Fool Me Again & Again
Korean food in London, Lotus eaters, Elon Musk's monkey, The Fool... what isn't this essay about?
Last weekend, my friend suggested dinner at a Korean place near Angel called Gamnamu.zip. I had never heard of it before, which surprised me because it’s in my general neighbourhood, and my love of Korean food goes way back, even before I moved to North Jersey at age 10. (I have an annoying tendency to scoff at New York’s K-Town and say Fort Lee is better, and that Pal Park is even better.) Chennai, where I was born, is home to India’s largest community of South Koreans, because Hyundai opened a factory there in 1995. A spiral prawn cracker I first tasted at a Korean classmate’s house circa 1998 is my Proustian madeleine. All of which to say, for as long as I have been alive, Korean food has felt close to home.
I left the ordering to my hyphenated Korean friends, not just because they would know better, but because they – like me – are prone to order with abandon, table size be damned.
Once we reached the end of the meal, debating how on earth we could finish what we’d started – stomachs filled to the brim yet still considering dessert – I brought up Lotus spread (also known as speculoos spread or cookie butter). I recently discovered the ‘Crunchy’ version, and am obsessed – it reminds me of footnotes in books, in the sense that crunchy bits of Biscoff cookies interrupt a smooth tasting experience to remind you of the original source, the cookie that launched 1000 ships / spin-off products. Except, um, delicious. Delicious footnotes! Delicious mixed metaphors!
I noticed two of my friends make eye contact and shift uncomfortably. Then they explained: In the apartment they’d moved into when they first came to London – a bleak hole in Brixton – they had live-in landlords who, at all times, kept two massive squeeze bottles of Lotus sauce in the fridge. When my friend casually asked about it, one of the landlords said, ‘oh we’re running low’ – and opened a cabinet door that revealed a cupboard full of Lotus products, stuffed into every crevice like Tetris. Including one container my friend described as ‘a bucket with a handle’. We laughed about it, but I could tell it had caused them some disquiet; enough to avoid Lotus spread for the rest of eternity.
Like The Odyssey, my friends had travelled from one island (New Zealand) to another, and encountered literal Lotus eaters. But it was not as cool, because these grown adults who ate cookie butter by the ton were responsible for their living situation. Not a great start to a new life in London that you’ve just emptied your bank account for! Maybe Lotus spread was how the landlords exerted power over the space, reminded them who’s boss. It’s a bit sinister too. What are these landlords trying to drown out with all that sweetness? Why have they not questioned whether this was healthy? When my friend said ‘bucket with a handle’ I thought of Jack and Jill, darkness lurking under nursery rhyme. In the novel The Last Kid Left by Rosecrans Baldwin, there is a character who gave me ick right at the outset because he takes his coffee black with six sugars. In both cases, sweetness is used to subdue or overpower something more bitter. There is some trickery involved. Trickster, joker, clown, court jester, fool.
In the tarot The Fool is sweet – innocent, youthful, wearing tatty old shoes; he gives the impression of having left in a rush. But no fashion choice is off for him because he is so endearing. I’ve always been delighted to see him show up in a tarot reading. New adventures! Fresh starts! But recently, I’ve started to notice its dark side. How close he is to falling off the cliff. How the shoes might actually be socks. How gullible. How that sweetness, in excess, can become toxic; not The Fool but The Joker. We all have that potential to go bitter. And that’s what The Fool represents: all potential, good and bad.
The Libra/Aries eclipse cycle snuffed out a lot of things from my life: my pre-surgery body, which could easily run a 5K. Calling New York home. A dear friend, and someone I worry was the love of my life. But most of all, it took away Ghost Chilli being safe in its not-yet-published state, full of potential and untested by public reception. I am inclined to apologise for being dramatic and saying the losses of the past eclipse aren’t a big deal compared to what I have gained. I want to make sure nobody judges me poorly. But the eclipse took that away too.
It is not easy to part with people-pleasing, because people-pleasing makes you excellent at reading the room. You know exactly what to say to make someone laugh, or make them think you are smart. You’re manipulating them but they don’t know it and you don’t know it either, because if it’s all chill and pleasant, then what is the harm? But when you let go of attempts to control how people perceive you – and risk looking like a fool – you can communicate with them, not just at them. That exchange is fertile ground for the divine.
After the Lotus eaters, my friends and I talked about Neuralink. Founded by Elon Musk, this company makes ‘ultra-fine threads’ that weave into a brain’s frontal cortex to fuse them with technology (brain chips, essentially). This would allow us to interact with smartphones using just our thoughts. It has the potential to restore movement to the paralysed and sight to the blind; that is one reason it received ‘breakthrough’ status from the US government last month, which will allow them to speed up development. Here is a video of a Neuralink-ed monkey playing the arcade game Pong with just his mind:
I don’t doubt that, if successful, Neuralink could help many people. But I do believe – and this is already evident – that the technology will used for much stupider things, like allowing us to order pizza delivered to our houses just by thinking about it. And that’s not even where the money would be. All signs point to data mining and military tech, even more revolting versions of what happened in Lebanon last month.
(Because I am still inclined to manage your perception of me: If you came here to read a Substack post about tarot, got pleasantly distracted by Korean food, cookie butter, and people-pleasing, and are now extremely depressed about how close we are to dystopia, I am sorry. But also not, because all of this stuff is real.)
Taking a few steps back from the total annihilation of the world, my friend mentioned a more innocuous way this kind of tech would be used: to show off your knowledge if you are trying to impress a date. Say you order a bottle of wine. You can, without picking up your phone, list off the tasting notes, say ‘ah yes, that was a good year’, and relay the life story of the vintner. Impressive! But in trying to manage how this date perceives you, are you actually present? Are you bothering to learn anything about them? Are you missing out on the beauty of simply not knowing, and discovering this information yourself, by tasting the wine, meeting the vintner on a future vacation – perhaps an anniversary trip with that date – and hearing him tell his own life story?
Smart tech like this is an invasion of Fool territory, where curiosity grows, desire emerges, and joy can be found. As well as humiliation, disappointment, and terror. Elon Musk and his ilk want to eliminate what they pity (disability, blindness) by creating technology that fine-tunes people, so they can appear more knowledgable, charismatic, and powerful. But knowledge, charisma, and power are built slowly and mysteriously, from within. The process is not glamorous, and only the top layer of it can be posted about on social media. Because everything under it is slippery and unknown.
Giving into Fool energy means someone like me, who thinks they know everything about their neighbourhood and boldly claims that there is no good Korean food in London, is proven wrong and shown that actually there is a lot that I do not know. (Like the taste of chicken feet – I tried it, and was embarrassed when I couldn’t finish it, but glad I tried.) Fool energy is both active and receptive, ready to learn, un-learn, re-learn, and start over, again and again. That’s why it is 0 in the Major Arcana. The Fool’s heart is open and arms are outstretched. One hand holds the baggage from the last cycle, just the essentials, and the other holds a white rose. He pinches the rose delicately with just two fingers, avoiding the thorns. Which to me indicates that even if he seems unaware of the cliff’s edge, he is at least aware of the rose, and still retains a small, reassuring instinct for self-protection. He is a fool, not an idiot.
Afters
I owe this essay to Cameron Steele, who pulled The Fool card for her October tarot reading, through her subscribers chat, encouraged me to write about it without feeling so awkward about it. She directed me to this excellent Weird Studies podcast I would highly recommend for anybody who has pulled or wants to learn more about The Fool.
We got the ‘Alcoholics’ Special' at Gamnamu.zip (lol), called that because some menu items can only be ordered with alcohol, like a small hill of jokbal (trotters) burnished at the table with a blowtorch. We ate it with gamja-tang (stew) ever-simmering on a gas burner, surrounded by moons of banchan. It was all so good but the highlight was trying makgeolli. (How do I even describe it… effervescent, milky rice wine? Words don’t do it justice.) It was served freshly brewed in a teapot, with what I can only call Korean katoris with handles. Great to cheers with:
Until next time,
Nikkitha
a fascinating essay – parts of which I haven't fully digested and might go back a second (and a third) time! also love that you weave in the Korean-Chennai connection: my first taste of Korean food was early too, sampling banchan and rice that a Korean classmate brought to our Spanish class in Chennai!