Harlequin/Troubadour

** As part of my PhD research, I read a lot of Michel Serres. Everyone has a favourite French intellectual/polymath, and he is mine. You can get a lot of PhD mileage out of a few pages of Michel Serres. He's the New Blue Car of Academia.

Simon mentions below that he liked Bob Dylan's comments about being a "song and dance man." It's a good description of Dylan, maybe, apart from the bit about dancing, which seems to have been more Allen Ginsberg's bag.

Michel Serres wrote a book called The Troubadour of Knowledge. Here's a bit from the publisher's blurb:

Like a swimmer who plunges into the river's current to reach the opposite bank, the person who wishes to learn must risk a voyage from the familiar to the strange. True education, Serres writes, takes place in the fluid middle of this crossing. To be educated is to become a harlequin, a crossbreed, a hybrid of our origins--like a newborn child, complexly produced as a mixture of maternal and paternal genes, yet an independent existence, separated from the familiar and determined.

He likes the image of the Harlequin, because of the costume, which is either a kind of chequerboard pattern or of many colours.

. Dylan, as we saw in the documentary, was a sponge, absorbing influences and techniques rapidly, and then spitting them out in an extraordinary hybrid form that was something entirely knew. In this, I think, he is the very embodiment of Serres' Harlequin (and of course, he famously wore whiteface makeup on the Rolling Thunder Review, making himself seem even more Harlequin-like).

Harlequin can also be pictured as the Fool from the Tarot deck, dancing too close to the edge of the cliff, or as the Joker in the playing cards. "When the Jester sang for the King and Queen," sang Don McLean in American Pie, and many people think that "the Jester" refers to Bob Dylan.

Harlequin is a magical figure, and I think he lives among us in the body of Bob Dylan. But the lesson for us all is that we shouldn't be afraid to let go of familiar things in order to learn (and become) something new. "Always in the process of becoming," as Bob said. Wonder if he's read any Serres?

**The Harlequin image comes from Qosmiq For the People