Lunar Follies

NEPER

A legerdemain icon, carefully handcrafted in the ancient and sadly anachronistic “tile mills” of Tynemouth-Bourne-Stetson on Palseyshire, broods, as it were, monochromatically, above the grime-streaked window that looks out on the rain-darkened street below. The difficult configurations of the disconcerting “construction” remind some visitors, paradoxically, of the hand-colored wood engraving of the assassination of Abraham (“Abe”) B. Lincoln at Ford’s Famous Theater and Emporium (such a realization is invariably chilling, and has made more than one person quite literally sick); still, the “moral intrusiveness,” as Michelle Caccatanto has trenchantly put it in one of her dazzling occasional essays on popular culture — which is, as she has noted, “so much more than popular culture”—of “La Folie au Monde,” the title by which the work is commonly known, has convinced an equal number of viewers to see in it a classic Dutch street fair with traveling stage and performers — the latter joyously akimbo in the whirl of a traditional Dutch Sunday in Neper. Such, then, is the power of the ancient Tynemouth craftsmen and the products of their time-tested thunking, gathering, carding, wooling, ratcheting, and blooring, made, as they have always been made, in the mist-shrouded valleys of the lower-central-midlands of the verdant Cotswolds and their crystalline lakes, aromatic fens, and glowing heaps of tossed midden, not to mention the acres of dead-grey gorse that say “home!” “La Folie,” as it is familiarly known to its many devotees, can be, as Ms. Caccatanto has noted, “many things to many persons,” yet it always gently insists on its “grave, brooding humanity” and its “true message” of steadfastness and “courage.” A few commentators have suggested that Ms. Caccatanto’s deeply respectful essay quietly suggests her hidden sense of herself, in the presence of so immortal an icon as “La Folie,” as a deluded purveyor of empty blather, the very picture of the impotent and self-deluded cultural critic; but they, as one of her defenders smilingly remarks, “don’t make half her salary.” The sunlight, by the by, brings the obscurest recesses of the object to sudden, startling life.