I remember the village idiot when I was at UC Berkeley. He’d come out mostly in the evenings, sometimes naked, sometimes clothed, playing hide-and-seek throughout the neighborhood, swaying, dancing and laughing. His laughter rang out strongly like a bell; at other times he’d be utterly silent. He seemed to use dance as a tool to awaken his energy. He danced in the streets, threw his hands up to the sky to salute the heavens and opened his palms widely in a gesture of reception to the abundance of the universe. He prayed and sang with his body. His mind failed him, everyone would say. Whose mind failed whom? I often wondered. I admired how he lived intimately with the powerful forces of his inner world, totally uninhibited and fully expressive. He ran around in mindless skipping, hiding, screaming, guffawing. His sounds would echo as he abandoned himself ecstatically into dance, with no audience.
Wherever he went there’d be plenty of people giggling at him, and others looking through their windows and locking their doors and hearts more tightly. Some people would imitate his transcendental dance and gestures. Was he insane, or was he blissful? Was he crazy or was he just unpredictable? I suppose there’s a negligible distinction between mysticism and psychopathology these days…mystical experiences are in contradiction to common sense, after all.
Who’s really insane? Who’s really the idiot? At Cal, the idiot wanted us to come outside and dance under the sky, breeze and moon. He was delightfully uninhibited, not conditioned like the rest of us. He danced literally to the beat of his own drum, in a world in which few of us are strong enough to do so. Might we be the idiots?