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.