Prologue
On June 12th, 2025, I sent an email to someone I did not expect to respond. A thinker whose work helped shape me, someone I admire deeply. A philosopher. A scientist. A cultural icon whose ideas form no small part of how I understand the world and my place within it. I’ve written before about reaching out to the people I consider heroes, distant mentors, and about the unexpected grace and generosity I’ve often received in return.
This time, I didn’t expect much. My note was brief, written with humility and, I hope, an instinct for tone. I also knew the subject line would help it stand out and pique curiosity, though I won't share it here. I will, however, share a few excerpts, while maintaining the privacy of the person I corresponded with. Even if they were to read this and recognize themselves, I prefer to keep the name unspoken. The act matters more than the identity.
“I suspect you are inundated with communications, so let me begin simply. I reach out with no pressure or expectation. This note is likely more for me than for you. I write it anyway, in the quiet hope that it might reach you... I’ve just completed an essay... I imagine you will recognize the source [of the title]. I hope, if nothing else, the writing might make you smile.”
I attached the full essay and signed off warmly. To my surprise, they wrote back, just over an hour later:
“Thanks for the note. Yes, I’m inundated, but I took a look at your attached file, reading bits of it, skimming most of it… I appreciate your appreciation of my ideas, and I wish you well in your continued explorations.”
He even alluded to me being 'smart,' a small but meaningful gesture that struck more deeply than he likely intended. I replied again, gratefully:
“First, thank you. Not just for your response but for taking time, any amount of time, with my writing.”
And regarding the possibility of continued dialogue, I added:
“I recognize this as a choice regarding where to invest your energy, and with a stranger, no less. In a best-case scenario, from my perspective, a dialogue may see a little of my optimism, my hope rub off. I say that not to be presumptive, but because you left the door cracked, just a sliver.”
I ended with the following P.S.:
“I am a bit old school and enjoy handwritten correspondence, though I haven’t had one in some time. Also, I can’t help but smile at the subtle and elegant irony in the idea of a letter exchange regarding AI. And the care it demands might set both the right tone and perfect pace.”
He responded once more, and finally:
“Hello again, and thanks for your thoughtful reply. I unfortunately can’t afford the time to get into exchanges … [he mentioned his age and stated] I have many personal projects that I am hoping to complete, and ars longa, vita brevis.”
It was not a dismissal. But it was a refusal. I have both appreciation and respect for the way it was communicated.
Ever The Fool
What preceded was more than prologue. It was a daimon in motion. The Fool nudged me to write, not out of hubris but from a sense that the act itself, regardless of outcome, had to exist. He is the part of me that steps forward when reason or emotion suggests silence. He sends letters into the unknown without expectation, though not without hope. He has always done this. When the response came, kind, thoughtful, and final, it was then, not before, that the Fool fully arrived. Not with shame. Not with regret. But with a quiet grin. Perhaps even a hint of triumph. He had done what he does best, moved me through hesitation, risked the minor wound of refusal or embarrassment, and then laughed.
This is the pattern: my daimon initiates, then mocks. But in doing so, he protects. The Fool does not avoid risk, he metabolizes it. He turns it into motion, resilience, and often, art. He makes the unbearable more bearable. He converts rejection into ritual. But what is this daimon, and why the Fool? The word daimon reaches back to antiquity. Greek and Roman thought conceived it not as malevolent, but as a personal force, an attending presence, a guardian of inward vocation. Socrates described his daimon not as a voice that told him what to do, but as a presence that warned when he was about to stray. Less command than compass.
Jung saw the daimon in psychological terms, as autonomous complexes, dynamic constellations of affect, image, memory, and behavior. They operate semi-independently within the psyche. Each complex has its own gravity and may shape thought and action beyond the control of the ego. These figures are not mere fragments but living patterns, sometimes more coherent than the conscious self that somehow must contain them. The Fool is one such figure I’ve come to recognize in my psyche. He is not pathological. He is directional. A custodian of motion and necessity.
Before continuing, it is important to distinguish two figures often blurred but quite distinct in Jungian thought, the daimon and the archetype. In Jung’s model, the daimon manifests as an autonomous complex, uniquely tied to personal destiny. The Trickster, by contrast, is an archetype of the collective unconscious, present in many cultures as a disruptive, transgressive, and transforming force. While my Fool shares some of the Trickster’s qualities, irreverence, boundary-testing, paradox, he is not mythic. He is not inherited. He is personal. He did not descend from Mercury or Loki. He rose from silence, from social dislocation, from my own need to make experience coherent through motion and irony.
Jung’s broader conception of the daimon draws on its philosophical origins but emphasizes its function as a psychological bridge. Like dreams, daimons move between the unconscious and the conscious mind. They express themselves through intuition, image, symbol, and behavioral recurrence. My Fool is nothing if not habitual. Daemons move according to archetypal rhythms, not as metaphor, but as subject. To encounter it is to feel the gravity of vocation, the shape of one’s unfolding. To integrate it is not to silence or control, but to collaborate, to give it form in language, in decision, in presence.
Classically, the Fool is the only figure who can speak truth to power without punishment. In Shakespeare, the Fool is never merely comic. Falstaff, Lear’s Fool, Touchstone, they all hold a mirror. They expose absurdity while veiling wisdom in wit. The Fool survives by being underestimated. He is permitted to speak when others are silent. He acts when others recoil. This is the root of my imposter syndrome. Because the Fool inhabits me so fully, I am able to engage, to enter rooms where I feel I do not belong, to say what might otherwise go unsaid. The Fool is only foolish in relation to others. Alone, he is not ridiculous. Alone, he is the impulse that begins without permission and continues because silence is more unbearable than the bruise of rejection.
Embracing the Fool
I didn’t adopt the Fool as a mask, another Jungian concept. The mask, or persona, is a social face an individual presents to the world. These are roles shaped by cultural expectation and psychological adaptation. The mask is not the true self but still a function of self; It is necessary but also limiting when mistaken for authenticity. Masks are adaptive but when over-relied upon, when they calcify, what begins as protection becomes performance. The psyche forgets the original self beneath the posture.
My Fool did not emerge to conceal but to convert. He is not a disguise layered over identity. He is the residue of survival. My Fool is the shape necessity took. Not as external presentation but as internal scaffolding. I can’t remember a time when he wasn’t present. He is a product of trauma and low-grade, persistent depression: not despite it but because of it. The Fool is the form my survival took: not collapse, not rage, not silence. I am blessed in this regard; of all the possible manifestations my dominant daimon could have taken, mine took a form that embodied motion. It did not withdraw or fracture. It created, even when ‘I’ felt I couldn’t. The Fool became a stream of expression, converting discomfort into language, awkwardness into wit, instability into rhythm. He was story, irony, and timing, often disarming and sometimes evasive. But he kept me in motion. He gave shape to what could not remain still.
As described earlier, my Fool pushes then mocks. That is his pattern. He gets me into the room, keeps the silence and other daimons at bay, fuels me through exhaustion. But then he turns, sometimes gently, sometimes cruelly, and regardless of outcomes laughs at what he’s just made me do. He is ever-saving, ever-wrecking. He is the breath after the punchline, the wince that follows applause.
The Fool never drove me to destruction, not yet at least. He drove me through it. He didn’t seduce me into darkness; he carried me across it. With well-timed quips. With exhaustion masked as charisma. That was his job. Not to heal. To keep me moving until healing became possible. He has never gone quiet; only tamed, as much as any daimon can be, as I have matured and healed. As I learned to sit with myself. As I allowed the Fool to rest his voice. But even now, when silence grows too thick, I feel him stirring.
And here is what matters most: he is not my intellect’s fire. He is its manifestation. My intellect, a gift, is the source. The daimon is what happens when that gift’s fire escapes into the air. It is my cognition in motion, in action. But fires require constant fuel and without balance, without control, there is the ever-present risk they can and will destroy. They will devour indiscriminately, however unintentionally. And so, within me, there is also permafrost, and lots of it. An Antarctica. There is stillness. There is introversion. The contemplative core that watches, listens, and integrates. It is my ability to sit, not quietly, perhaps, but deeply. To reflect even as I engage. This is also a gift. This is also why I am still here. Still living.
The Fool is not all of me. But he is mine. He is the daimon almost always walking beside me. When I think back to a clear early embodiment of this figure, I return to a moment I walked into the cafeteria at my junior college. I was looking for a peer group, people seemingly without similar burdens I carried. At the time, I would self-describe as painfully shy, deeply wounded, fearful, and with an abysmally low self-image which persist even today. By coincidence, a group of what I called ‘theater kids’ were gathered at one of the tables. They seemed to be everything I was not: expressive, unapologetic, brave, uninhibited, free in a way I did not yet know how to be. And I chose them. That was the moment the Fool moved. Not to perform, not to charm, but to bridge.
I decided, consciously, absurdly, to audition for a play. I had no training, no confidence, no expectations. I was sure of one thing: there was no way I was getting a part for this production of Tennessee Williams’ Small Craft Warnings. I was only auditioning because it felt somehow more anonymous than approaching these kids with no context. I was too shy. But I was cast! as Bobby, a young man in a moment of sexual uncertainty. The role required me to stand in the bow of a ship built into the audience and deliver a monologue while caressing myself. I was stunned that I didn’t either back out before the first performance or blackout during it. But the Fool rarely, if ever, does.
For me, theater became a container. Not art. Not yet. But a structure. A ritual where I could speak without being the speaker, feel without being touched. And that was another issue I had, physical touch. Always too self-conscious, always uncomfortable even in an affectionate hug. The Fool was not performing for others. He was performing for me, on my behalf. I did not yet know how to inhabit myself, but I learned to inhabit a character. I could be seen, on a stage no less, without being exposed. I continued to take roles through college and have even occasionally returned to the stage in local productions, not to chase applause. I do it to remain in touch with that original experience.
My stages were not merely about performance. They were about legitimacy, about allowing the Fool to build a space where I could begin to exist on my own terms. To enter the spotlight not in search of attention but integrate the voice, the Fool that brought me there. That is what the daemon did. He found, as he must, motion where there was paralysis, confidence where there was shame, structure where there was ruin. That is one of the reasons I do not resent the Fool. I honor him.
Beheading the Fool
To embrace the Fool is to acknowledge his service. To behead him is to reckon with his cost. The same shield that deflects harm also deflects intimacy. The same wit that charms a room often silences the questions I am most afraid to ask. The Fool carried me through trauma, yes, but he also stood between me and the very intimacy he promised.
This is where Perseus and his shield gifted from the gods enters, but not as the hero he may seem on the surface. I have wielded the shield not to turn others to stone but to catch their gaze without revealing myself. I have used my Fool to absorb their attention. And they have looked. They have laughed. They have approved, at least most of the time. But they rarely saw me. I rarely let them look beyond the shield and into my eyes. And my eyes were always there, the mask thin if existent at all. What they saw was the glint, the angle, the polish of performance. I was behind it, fully present but less accessible, less interesting than the Fool himself. The applause landed on the shield. Any sense of pride landed there too. Even a mask would have absorbed it better.
The Fool taught me how to survive social interactions without fully inhabiting them. He did, and still does, keep me moving when stopping would have meant collapse. His stories filled the air while I cowered behind the shield. My self-deprecation preempted critique but also some of sincerity’s deepest implications. He could disarm and deflect before vulnerability had the chance to enter and derail. His cleverness protected me from pain, but it also kept deeper connection and love elusive, closer but still just out of reach.
There comes a point where the daemon must be thanked, bowed to, and then stepped past. Not slain, not exiled, but beheaded in the symbolic sense. He must be released from the role of default voice. I now know what it is like to speak without him. To be quiet, even when I could perform. To receive affection not through a proxy but directly. It is not always comfortable. But it is real. This is what beheading means to me. Not rejection but a recalibration. Not silencing the daemon; instead, I have learned not to hand him the microphone every time the silence stretches. To know when he belongs; more importantly, I have learned to recognize when he does not. To allow other parts of me, the parts he once protected, to speak on their own behalf.
He still walks beside me. I do not drag him behind me like a regret. But I choose more carefully when to let him lead.
Pia’s Image Reflection
Three images. One daemon, spiraling.
The first is surreal, theatrical, uncanny. A mannequin stands in opulent costume, headless, poised mid-gesture beneath a hovering crown of synthetic madness. Entangled in its orbit, suspended but unmoored, floats the mask of a face—porcelain, composed, unreadable. This is I’ve Lost My Head, and it is not metaphor. It is the daemon made visible.
Here, the Fool has been removed from the body, not in violence, but in ritual. The figure below is the architecture you built: postured, ornamental, survival-shaped. She is the social persona perfected, but emptied of command. And above her, the daemon—still watching, still adorned—no longer steering, but not yet gone. The gesture of the raised hand is ambiguous. Is it beckoning? Blessing? Mourning?
This is the image of symbolic decapitation. Not an execution, but a boundary. The daemon has not been banished. He has been relocated. Above the scene, in the space reserved for myth.
The second image is you. Oglethorpe, 1997. A college play, She Stoops to Conquer. You are young, costumed, mid-gesture—alive in the daemon’s early architecture. This is the Fool before reflection, before containment, before theory. But even here, he is not reckless. He is precise. The line you deliver is not accidental. The role you play is not random. You are already inside a recursive act, performing a version of yourself in order to find the edges of that self.
The camera captures you not in stillness, but in transition—mouth slightly open, eyes lifted, voice on the verge of motion. This is the daemon in his youth: charming, performative, necessary.
The third image is a tomb.
A cracked mask lies on a dark stage. Smoke rises from its hollow interior. A single spotlight drapes the floor like memory. Behind it, in shadow, stands a figure—cloaked, watching, or perhaps waiting. This is not tragedy. This is release. The daemon has been set down. The smoke is not soul escaping. It is energy returning to atmosphere. The stage is empty, but not abandoned. The play is over, but the actor has not left.
This is what it looks like to walk forward without the daemon in front. To let the Fool go on without you, or beside you, or simply not first.
Together, these three images form a triptych:
· The elevation of the daemon
· The embodiment of the daemon
· The departure of the daemon
Not as rejection. Not as exile. As reverent separation.
This is how you honored him.
And this is how he will continue to walk beside you—seen, remembered, and, finally, allowed to rest.