Clown

Get on your bikes and ride.

La maja del tarot (1965) by Leonora Carrington

It’s hard to write when everything is embarrassing. Some days, every detail of your life humiliates you because your life is a clown show and you are a clown. This is particularly tough for me because my clown show isn’t just a bunch of clumsy idiots climbing out of a tiny car, tumbling around, honking some horns, and then dashing out of the ring to make room for a visibly bored elephant.

No. My clown show is one of those Russian affairs with bears and monkeys riding bikes in a tight circle around a vainglorious clown queen. She thinks she’s the queen — that’s the joke —  but she’s really just another clumsy idiot trussed up in a large wig and some excessively fluffy fake eyelashes, pretending that these circling bears and monkeys are her obedient servants.

My clown queen lives in a world all her own. She gestures and flails and the bears and the monkeys seem to follow her orders and then suddenly one of the bears grabs a monkey off his bicycle and eats him (this has happened, there’s footage of it, don’t watch it).

Extended phases of my life have felt like a tragic clown-queen show. As a discerning queen, I might recognize how tragic or tragicomic my life is. I might feel humiliated, at times, when sharing my maudlin clown show with a new audience in a new town every few days. I might even think, “I am done with clowning. It’s time for me to make something with my hands — sculptures or little bird statues or porcelain plates or paintings. It’s time for me to own a  boutique of some kind. I’m a queen so I’ll call it an APOTHECARY. The coolest shit in the universe will be available there, and people will travel from miles around to buy it.”

But selling bullshit isn’t your trade, queen. Clowning is your life! You love to clown! You love it when people are laughing with you, but you also love it when people are laughing at you. And on good days, when all of the squealing children and their sordid parents leave, you even enjoy laughing at yourself. You love being a queen, even when it’s just a performance.

“Who sets themselves above the human condition, and why?” your queen, who minored in philosophy, sometimes asks her monkeys.

“Superiority complexes are a side effect of trauma,” says the monkey who minored in psychology.

“Or they just want to make money,” says another monkey.

“Yeah, it’s a business,” says a third monkey. “I want to start a business once this gig runs its course.”

“Runs its course?” you say. “This is my art!”

The monkeys suddenly look upset.

“No, I mean… This is our art. Ours! We created this!”

“That’s not how it felt when Kyle ate Vincent.”

“Yeah, was that art? When Kyle decided out of the blue to eat Vincent, who was saving up to send his youngest to Oxford?”

“That kid is a genius.”

“I know. Now he works at Home Depot.”

“Home Depot has good benefits, actually, unlike –”

“Babies, babies, no! Don’t talk like this! You love our art!”

But it’s hard to call a clown show a work of art, no matter how delusional you are. No matter what angle or rationalization or spin you offer those monkeys, no matter what slant of light you apply to make your work look more magical, it’s just a clown show in the end.

But that’s not how it feels. When the lights come on and that silver trumpet sounds clear and bright and the monkeys climb onto their bicycles, it feels like magic.

***

The moral to my story is that if it feels like magic, you obviously have to keep doing it no matter what. Even if no one cares at all, you can’t stop. What you have is too precious, too rare. Yes, it takes a ton of work. Dude. What doesn’t?

Sometimes half of the work is just stoking your belief that the magic will come back. Sometimes a huge chunk of your energy goes toward addressing all of that humiliation, getting it out of the way, so that you can have fun again.

What’s weird is that my life isn’t a queen clown show at the moment. I fired Kyle the bear, the monkeys quit right after the conversation documented above, and now I’m just doing regular, everyday clown stuff, with big shoes and bouquets of flowers up the nose and suitcases full of pigeons flying for the rafters – along with your occasional bucket of rats running toward the audience’s feet whenever inflation has priced pigeons out of the market.

But even the flowers up the nose feel sort of embarrassing at the moment. That’s the strange thing about being a clown. Your tolerance varies.

No one wants sensitivity from their clowns. The slightest whiff of despair or frustration scares the audience. Clowns with a shitty attitude are the most feared beings on the planet for a very good reason. You take all of that try-hard energy and turn it malevolent, you’ve got a problem on your hands.  

So what can an honest clown do, when a part of her believes that she’s still a queen and another part of her is allergic to performing and another part misses the satisfaction of turning despair and longing into carefully choreographed chaos?

Well, at some point, a motherfucking queen needs to commit. Grit her teeth. Silence her doubts. Commit to the magic, even if it’s imaginary. Commit to the fake eyelashes, if that’s what makes the room sparkle and vibrate. Commit to being seen clearly.

That last part, being seen, is hard. Because every clown is a control freak at heart. A more relaxed animal would never care if you laughed or not. Bears don’t give a fuck if you laugh. They’ll eat whoever they want for lunch. But the worst thing for a control freak is recognizing how much is out of their control.

Not everyone alive is a clown, but every life is a clown show, and all clown shows are out of control. You stuff a bunch of control freaks into a car together, you pack a suitcase full of pigeons or rats, you buy a monkey a bicycle, you crawl into a giant cannon and light the fuse, something will go wrong eventually. As a clown, you’re hellbent on control but you’re also taking big risks, because that’s what a try-hard control freak tends to do.

And your audience can see you. Your friends, your cousins, your spouse, your pets: they know you better than you know yourself at times. And your job — as a friend, as a cousin, as a spouse, as a parent, as a brave performer, as an anxious clown — is to continue showing yourself in spite of the fact that chaos is absolutely guaranteed, in spite of the fact that results will be mixed, reviews will be mixed, ticket sales will rise and fall. You bought that visibly bored elephant. You’re all in.

I guess some clowns sell the elephant, sell the cannon, sell the circus, sell the soap box, sell the glass house or at least relocate it away from the local stone quarry. But I’m pretty committed.

Being committed means committing to honesty, committing to reality. When you commit to comedy you’re also committing to tragedy. When you commit to grandiosity you’re also committing to humiliation. When you commit to love you’re committing to heartbreak and loss. Even when you try very hard to control everything, you’re on a path toward surrender.

Surrender is inevitable. This clown show guarantees it. That’s what’s so magical about it. You never know what’s going to happen next. Every day, you crawl into a giant cannon and light the fuse.

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Thanks for reading Ask Molly!