Mr Tambourine Man...

I am a loser. I fail at everything I attempt. I am an awkward, off balance bumbling idiot. I am just like you… but I am me. I put myself down so you can get a lift... That is my serious side.

I am here to mock the serious world we live in. I don’t cry because it is over, I smile because it happened.  I hope I can remind you with a smile, or perhaps a tear, that to be human is to make mistakes… sometimes really stupid mistakes…

This oil spill in the Gulf is affecting everybody.
In fact, when I went to lunch this weekend and ordered the sea bass,
they asked if I wanted it regular or unleaded.
- David Letterman

(A man holds a plastic bag with seawater and oil from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill south of Freemason Island, Louisiana May 7, 2010)

I represent the flip side of sanity. I speak to “power”. I have the ability to speak to the most powerful and the mightiest among us… the governments, the presidents, the kings and queens… I am here to ridicule the establishment and mock authority. I am not the centre of an event… I appear between the great acts, fumble and fall to make you smile again after the tensions created by the heroes we came to admire…

I laugh at myself. I don’t make the joke, I am the joke. I take the bucket in my face, my trousers fall down. I am the one who falls off the ladder. Thank heavens I am only a clown… 

It would have been awful to have been a real human being. But all the world loves a clown?!  I am being tortured for your entertainment. I even pretend to enjoy it... hehe. I know this sounds a bit disturbing… hey? Doesn’t it? Does it make me fundamentally a victim?

Sometimes I scare me a little bit... I tell the truth. My jokes, which seem trivial, are actually all true. Sometimes I think it is not I who is crazy, foolish or upside down… but the world. Sometimes I think I am the only one that really sees clearly. Can you see me? I am no victim. I confront authority openly. I am a truthteller in a world of lies… I highlight the madness of this world with my wit... I think... therefore I clown...

I prefer actions to words... and signs to talking. People think I am a fool... 

They think I cannot deal with trauma very well. Maybe they are right? But I make them laugh... laughter has always been the language of the spirit… it is a light… it is warmth. And the gods of healing and good fortune always find a way inside the hardest heart to connect us to the Heart of the sky. 

All power play is an illusion. Through my humour I think laterally and outside the box. I am the symbol of freedom from the imprisonment of the human spirit in a confined world. Through humour we can transcend… we can see that the emperor has no clothes… that we all have balloon like ego’s….

‘We live on the Planet of the Apes. Is that funny? Or serious?” – Robert Wilson

Comedy and tragedy are closely related. The yin and yang of the human condition… I know people everywhere realize that the most powerful people in the world are those who give their power away… it is easy for me to play the fool… I don’t have to prove nothing…

“ It seems plausible that folly and fool, like magic and religion, meet some deeply rooted need in human society.” Peter Berger

Can you see me now?

There are two kinds of people in this world. People who hate clowns… and clowns. People who bring their own clown to life… and their own imagination into play. We all know clearly the difference between "reality” and “imagination” In the imagination anything is possible… it is the space charged with the possible. With being a clown for a while we can discover our own archetype within ourselves…. We can find our own ways of being a clown… we are given permission to clown around a bit, to be a child again, to be in a naïve and fragile state, to experience opposites through intensity and amplification.

We can experience a metamorphoses… take of our clothes…. Put on our red noses, those outrageous shoes, the larger-than- life shorts… open ourselves a bit….  Bring out our imagination…listen to our feelings…listen to our bodies… listen to others… improvise…

Being a clown is more than a state. It is a movement, a dynamic process – it is even a two way movement: feet on the ground and head in the clouds. This duality facilitates the emergence of our imagination.

Let’s keep our feet on the ground. Let’s remain alert to the concrete reality that surrounds us. Smell it… hear it….feel the world touching us…. Experience this anchor of reality…the security of it. This is our invitation to drift further into the absurd… look at the world beyond what we know…move at the edge of two worlds… that of imagination… and reality… 

Experience the feeling of being in a permanent state of instability…. Do not control… when we let go of control we become aware and surprised by the depth that emerges… give ourselves permission to be a non-conformist for a while…take out the clown in the closet… play with rules and social conventions… Just for  short while “pretend” not to be the responsible, mature, educated and intelligent (which we all are of course!) person… allow ourselves just for a minute a two to become an unruly spirit prone to excesses and a keen explorer of the edges of things…rid yourself of dogma… find a new direction… move forward… exceed the speed of light. Is this the real world? Is this just fantasy?

Light and dark are merely facets of reality. To shatter constraints inside our spirit one has to explode mentally in order to break free of the limitations of our perceptions…. Let’s imagine a new world… together… reality is always way ahead of what we can imagine!

Though you might hear laughin', spinnin', swingin' madly across the sun,
It's not aimed at anyone, it's just escapin' on the run
And but for the sky there are no fences facin'.
And if you hear vague traces of skippin' reels of rhyme
To your tambourine in time, it's just a ragged clown behind,
I wouldn't pay it any mind, it's just a shadow you're
Seein' that he's chasing.

Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me,
I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going to.
Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me,
In the jingle jangle morning I'll come followin' you.

Then take me disappearin' through the smoke rings of my mind,
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves,
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach,
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.

“You never turned around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns when they all did tricks for you” – Bob Dylan... is it blowin' in the wind?

Send in the clowns… it is 2011 before 12!