As Norman's dreams and masks illustrate, folly is recognized as the wisdom of fools. Folly also shapes cultural history. We see that what begins as fatuous, gradually becomes the new paradigm we live by, the powdered wigs, the fox trots, or the cadaillacs with big Sputnik fins. We look at the infinitude of gargoyles, saints, Popes and angles and celebrate not so much God as the folly of the human spirit. Righteousness is temporal, but folly is eternal.
History is a chronicle of human delusions.
This is why Norman rejects language in a certain way. It is this fatuousness, this folly, that has shaped the history of music. That is why some Italian decided to rub horse tail hairs over cat intestines stretched taut over a poorly varnished pine box to make music using a tonality created by a harmony of spheres revolving around the earth like a big, godly clockwork. Folly is why a distinguished musicologist like Jann Pasler goes to Rose Mountain and has a group of adults feeling leaves and bark with their hands so that they can listen to the voices of trees. And it is why a famous composer I know gets a whole audience of cultured, educated people to start making burps and rasberries with their mouths in a concer hall.