The return of the innocent
The Innocent robs us of willful blindness, so we bury them. Better dragons than this wide-eyed wonder latched to our hand telling us we don’t have to live this way.
Artful Wobbler
The winter solstice’s slow re-emergence of light is a kind of beginning. The Fool in a tarot deck is another. Number 0, so filled with the wonder of the moment they don’t seem to notice they’re about to step off a cliff. The leap into the unknown is the start of all things. With this fall, it begins.
The archetype of the Innocent is also considered a beginning, the first lap of the hero’s journey, which is our own journey through life. Generally we leap away from this innocence as fast as we can. Our entertainment and news feeds are dystopian, our heroes flawed and frequently vicious. The innocent character, if we see one at all, is dull, simple-minded, full of unrealistic ideas of happiness. Deployed sparingly as the moral voice at a critical plot point. Rarely the heroes, often a kid or child-minded. We lean anti-hero and villain.
But true innocence doesn’t bore us, it scares us. The agony of an Innocent is terrifying. In the best times we’re all walking bruises but for Innocents the casual, baked-in cruelty of the normal world is soul-destroying. They exist as exposed nerves. No wonder we do anything we can to avoid it. But just as regular life is a danger to the Innocent, the Innocent is a danger to social order. Our systems are built on acceptable loss, winners and losers and institutionalized cruelty. We systemize suffering, relying on people to look past the harm of ourselves and others. But the Innocent won’t look away. They can’t. They tug at your sleeve, point right at the suffering and ask you to stop it. Worse, the Innocent knows you can do it. They have the utmost faith in you and want you to have faith in you too. They force us to remember the pain of betrayed trust. They force us to consider a better way.
The Innocent robs us of willful blindness, so we bury them. Better dragons than this wide-eyed wonder latched to our hand telling us we don’t have to live this way. Better a slurry of Odysseus characters in entertainment, politics and life except the only one who comes back alive from Odysseus’s crew is Odysseus. The cost of this character is the world.
What if we stopped telling Innocents to grow up and toughen up but made room for them in our stories and our lives, with the same right to space as we give the CEOs, tech bros, politicos and hustlers selling some kind of utopia by slaughtering everything around them? Which is another irritant of the Innocent, they require action. Tech bro land is pleasantly passive, you just sit and be crushed but life with Innocents is demanding. They truly can’t exist in the world as it is, if you know one you have to do something to protect them, which usually protects other things as well. The Innocent’s yearning is for everyone. But there’s infrastructure in anything. There’s oligarch infrastructure. Inequality, zero sum and side hustle culture is controlled through carefully constructed infrastructure. It’s just tenderness we don’t protect, not even for children. We believe damage is the cost of living but there is an immeasurable societal benefit in adult, grown-up innocence, expressed thoroughly and permissibly, without disguise or defence.
A life of persistent idealistic yearning for our best selves isn’t for most of us. If it were it would be disastrous. But it’s just as disastrous to deny it in our lives and art.
The Innocent risks everything just to live as themselves. Deliberately and diligently refusing to deny, downplay, armour up or take arms against pain, death and cruelty is a supreme act of courage. You know this is true because so few of us can do it, we ball up, deflect, lash out, escape through the nearest door. To go unarmed in the full face of the world is madness to most but to the true Innocent, anything else is profound self-denial. The Innocent is forged in the belief that we can be better. To behave otherwise is self-obliteration. Innocence isn’t the start of the story, it’s the culmination.
So the Fool has to step off the cliff. They’re not too giddy to see the edge, they just have to fly from it to be true to themselves, and the rest of us. They’re bravest of all.