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King Lear and The King's Men - Lessons on the Slippery Art of Family Governance

King Lear: The History Revealed by Fintan O'Toole, reviewed in The New York Review of Books.

Family Governance for Governing Families. The role of the artist, under a patron. The role of the King's Man. Support, absorb, refactor, and subvert, for the greater good. More power than a Wise Counselor in the traditional Courtier mode. More power than Parliament. Only an all licensed Fool could do more. Were I a wise man I would join Wise Counsel, giving sage advice to families as powerful as our former Monarchs, before we broke from English rule. 

The Wise make good use of literature, as of everything else. If they were wiser yet, they would be Fools. And perhaps The Happy Tutor could show them how. He is a Secular Priest, or actually a real priest, educated at Oxford as a cleric, since under Primogeniture (how our august predecessors beat the proverb, ashes to ashes, and rags to rags), he had to go into the army, become a judge, or be a priest and scholar, with a parish, or a school, or if lazy, as Tutor is, and a drunkard, and carouser, he could set up as a Morals Tutor to his noble neighbor's brats. Mentoring the Heirs, as we now say. The Happy Tutor is also the Lord of Misrule. So are our Wise Counsel, today, if by Misrule we mean the rule of the richest forever. Fool is one thing, Coxcomb, or Villain is another.

In Lear, do we pity the pauper at the base of Fortune's wheel as it turns, or the King at the top who must inevitably fall? When the highest and lowest trade places, 'handy dandy' who goes in ermine, and who in rags? Change places, and who is the thief, and who is the justice? Who is the sighted one? Who is blind?  Who is sane and who mad? Riddle me that, Wise Counsel. But more importantly, can we like Shakespeare, speak truth in riddles to power, and still be awarded our four yards of red cloth to wear the King's livery at court? So far Tutor, buck naked in a Dumpster, must await future delivery. Advantage Wise Counsel.

If I were to write my own Book on Wealth and the Will of God, I would add the epigraph: "Wiser are the Children of Darkness." And believe me, I have learned that to my own cost. Let it be a lesson to us all.

Saving the world without getting out from under the bed

When we save the world, through metrics, and regimentation of others, what do we and they become in the process? I have a new friend, age nine, Tutor's Tutee. She lives lone with her mother in a huge castle, alone unless you include the hired help, like Tutor. Her name is Audrey. What Tutor tells her is that she must save the world before she reaches age 10 or so, because then she will become a Stupid Grownup, and when grownups try to save the world, they become monsters, acting out. They try to fix the world as they try to fix Audrey, and that only makes things ever so much worse, as Audrey well knows.  "Only the kids can save us," Tutor tells her at nap time and story time, "but only if they never ever grow up." He makes her promise that she will never grow up, or if she does, that she stay alive in the big person she is doomed to become. Bill Schambra says it differently, in this review of The Philanthropic Revolution, but he is of this visionary company. A warrior in the world, but the kind of man who could put Audrey to bed with tale from the Brothers Grimm, telling her the necessary truths of our fallen world. Far better reading for her than Joseph Campbell, a Ted Talk, or some of the usual BS about the Quest, or the Journey. We are going nowhere. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Rags to riches to rags. The seasons go in circles. So does Fortune's Wheel. We are as saved as we can be, right now, between two beats of a sleeping child' heart.