Part Two of an examination into Clown, Failure and Resiliency.

[Part One: BOUNCING TOWARDS GRACE: RISKING FAILURE IN SEARCH OF THE SUBLIME - Falling into the Abyss with Clowns and the Circus]

Falling from grace, arriving at the bottom of the heap, plunging into the abyss of failure is what most of us spend our lives trying to ensure does not happen. Yet it does, repeatedly, and for most of us the terror of this potential fall has us running ever faster in an attempt to outwit the inevitable. Human beings are made to fall. It is bred into our very bones. Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt in ‘History & Obstinacy’ state: “Humans were not designed for balance. Our upright gait suggests a process of constantly tumbling forward, of walking and falling at the same time. Even a soldier at attention does not so much maintain his balance as rotate around an imaginary point of equilibrium and is therefore unstable and prone to stumble.” (28). Kluge and Negt examine the faulty nature of the human being, instability literally bred into the bones of the human skeleton, making it inevitable that we fall with every step we take, surviving only by our ability to rebalance our continually unstable relationship with the world in our attempts to move forward. Yet our world is currently becoming more unstable and our stance is therefore more precarious on this shifting ground, requiring that we become more adept in our ability to cope with the disconcerting “disequilibre" of existence that Eugenio Barba references as the truth of the human condition attempting to find balance inside a precarious position. (130). In speaking of the performer, Barba claims the precariousness resulting from the distortion to maintain balance in this unstable state “dilates the body’s tensions in such a way that the performer seems to be alive even before he begins to express” (34), suggesting the performer becomes more alive the greater the effort to maintain balance; the closer she is to the brink of falling. Therefore, if, rather than resisting this human propensity to falling, we accepted the inevitability of it and fully engaged with both the precarity of imbalance and the ferocious momentum of falling, we might discover an extraordinarily alive resiliency in the disruptive act of falling, similar to Edmund Burke’s ideas about the sublime resulting from an uncontrolled, vast, and often terrifying experience that defies reason. (Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of The Sublime and Beautiful).

But falling is dangerous and failing is terrifying. Both are painful experiences that instinct instructs us to avoid, interfering with our ability to engage with the abyss in search of the sublime or in search of others. Not only is our skeletal structure unstable and prone to falling, it is also made to break. We are not built for standing and we most certainly are not built to withstand the impact of a fall. In History & Obstinacy it is revealed that our skeletal structure has fault lines that will sooner or later lead to breakage in a fall, incapacitating us and necessitating a community to care for the individual in order to survive. Kluge and Negt refer to this unavoidable event as “the violence of relationality" and the femoral neck in the hip is the weak spot: “Everyone knows that one day they will fall, and then this bone will break.” (441). They explain how this flaw surprisingly leads to survival of the species: “parts of our anatomy such as the hip’s weak femoral neck are designed to fracture with this inevitable fall. But this inescapable fracture is not an evolutionary flaw in our construction. Here, the defect of the isolated person turns out to be an asset of the species, an opportunity for the Mangelwesen [deficient being] to realize its potential within the collective body: since a person immobilized by a broken hip must be cared for lest he or she die, the weak femoral neck of this deficient being serves as a natural mechanism to guarantee interdependency with others, forcing autonomous individuals out of their self-sufficiency.” (28). They are proposing survival depends on our ability to concede our independence to the demands of a failing physical system. This “violence of relationality” bears a striking resemblance to the failing cultures and collapsing countries we are currently witnessing in our world, potentially offering a form of resiliency in collectivity we urgently need to consider as we face the choice to either embrace this collision of cultures risking contact with others, or isolate ourselves in our attempts to ensure that we individually are the chosen few if there is only room for survival of the fittest on our planet.

Clowns seek contact regardless of the risks, willingly engaging with collisions in their world. They seek community and connection with the audience, risking failure and rejection with every appearance. Clowns face this abyss every time they enter the stage and dare to share the truth of themselves as a “deficient being” - fault lines and weaknesses on display. It requires great resiliency to repeatedly engage with potential failure and rejection when we are the misfit of society. Jacques Lecoq describes the essence of clown: “It is a profession of faith, a taking up of a position with regard to society, to be this character that is outside…to be the one who is drawn to doing things he doesn’t know how to do, to explore those points where he is weakest. [The clown] shows his weak points - thin legs, big chest, short arms - wearing clothes that draw our attention to them, where most people use clothes to hide them. He accepts himself and shows himself as he is.” (Lecoq 115).

Perhaps clowns are the most radically hopeful embodiment of human resiliency, especially now. Resilient to the prescribed meaning of failure, refusing the recognized logic of a society that defines them as outcasts, existing in the abyss of belonging nowhere, they roam the planet insisting on connection as a means of survival. Philippe Gaulier explains the clown’s power as an outsider: “The clown comes from very far away, like the Wandering Jew or the Gypsy. He talks with a special accent which has never been heard before, He comes from nowhere in particular. He brings the freedom of someone who is rootless and so laughs better. He helps us dream because he isn’t from around here.” (Gaulier 292). All the more magnificent, the clown engages with the uncertainty and imbalance of life with a ferocity that is based not on outrage for being marginalized but rather fuelled by love, pleasure, joy and laughter at continuing to be alive against all odds: against the pull of gravity; against social norms; against anatomy and the unstable human skeletal structure not made for balance and prone to falling; within the instability of the moment; regardless of the oppressive forces of society and expectation - the clown is still standing. Defiant by the act of continuing to exist. This is the clown’s ability to bounce back from the fall, to find buoyancy and momentum in the velocity of the fall rather than remaining face down in the dirt. It is the resiliency of Samuel Beckett’s rally to “fail again, fail better” and of the character in his story The Unnamable who, when immobilized by despair, declares “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” With the ability to bounce back, the clown “fails where you expect him to succeed and succeeds where you expect him to fail”, generating laughter as a response to “a tragic and absurd world.” (Lecoq 116). Radical resiliency indeed.

We must be able to bounce back from failure - to endure the fall and use the momentum to catapult ourselves back into the world, back into community, refusing to be ostracized. Resisting the slap in the face/the slap down by rebounding, using the momentum of the slap to turn back to face the slapper and echo Judith Butler’s battlecry of resiliency: “We are here. We are still here.” (A Politics of the Street). Gloria Gaynor’s iconic song “I Will Survive” has become an internationally recognized anthem of queer resiliency, proclaiming the ability to survive against persecution and marginalization in societies that frame LGBTQ people as failures and undesirable elements. This song is a celebration of survival and an example of resistance, ferocious resiliency and joyous bouncing back. Perhaps resiliency is the ultimate act of resistance.

We are living in a world undergoing radical change and seismic shifts, demanding greater resiliency and ingenuity to survive and requiring the buoyancy of joy to ensure that when we have lost the velocity of the fall and find ourselves lying face down in the dirt, we can lift ourselves back up from the bottom of the heap in order to “brazen life out” as W.N.P. Barbellion says in The Journal of a Disappointed Man. Ensuring that Beckett’s “I can’t go on” accepts the necessity of “I will go on” and once more we gather the courage to bounce back and “regard without flinching our amazing situation on this island planet where we are marooned.” (Barbellion, Enjoying Life, XI). This unstoppable act of free-falling into the future on a highly unstable planet might best be navigated with the ferocious love of the clown and the momentum of the resilient bounce, to ensure survival of not just the fittest as Darwin would recommend, but of all the extraordinary freaks and beautiful geeks that result from the precarious contortions required to maintain balance and endure the impact of the inevitable fall.