As a quick note before I go to bed… I got notes, perfect timing, from my editor about this piece I’m writing for Hollywood.com, and I have to go back to this pizzeria to write another one very soon, so gotta go do that, but BASICALLY — I thought, oh, this could be a good book, too, because I was writing an article about clowns — and I thought, wait a minute, suddenly looking out the window (in my mind) at English horses… The Hero with a Thousand Faces? I can fit a thousand clowns in one car at least — a physics problem. And clowns came into existence at the dawn of society, so it predates the hero: a healer. You see? You see. Vishen does. Every single society, Bernie Collins, this world-renown clown and scholar told me, has clowns except Totalitarian regimes no matter where you go across time and space.
“Why?”
“Because you kill your clowns and poets first,” so then, take Hannah Arendt, “the break from belonging is at the root of that regime,” so that’s what the clown represents.
It came up toward the end of this first round as an idea to think about the clown (societal) in the spirit of “the hero.” I haven’t read everything yet to totally do what I’d like to, but I’m excited about this one…since it’s significance is belonging. I’m trying to use the mythological framework of The Village, The Wasteland, and this hero wandering off, the clown standing there, the whole time, “this loser, isn’t that right chief?” Since the idea is, the moment we had a chief, we had a clown. It will be clear, why clowns and poets are structurally aligned as Pessoa talked about the inutility of travel, hero, as did Emily Dickinson. You don’t need to go anywhere to get there. And a clown can speak that way. It’s relieving somehow…clown and chief somewhat inseparable.
My editor said it was compelling, good, and he said it’s already at word limit, BUT he felt like maybe a few more clown references would be good, which is what I thought, so I’ll be sitting with that, and figuring how to marry those two notes, as I’d like to have clowns tumble out with wisdom to share.
Anyway, I gotta finish up a couple of things, but I’m excited about this, and I have to finish this article…