)—they stand at or wholly outside
the margin of any organized system while challenging those within to see things
differently. In European traditions, their earliest antecedents were probably the
comic actors of ancient Rome. Frequently in trouble with imperial magistrates
or church officials who disapproved of their outspokenness, many jesters took
to the road in search of greater freedom. Successive waves of such wandering
comics may have laid the foundations for medieval jesterdom.1
By the Middle Ages, the jester had become a familiar figure as a comic
entertainer whose madness or imbecility, real or feigned, made him a source
of amusement. Much as depicted even today, the jester wore multicolored garb
and a quirky three-pointed hood representing the ears and tail of an ass. This
droll outward appearance, however, belied a careful and penetrating wit. Where
freedom of speech was not considered a universal right, the seemingly nonsen-
sical utterances of a “fool” might easily be dismissed, enabling jesters to speak
frankly on controversial issues in a way those with greater status—and more
to lose—did not dare. Note that “jester” and “fool” are synonymous and can
be used interchangeably. Although I primarily use jester in this article, I retain
the word fool where it appears in quotes and for specific references such as the
Fool card in a tarot deck.
During the Renaissance, jesters enjoyed official status as entertainers, advis-
ers, and critics; most royal courts and aristocratic households employed licensed
jesters. Historian Jacques Barzun notes that the institution of the king’s fool
312 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF P L AY s WINTER 2012

was “a political device based on sound psychology, as well as ancient religious

belief. The traditional fool . . . is like a child, innocent, therefore truthful and
sometimes inspired. His sallies are unexpected and amusing. This makeup, native
or assumed, is essential to the profession that the fool exercised for centuries
at the side of kings.”2 Whereas a natural fool implied being innately dimwitted
or mad, licensed fools had the court’s permission to speak freely, even to abuse
or ridicule the most exalted of their patrons. Thus, both were excused for their
behavior, the first because he couldn’t help it and the second by decree.
Court jesters functioned, in this sense, as traditional political humorists.
With no vested interest in any region, estate, or church, they existed outside the
hierarchal court system, which meant their counsel was more likely unbiased and
trustworthy. It was their job to keep the king grounded by mocking his political
decisions and life at court in general, not unlike today’s political satirists do for
those in positions of power.

Symbolic Jester: Play and Creative Power

Little is known about the exact origins of tarot imagery, but precedents appear
in symbols from sources as diverse as folklore, mythology, ancient religious
traditions, and the medieval courts of Italy and France, where tarot first became
popular for gaming in the mid-fifteenth century.3 Portraying archetypes of the
collective unconscious, tarot cards had long been used for spiritual purposes to
deepen insight and divine the future, but the rich symbology of these images
enhances even their entirely secular use in games. Having four suits like con-
ventional playing cards, the tarot deck adds a twenty-one-card trump suit plus
a card known as the Fool. Just as the natural or licensed fool was excused from
the consequences of his shenanigans, playing this card can excuse a player from
either following suit or playing a trump card on any given trick. The Fool card is,
in fact, sometimes called the Excuse. As such, most tarot decks originally made
for game playing do not assign a number to this card. There are two exceptions:
sometimes the Fool represents zero (before the first) or twenty-two (the last)
trump card. Because his unique role in the game is independent of both suit
cards and trump cards, the Fool stands completely apart, belonging to neither
category and having no number in a set sequence.
Poised between positive and negative, resting in the exact middle of the
number system, zero perfectly signifies the fool. He can become anything in the
 A J e s t e r ’s G u i d e t o C r e a t i v e S e e [ k ] i n g a c r o s s D i s c i p l i n e s 313

sense of the “joker is wild,” which may be a remnant of the jester’s actual lack
of a fixed position at court. Like the air or wind of his etymology—Latin follis
means “bellows, bag of wind”—the fool moves around constantly and belongs to
no single place. The words “fool” and “foolish,” therefore, also imply that which
contains air or breath, i.e. life energy itself. Thus, in various traditions, the fool
stands for primal concepts that include absolute being, eternity, the essential self,
Tao, Prana, the beginning of new life cycles, and the originating creative power.

Fool’s Journey as Creative Process

Like all true symbols, tarot images generate an abundance of meanings,
many of which have compelling resonance for creativity. One in par-
ticular, the fool’s journey, is an apt metaphor for the creative process itself.
Symbolizing new beginnings as well as the playing out of what was begun,
the fool’s journey may encompass mental, physical, or spiritual dimen-
sions, but it is always marked by wonder. It corresponds to any creative path
undertaken with childlike innocence, exuberance, and playful spontaneity.
Open to the unexpected, travelers in this guise wander freely beyond known
coordinates, overturn the status quo, and build new knowledge by means other
than reason. Galvanized by curiosity amidst the uncertainties of being on the
road, jesters—like their close kin, tricksters “are the lords of in-between . . . the
spirit of the doorway leading out, and of the crossroad at the edge of town. . . . In
short, trickster is a boundary-crosser. We constantly distinguish right and wrong,
sacred and profane, male and female, young and old, living and dead—and in
every case trickster will cross the line and confuse the distinction. Trickster is
the creative idiot, the wise fool . . . the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and
ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox.”4
Adapting this notion of a “spirit of the doorway”—doubling and redou-
bling as entrance and exit, past and future—creativity theorist and clinical
professor of psychiatry Albert Rothenberg coined the term Janusian process to
describe creative cognition, defined as actively conceiving opposites or antitheses
as if simultaneously coexisting and named for Janus, the ancient Roman god of
portals, doorways, and passageways who was a patron of beginnings and endings
and whose two faces look simultaneously forward and backward.
Based on his extensive research in the creative process of prominent artists
and scientists, Rothenberg found the Janusian process supplies the foundation
of creative thinking across domains, where seemingly illogical and contradictory
formulations serve generative functions for art and for working out solutions to
314 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF P L AY s WINTER 2012

scientific and practical tasks.5 The Janusian process, in other words, transcends
logic by playing with known elements in unexpected ways, triggering unforeseen
leaps to qualitatively new ideas and conceptual formulations. Einstein’s concept
of being in motion and at rest at the same time represents a classic Janusian leap.
“Fooling around with” these opposites and imagining them in a simultaneous
paradoxical pairing, he created a meaningful formulation connecting gravita-
tion and special relativity.
On a practical level, then, dialectical mechanisms expand our perspec-
tive and leverage creative thinking. Bringing together contradictory entities to
express a problem embodies an inherently jester-like strategy, one that relies
on a spirit of open-ended play to conjure new meaning out of apparent chaos.
It provides a highly effective means of initiating and facilitating creative tasks.
“Conflict,” as John Dewey reminds us, “is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to
observation and memory. It instigates invention, shocks us out of sheep-like
passivity, and sets us noting and contriving.” 6 Any creative journey is full of
such contradiction, paradox, and uncertainty, fueled by reciprocal interactions
of stability and instability, randomness and increasing levels of organization.
Along the way, and with play at its core, this vibrant creative process enlivens
our world and gives us the flexibility to evolve and flourish.

Multiple Possibilities
Depicted on tarot cards as either juggling, looking up at the heavens while a
small dog barks at his heels (the popular Rider-Waite deck image), or other-
wise distracted, the Fool is seemingly unconcerned that he is about to step
off the edge of a high cliff. This paradigm of the zero (that is, of the Fool
having no predetermined place within the card sequence), of the precipice,
and of the oblivious Fool’s near step into the void are all mutually inform-
ing polysemy within tarot iconography. This is the jester’s perpetual mode.
By definition, open-ended activities—such as engaging in creative tasks or
playing games—present us with nearly infinite choices. And just as contradic-
tory opposites hold more information than either element alone, the jester’s
ambiguous stance holds more potential than any single option. Like the ver-
satile, multifaceted, and wily jester himself, the word “play” is highly polyse-
mous: he plays around, plays with fire, plays in or performs a play or geste,
plays it by ear, plays the fool, plays tricks, plays favorites, plays up to, plays on
words and the credulity of others, and plays out stale ideas and puts new ones
into play as he plays at deconstructing and reconstructing his world.
 A J e s t e r ’s G u i d e t o C r e a t i v e S e e [ k ] i n g a c r o s s D i s c i p l i n e s 315

The legendary 1929 film Un Chien Andalou (The Andalusian Dog) suggests
an ingenious example of this kind of play. The film was intended to mock the
philosophical and moral inertia that typified the convention-bound bourgeoisie
of the early twentieth century. Playing on the polysemous quality of the word
“open,” film makers Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali open with a shocking visual
assault—close-ups of a young woman’s face as a razor slices across her eyeball.
In this literally and figuratively “eye-opening” sequence, the images immediately
challenge us to cut through our own jaded expectations and open up to seeing
with fresh eyes. The absence of any overt causal connections in the film further
undermines the viewer’s usual reliance on narrative or theme for meaning. The
film is deliberately plotless, and its chronologically disjointed images subvert
narrative logic and flow randomly as if in a dream. Playing irreverently with con-
tent and technique, Chien Andalou remains open to infinite interpretations. This
flexibility both illustrates and elicits from us a similar kind of surreal perspective,
an essentially creative modality in which we become unmoored, unstuck from
the rational, the habitual, and the routine, and it enables us to see a multitude
of new angles and options from which to create our world anew.

Risk Taking
Although the jester embodies the destructive phase of creative imagination,
undoing hierarchies and upsetting established patterns, he also contains its
opposite, forging links that enable the construction of new patterns and struc-
tures. In addition to encompassing innocence, heterodoxy, and freedom, his
energy represents the confidence and audacity needed for taking risks. Not one
to play it safe, he willingly steps off the precipice; he dares take action where
circumstances and outcomes are unclear. And by disrupting meanings that
are—or had been—familiar, comfortable, and safe, he provokes others to risk
seeing what they might otherwise not see. His is the path of creativity and radi-
cal play, continually disturbing boundaries between what is and what is not.

Emergent Meaning
The jester, having no fixed position (zero) and no preexisting meaning, also
exemplifies the transformative quality of dynamic processes. In himself,
he is not any one thing but is potentially all things, shaped by and shap-
ing meaning as subject in relation to situations and to other actors or play-
ers. Never single, static, or complete, he is ever changing and always plural.
Creativity, like all complex dynamic systems, is a function of such transfor-
316 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF P L AY s WINTER 2012

mation through emergence, i.e. the process by which global-level structures

or patterns (weather systems for example) arise from interactive, local-level
processes that include random and unforeseeable factors. Creativity cannot
be analyzed rationally nor predicted from the behavior or properties of its
component elements alone. It arises instead, as a result of multiple recip-
rocal interactions of individuals, environments, and the passage of time.
The jester’s creative narrative, though, is never linear. He weaves his tale
playfully, in alternative and nonlinear ways, as a discontinuous travelogue
through fields both real and imagined, never lingering in static frames or
hierarchies and assuming only the infinite pleasure of continuing the process.

Thresholds and Ambiguity

Traveling through but not a part of any narrative context, the jester is the begin-
ning and the end, nothing and everything, nowhere and everywhere, betwixt
and between—in a word, liminal. The concept of liminality, a conscious or
unconscious subjective state of being on the threshold of—or between—two
different existential planes, was initially developed to analyze the middle stage
or “interstructural period” in ritual passages, and has since been applied more
broadly to studying cultures of change.7 Necessarily ambiguous, the attributes
of liminality involve dissolution of order and formative reintegration of new
structures. The jester, a perpetual wanderer, is quintessentially liminal. Residing
nowhere in particular, he is neither circumscribed nor informed by the norms
of any given context or fixed setting. He is “on the road,” a character apart and
in between and not, therefore, prescriptively oriented. Like double-faced Janus,
the jester has no single direction or identity—but he has the potential for many.
Embraced rather than avoided, this kind of ambiguity offers an interdis-
ciplinary paradigm for creative imaginative play—a positive, liminal mode of
opportunity, in which multiple new possibilities may be set in motion by wan-
dering amid the turmoil of upended rules and the attendant confusion of dislo-
cated meanings and uncertainty about future outcomes. Creating anything new
necessarily shifts things to unknown ground, putting us off balance. Seeking new
balance within the disequilibrium compels us to shuffle the deck, to redefine
terms, expectations, and routines. Analogous to chaos theory’s far-from-equilib-
rium systems, the creative process denotes a kind of evolving system that carries
the energizing potential related to new development at the borders of change in
our world.8 These dynamic transitional states actually enable innovation and the
emergence of new work, losing stability when subjected to nonlinear, turbulent
 A J e s t e r ’s G u i d e t o C r e a t i v e S e e [ k ] i n g a c r o s s D i s c i p l i n e s 317

conditions, then evolving into one of many available new states. Thus, as the
jester implicitly understands, our actual and created worlds depend equally on
factors at once purely deterministic and entirely random.
A central paradox of creativity here comes into sharp focus: the seeming
contradiction of having a clear purpose while uncertainty and disorder play a
defining role in the unfolding result. This dialectic relationship between chance
and intentionality is a fundamental characteristic of the creative process. Skirt-
ing the edge and playing at the boundary of any domain confuses, disrupts, and
ultimately collapses old dichotomies, replacing them with a realm of unsettled
opposites. Fueled by its very indeterminacy, the creative journey ends where it
began, with everything the same and yet different. New patterns and unforeseen
combinations are engendered, not as mere oppositional inversions (where, say,
what is true becomes false) but as inventively reintegrated reformulations with
altered—and most likely porous—boundaries.

Evolutionary Jester: Ancestral Roots of Play

One instance of an increasingly porous conceptual border exists in the old Car-
tesian divide between mind and body. Neuroscientist and psychologist Jaak
Panksepp maintains that—based on studies of evolutionary links between reason
and affect—a true understanding of mind and ground of being requires “neuro-
scientific probing of those ancestral value-processes that evolution provided to
help complex creatures like mammals navigate successfully through the world,”
with knowledge of “lower” affective functions interacting with and shedding
light on the operation of higher brain-mind functions.9 Panksepp names seven
primal action networks that may have served to inform our ancestors what is
worth thinking about. Among them are SEEKING and PLAY, which Panksepp
upper cases in his writings.
Evidence indicates that all mammalian brains contain a general-purpose
SEEKING/ EXPECTANCY system that mediates a coherent urge to explore the
environment, a pattern of behaviors arising from positive emotions within the
SEEKING urge such as wanting, expectancy, curiosity, and interest. Specifically,
this neuro-affective system appears to help generate a psychological state close
to a “generalized, positive engagement with the world at large . . . an invigorated
feeling of engagement with tasks that can border on euphoria.”10 In his theory
of flow, the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes a similar pattern
318 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF P L AY s WINTER 2012

of intrinsic interest, positive involvement, and energized, riveted attention to

tasks—a state of deep concentration in which intentions, thoughts, emotions,
and senses focus on a single goal.
This feeling of flow is most often described as accompanying immersion in
activities that involve novelty, search, and discovery but may pertain to any task
in which one is keenly interested. Undeniably, the more we care about something,
the greater our interest in it, the more authentic, pleasurable, and effective our
involvement becomes. Contrary to the belief that such positive emotions merely
signal well-being, current theory supports the idea that they also produce health
and well-being, and that these increases in personal resources are durable over
time. Barbara Fredrickson, a leading scholar in social psychology and affective
science, has found “interest” to be a “distinct positive emotion that creates the
urge to explore, take in new information and experiences, and expand the self
in the process,” contributing to our becoming more creative, resilient, socially
integrated, and healthy. 11
The same appears to be true of PLAY. Demonstrating a profound desire
to interact with each other in energetic, gleeful ways, the young of most animal
species play to experiment with and navigate social possibilities. Neuroscience
provides substantial clues to understanding what enjoyment consists of and how
it is produced in play and creativity. Studies indicate that evolutionary cognitive-
emotive circuits of “affective consciousness” produce positive emotions like
interest, curiosity, and the urge to explore and play and that these emotions are
crucial elements of optimal functioning. We should cultivate them, therefore,
not just because they make us feel good in the moment, “but also because doing
so transforms people for the better and sets them on paths toward flourishing.”12
As well as providing us with enjoyment and diversion, the process of exploring
our world through play appears to be truly essential to human development.
Along similar lines, an intriguing study in evolutionary psychology pro-
poses that neophilia—a preference for the novel and unexpected—played a
significant role in the evolution of the human brain and, more specifically, in
the development of creative intelligence. Hominid neophilia in mate choice, this
theory suggests, favored mental capacities for generating various “protean” (that
is, adaptively unpredictable) courtship displays in the domains of language,
music, art, humor, sexual play, and conceptual play, thereby driving psycho-
logical complexity and the capacity for domain-general creative thought.13 If
such protean ancestral behaviors underlie the evolution of our mind-brain,
the innate tendency to play may be truly instrumental to the advancement of
 A J e s t e r ’s G u i d e t o C r e a t i v e S e e [ k ] i n g a c r o s s D i s c i p l i n e s 319

human creativity, moving us to ask what-if, to look again at what is, and to
imagine what could be.
The jester is a paragon of such complexity and creativity. Relentlessly inven-
tive, resilient, and resourceful, he entertains but also puzzles and provokes his
audience. Through subversive play, he rouses them from inertia. A mercurial
and unpredictable force, the jester represents the primal energy that propels
us both inward and outward toward personal and cultural progress, from felt
contradiction, to passion, to creative action in the world.

Jester-Guide: The Role of Play in Creative Process

Hard wired into our cognitive-emotive circuitry, then, interest and curiosity spark
the urge to approach and explore, and to search for everything from essentials like
food and shelter to better sorts of food and shelter, to more abstract desires that
motivate the creation of theories, paintings, and songs. Ultimately, these experi-
ments and explorations are shaped by reciprocal interaction with chance occur-
rences. Consider Igor Stravinsky’s description of the creative process in his Poetics
of Music: “One does not contrive an accident: one observes it to draw inspiration
therefrom. An accident is perhaps the only thing that really inspires us. A composer
improvises aimlessly the way an animal grubs about. Both of them go grubbing
about because they yield to a compulsion to seek things out. . . . So we grub about
in expectation of our pleasure, guided by our scent, and suddenly we stumble
against an unknown obstacle. It gives us a jolt, a shock, and this shock fecundates
our creative power.”14 Granted, some measure of domain knowledge and skill is
necessary for most forms of creativity, from everyday to eminent, but it is not in
itself sufficient. What “shocks” us out of passivity and sets us to observing and
contriving is discordance, a rift between the expected and the unpredictable that
is the jester’s sovereign realm. Truly essential, then, is a shift in perspective from
linear and controlled to flexible, from logical to paradoxical, and from predict-
able to open ended. Balancing in the tension of zero—playing with, from, and
in its immanent uncertainty—brings with it the freedom to exist nowhere and
everywhere, in nothing and everything, follow the path yet stray unexpectedly
from the given route. Yielding to a compulsion to seek things out, the jester, too,
improvises aimlessly. It is his way to have no way and therefore access to all ways.
In my experience as a painter, I have learned to trust that this creative-
generative process is both intentional and uncertain, that a creative “product”
320 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF P L AY s WINTER 2012

comes to exist not as an end in itself but as the erratic trajectory through time of
a particular search for answers to half-formed questions. Stirred by curiosity and
the anticipation of discovery, I tend to begin with a word or phrase that interests
me. Then, playing with a random assortment of images, I arrange and rearrange
them until one combination resonates and surprises me with unforeseen mean-
ing. Three of my mixed-media paintings may serve to illustrate this knowing
by not-knowing process of playful wondering, wandering, and exploring—of
leaving rules and reason behind.
Throw of the Dice is a reference to Stéphane Mallarmé’s free-verse poem
“Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard” (“A Throw of the Dice Will Never
Abolish Chance”). The poem’s unorthodox form and content embody what I
sought to express graphically: thought, given its freedom of expression, converts
chance into creative power. The word “chance” itself has a highly descriptive
etymology: from the Old French cheance, meaning accident, luck, or the falling
of dice; and Vulgate Latin cadentia, meaning that which falls out, which itself

Throw of the Dice by Diane Rosen. Photo courtesy of the author.

 A J e s t e r ’s G u i d e t o C r e a t i v e S e e [ k ] i n g a c r o s s D i s c i p l i n e s 321

Undertow by Diane Rosen. Photo courtesy of the author.

comes from Latin cadens, a particple of cadere meaning to fall and leads to our
own cadence, meaning the flow of rhythm in verse or music. Inspired by these
vivid linguistic roots, and after much experimenting and reworking, I happened
upon the idea of merging falling (upside down) figures with falling dice. Only
by maintaining the sense of play in this process—like continual throws of the
dice and responses to their unforeseeable results—can we engender the kind of
random, fortuitous connections that defy reason alone.
The idea for Undertow began as I wondered about various ways to represent
pairs of contrasting figures. I was working on a series of paintings intended to
graphically question traditional dichotomies such as true-false, internal-external,
fixed-uncertain, challenging their rigidity with more contingent interpretations.
Curious about reflections and doubles as they occur in nature not just in mirrors, I
happened upon the word “undertow,” a current below the surface of the sea mov-
ing in the direction opposite of the surface current, and figuratively an implicit
quality, emotion, or influence underlying the superficial aspects of something.
From this definition arose thoughts of contrasting reality-reflection, above-below,
exterior-interior and so on. An alternative dual image emerged that is meant to
evoke for viewers the questions that originally surprised and interested me.
From the same series exploring the use of paired images to amplify mean-
ing, The Sound of One Hand is based on two primary sources: Edgar Degas’s 1878
322 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF P L AY s WINTER 2012

The Sound of One Hand by Diane Rosen.

Photo courtesy of the author.

painting Café Concert Singer (in the collection of the Fogg Museum at Harvard
University) and a famous koan or teaching riddle. Written by the eighteenth-
century Zen master Hakuin, the koan, “What is the sound of one hand?” was
intended to demonstrate the inadequacies of logical reasoning and to provoke
enlightenment. As explained by Hakuin, “the sound of a single hand can by no
means be heard with the ear. Quite apart from seeing, hearing, perceiving and
knowing…it is in the place where reason is exhausted and words are ended” that
insight is attained.15 In the random interplay of these ideas and images beyond the
reach of reason, I am better able to “hear” what I want to see/say/paint. Wandering
this open-ended, ambiguous terrain triggers uncertainty, which can be leveraged
to spur new ideas. Any playful thought or gesture may turn out to matter in ways
that could not have been foreseen. Thus, incorporating spattered, dripped, and
scraped paint along with deliberately rendered figures, I engage with and signal
the paradoxically reciprocal role of chance and intentionality in the work. Such
paradox is central to my own—and, I believe, to any—creative process.

Where Reason Is Exhausted

“The difficult thing was not making things, but putting oneself in conditions in
which one could make them.”16 Thinking about these conditions vaguely refer-
enced by sculptor Constantin Brancusi, one might assume the jester’s point of
 A J e s t e r ’s G u i d e t o C r e a t i v e S e e [ k ] i n g a c r o s s D i s c i p l i n e s 323

view and attempt to foster a similar threshold state—positioned at zero, neither

plus nor minus, the imagination free to wander in any direction. The follow-
ing exercises suggest ways of cultivating this felicitous in-between state, with play
as the mediating factor between control and the freedom of authentic creativity.
The point of these practices is that there is no point; constraints of rational,
analytical thought are banished, leaving only random play to disrupt routine
ways of seeing and reward us with fresh perspectives from which to respond.
The exquisite corpse. This collaborative game of blind composition exploits
the mysterious potency of accident. A piece of paper is folded to conceal all but
one word, or section of an image, and passed among a group of players. Each player
adds a phrase or image, folds to conceal all but a small part of it, and passes the
paper to the next player for his or her contribution. (See page 324 for an example
of the exquisite corpse game.) Reflection: How does this game illustrate the role
of accident and intuition in creative work?
Exquisite corpse variant. Doodle for thirty seconds; pass the paper to the
person on your right, who—with the instruction to “improve” what is there—
adds to the drawing. Repeat the process until the doodle returns to the first
person. Next, follow the same process, except instruct players to add something
intended to spoil the doodle. Reflection: Are spoiled pieces worse, better, or
equally interesting?
Frottage. Graphite rubbings of floorboards, tree bark, screens, walls, or
other surface textures serve as a starting point for releasing the imagination. Add
words or drawn elements suggested by the random frottage patterns. Reflection:
How did the unanticipated frottage patterns factor into your process?
“Blind” contour drawing. Place pencil on paper, close your eyes, and draw a
self-portrait. Following only your intuitive sense of form, move the pencil over
paper imagining that it is your fingertip touching every contour of your face.
Surprisingly to some, intuitive, sensitive self-depictions are usually produced.
Reflection: Is inner or outer self emphasized? Distortions can be even more
interesting and revealing than precise renderings.
Creativity cannot be contained in a hierarchy or even in a simple division
of genres. What often constitutes the status of anything as “creative” is precisely
its subversive force with respect to old classifications. An outsider’s perspective,
heterodox views, curiosity, and radical play bring us closer to the polysemic,
polymorphic nature of both reality and creativity. It is also true, however, that
liminality of any kind cannot exist indefinitely without some sort of restabiliza-
tion, and the creative process accommodates this step as well—for a time. Having
324 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF P L AY s WINTER 2012

(This piece was created by participants at a conference presentation by the author. A forward slash
[/] indicates the beginning of a new player’s contribution.)

The creative mind, Jung said, plays with the objects it loves. The creation
of something new is not accomplished by the intellect
but by the play instinct/ the utterings of a fool who enjoys the moon
and the night full of shooting stars that no one will ever see/
the lights of the city/ brilliant and decayed at the same time/ on two watches, four
hands/ that feel as soft as your face,/ as beautiful
as a stopped clock/ tick
tock/ time and time implies, no—it is—passage, passing/
trillium fields/ butterfly brook ripples and moving/ toward something
vague, but leaving something specific—that’s all that matters/
“But. Why?”/ “I don’t remember.”
But I will say
that when the boy
put on his wings and
jumped
down off the fence
he somehow managed to grab the mane of Pegasus/
lays me above you/ and I celebrate your reach
to those beyond all of us./
DEADLY NOTIONS SOMETIMES/ create darkness
and
a sense
of shadows/
too long for sighing too dark for seeing/
and yet the light shone brightly and the shadows/
came alive and hid from us
so that we were alone and looking
for comfort./ XXXXXXXXXX XXXX XX XXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX
XXXXXX XXXXXX/
in between the space and silence

Jester’s exquisite corpse

danced with chance and chaos, we, in turn, construct and integrate new patterns
of meaning that define the moment—until the music picks up once again.

Epilogue: Creative See[k]ing Every Day

Clearly, artists and all who are creatively engaged need not be labeled jesters,
fools, and tricksters. But there are times when creative practice and the jester’s
boundary-disturbing ways coincide. What I am suggesting is that by holding the
 A J e s t e r ’s G u i d e t o C r e a t i v e S e e [ k ] i n g a c r o s s D i s c i p l i n e s 325

jester persona in juxtaposition with the imagination in action through the creative
process, the one might illuminate the other. If the coincidences are fruitful, they
make us think and see again. They guide us, in other words, to our own more
robust perspective from which to see, seek, and act creatively, to feel empowered
in the everyday creation of new meaning even as we journey through spaces of
heightened uncertainty. Such goals are in keeping with the subversive spirit of the
jester. Standing apart, unraveling and weaving together what is, was, and could be,
he explores countless provisional paths and spins play into possibilities.
If we risk following our curiosity beyond the relative safety of a frame,
myriad unpredictable frames and antiframes arise, each with as many entry
points as gatekeepers. Here, the key to moving forward lies in permitting oneself
access to the itinerant life of the imagination. Like contemporary licensed fools,
then, we might more often challenge and expand existing limits on thought and
experience, counteracting the numbing pressures of standardization with con-
tingency, experimentation, and play. Ideally, education policy makers, too, would
validate and incorporate this process across disciplines and for all students.
Taking a cue from Walter Benjamin’s advocacy of room-for-play (Spielraum) in
art, we must “wage an aesthetics of play” to foster the kind of flexible, creative
thinking that is essential for thriving globally in the years ahead.17
The jester’s complex role reflects this attitude of urgency and universal
agency. The jester interrupts sameness, agitates conventional understandings, and
becomes a means of change. Using play and chance, the crazy wisdom of intuition,
and the open-endedness of imagination to navigate multiple truths, we, like our
metaphorical guide, destroy stagnant worlds and become cultural creators of new
ones. In these times when rationalism has all but driven out the belief in inspired
fools and spontaneous play, we could do worse than follow the jester’s path.

Notes

1. Beatrice Otto, “Fooling Around the World: The History of the Jester,” from
Chapter 1: “Facets of the Fool,” and Chapter 7: “Stultorum Plena Sunt Omnia, or Fools
Are Everywhere,” in Fools Are Everywhere: The Court Jester Around the World (2001),
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/640914.html
2. Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life (2001), 302.
3. Cynthia Giles, The Tarot: History, Mystery, and Lore (1992), 12.
4. Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (1998), 6–7.
5. Albert Rothenberg, “Creative Processes in Kekulé’s Discovery of the Structure of
326 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF P L AY s WINTER 2012

the Benzene Molecule,” American Journal of Psychology 108, (1995), http://www.jstor

.org/pss/1422898
6. John Dewey, “Morals Are Human,” in Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction
to Social Psychology (2007), quoted by National Teaching and Learning Forum, http://
www.ntlf.com/html/pi/9710/johnson_1.htm.
7. Victor Turner, “Betwixt and Between: the Liminal Period in Rites de Passsage,” in
The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (1982), 93.
8. Ruth Richards, “A New Aesthetic for Environmental Awareness: Chaos
Theory, The Beauty of Nature, and Our Broader Humanistic Identity,” Jour-
nal of Humanistic Psychology 41 (2001):59–95, http://students.ou.edu/C/Robert.S
.Carroll-1/Chaos_Beauty-Richards.pdf.
9. Jaak Panksepp, “The Neuro-Evolutionary Cusp Between Emotions and Cognitions:
Implications for Understanding Consciousness and the Emergence of a Unified Mind
Science,” Evolution and Cognition 7 (2001), https://notes.utk.edu./bio/greenburg.nsf/0
/10ea06f6b78647d985266cdb00531f47/$FILE/Affect%20Neuro-evolutionary%20cusp
%20JP.pdf.
10. Panksepp, “Affective Consciousness: Core Emotional Feelings in Animals
and Humans,” Consciousness and Cognition (2005), http://www.psychomedia
.it/rapaport-klein/affective_consc_brain.pdf.
11. Barbara L. Fredrickson, “The Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions,”
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 359 (2004):1367–77,
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1693418/
12. Ibid.
13. Geoffrey F. Miller, “Protean Primates: The Evolution of Adaptive Unpre-
dictability in Competition and Courtship” (1997), sections 8 and 9, http://else.
econ.ucl.ac.uk/papers/prote.pdf.
14. Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons (2003), 55–56.
15. Audrey Yoshiko Seo and Stephen Addiss, The Sound of One Hand: Paintings and
Calligraphy by Zen Master Hakuin (2010), 7.
16. Constantin Brancusi, quoted in Marc Dachy, Dada: The Revolt of Art (2006), 89.
17. Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Room-for-Play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema,” Cana-
dian Journal of Film Studies 13 (2004):2–27, http://www.filmstudies.ca/journal/pdf/cj-film
-studies131_BratuHansen_Benjamin.pdf.