Not Stand-Up but Stand-in Comedy: the Venn diagram of profound and ridiculous

Leaves bandaged onto a stick (indigo)

I’m really interested in what constitutes meaningful, moving texts that appeal to “poetic” or “literary” sensibilities. I’m interested in how images that challenge traditional notions of beauty, seriousness, gravitas or even emotional maturity can reflect our experience and speak to the realities, both material and emotional, of our world. Not what we think we should value or experience but what we might or actually do.

For example, here are two (well, three) examples. The first is the image and the video (below) of some leaves band-aided onto a stick, placed on a shiny surface and illuminated from above to create shadows, then the colour reversed and the saturation played with to create the above image and then the video below. Both are beautiful, invoke the kind of poetic response from such images. Leaves, nature, beautiful colours, the pathos of wounds and bandages, of the amaranthine nature of mortality. (I created music to go with the video to bring out that feeling.)

Now consider the text below, “Ethics of the Clown.” It is absurd and surreal (the narrator fits themselves inside a condom, for instance) and it is apparently about clowns, or clowns as a stand-in for human experience. It is absurd, certainly and perhaps funny. The pacing of the images and the rhythms of the piece are carefully and aesthetically controlled. However, for most readers, I’ve found, its too outre or odd to garner the kind of literary appreciation that other texts might evoke. I wonder why? Is it because many people would rather not mix absurdity and “low” content with art, because perhaps it tends to belie “deep” thought and feelings — i.e. for them it only evokes triviality or simple humour. Is it because most of us have been trained to appreciate the traditionally “poetic” (wherein we respond with “mmm” when we hear it)? I don’t really know. For me, my most profound experiences often mix “high” and “low,” the ridiculous and trivial with the luminous and numinous. And most of my life is a salmagundi of both at the same time. I might be only able to access trivilities when walking in the woods or attending a symphony yet might feel illumination or deep joy when on the toilet or cashing in a coupon at the drug store. I think our art should sometimes reflect this and we should be open to all of it. Trees, woods, discarded condoms, clowns and carbuncles all.

Ethics of the Clown

Tide in. Tide out. For a wetsuit, I fit myself inside a condom and dive past the canoes in the troposphere. If an apple is a fruit, then anything is possible; for example—and this is true—a medieval alchemist who was considered half leech due to his medical skill, decided to light a bridge with luminous carbuncles. From inside the condom, now large as a dinghy, the world is pearlescent, a season of mists and mellow fruitfulness and I roil through clouds as if a king gathering his ermine cape and making a parade of himself through the arbour. The ancestors are impacted follicles on the big feet of history. Each day the sun smears up and then down, fusing an impossible quantity of hydrogen atoms to form helium at its core. Let’s not forget how we live through its burning and also our ability to balance upright on our shoes, else all would be horizontal and even clowns would be killers.