1 + 0 = Clown | Certain Absurdity

1 + 0 = Clown

Certain Absurdity for Creature Citizens

A Clown Conspiracy of Sublime Stupidity

The Rise of Deliberately Absurd Humans

Note: All are welcome.

However, this work is Not for everyone.

When I teach and facilitate the clown-building process, I act as a professional guide.

I do not discriminate against anyone based on anything.

1 + 0 = Clown is one recipe for constructing a "clown".

It is an esoteric, spiritual, holistic and absurdist equation

that is at once utterly simple and infinitely complex.
Because, rather than limit or define "clowns"

(which is what basic number-equations typically do),

I subscribe to the notion that "clown" is a free-radical and variable that,

(while being a laughably limiting and inadequate term on it's own),

is the sum-total of these two things:.

"1/One",

the Creature:

the existent-substantive, wild-lunatic, earthly soul-child each and every person represents

(aka, their animal + vegetable + mineral = Body or "equipment"), on the one hand,

and "0/Zero",

the Spirit:

the etheric, spirit-entity, strange-angel or super-zero in each and every person,

(aka, their angel + imagination = spirit or innate light, on the other.

"Clowns" are simultaneously simple and sublime: 1 + 0 = Sublime Simpleton = Clown.

That is, they can appear as total dolts, yet enact deeply meaningful or esoteric tasks

or show up as highly intelligent orators, yet appear in some abstract or other-worldly guise and/or scenario. Or mutant creatures and things entirely different still.

I am constantly being surprised by what folks create.

It's the great love I enjoy in offering this process.

Taken further in this way, 1 and 0 are equated with additional, potent and

suggestive variables that I will not mention here.

The variables made accessible become idiosyncratic to each who author them.

Cross-Dressing and Drag-Clowning are also practiced by yours truly and are recommended.

Another recipe I've invented, and facilitate to great success, is

The 3-Dimensional Clown or Occupationally Hazardous Misfits:

the recipe is:

Haunted Head + Hungry Heart + Biased Belly = Clown Occupation

That is, establishing the clown's peculiar, "spiritual", abstract, professional or bizarre Employment. As well as their costuming, based on these principles.

Put another way: 1) the mental-confusion, 2) the sensitivity or sentimentality

and 3) the base-drive or instinctive-politic of any single sublime-simpleton.

There are many clown schools, hybrid-methods and physical-theatre exercises geared toward "clown" creation that I draw upon as needed. For now, let me get philosophical:

Teaching to Transgress

Before we can safely talk about what it means to trip down into the parallel universe of clown town, we must first attempt to describe the context immediately adjacent to it.

We all bare the invisible weight of human frailty, darkness, short-comings and over-rationality.

It's called being consciously and/or unconsciously human.

To be an effective contrarian ("clown"), one must air on the side of being consciously-human.

And adjacent to it, The Art of Being Human requires at least

two fully functioning realities:

1) The Inside Job of keeping all aspects of our truth, our drives and desires, within us, in harmony and

2) The Outside Job of balancing between outward transparency and outward social acting.

Note: the phrase, "social acting" should not be misconstrued as theater-acting or being false.

As social beings, we are all ever-reflecting and absorbing the art and/or social mandates of being 'social actors'.

If you disagree with this, lets just say that this is how "social actor" is being defined for the purposes of fleshing out a bigger picture for us to move around and explore within.

We are utterly individual social actors even when we justify, to ourselves and each other, that we are above the possibility of self-fabrication, wrong-fantasy, self-fiction or social-deception.

For many, without even being fully conscious of it, "clown" equates as a form of falsity.

Probably because addressing themselves as such would defy the person they've come, with such determination, to become and adhere to through peer-pressure, wreck and ruin. There is simply no space for more of themselves.

Also, they have no inkling (nor should they) that they themselves could be purveyors of truth or liberation by dressing and addressing themselves the parts of fools.

In fact, clowning's correct and primary aim is to reconcile and expose the truth, frailty, monstrosity, beauty

and all else (fill in the blank), of Being Human.

Exposing the general, social cover-up, by liberated personhood proximity,

is Not for everyone and is only one thing a "clown" is likely to do.

In any clown-technology, anyone's attachment to being a "clown" can be just as misleading as it might be instructive. "Clown" is just a word. A place-holder for what gets built and discovered by it's author. Weather we call ourselves "clowns", "princes", "paupers" or "graveyard-puking-sluts" is irrelevant. Although, at least, the latter-most is more descriptive.

"Clowning" alone is too vague and inadequate a term to describe what we're really talking about for all it's actual tacky-majesty, esoteric-confabulation, mythic-sub-identifying, consciously-musing or correctly-delusional grand designing.

In fact, though you can't blame anyone, this hang-up on words like "clown" speaks novels about how restricted we can become by adhering so tightly to the same word-meanings from the cradle to the grave.

On this journey of Life, language, like luggage, must be checked and rechecked to reach the greatest number of destinations, epiphanies and people.

Blind conviction breeds blind convicts.

Absolute corruption corrupts absolutely.

If these be Life-sentences, I aim to escape 'em.

Sometimes naked

Sometimes mad

Now the scholar

Now the fool

Thus they appear on earth

The free people.

(Hindu verse)

and now..

CLOWN TOWN

..a parallel universe.

For the past 40 or so years, I've been asking myself this question,

"Why do I continue to “clown” around?"

My answer:

To specify and maintain my sense of awe and gratitude in relation to the mystery dimension of the universe.

To become more of myself.

To have as much fun as possible.

And to become undone to and from social expectations.

Especially my own.

In my four-plus decades journey from a circus clown, to a professional character-actor, to a street-theatre and cabaret director, clown-wrangler/teacher, ritual-technology facilitator, and mystery-school creator (having little or nothing to do with clowns), and now, having become a minister of walking prayer, I’ve come to grasp, fairly clearly, my own philosophical and empirical assessment of what being a “clown” is all about.

I call them Deliberately Absurd Humans. (DAH!)

The Art of Clowning is equally traversed by the light-hearted, the dark-gutted and the gray-mattered.

Combine as you will.

Sure, there is the generic notion of clowns, brought to us by the same safe distance we might unconsciously hold forth in avoiding red necks, lepers, the homeless or the IRS.

In this way, clowns are just "clowns" in the same way that we agree the squirrel just "squirrels" and the sky is blue.

In fact, at this point in history, with the exception of the very few willing and informed, the word ‘clown’ can do little more that further-stereotype how clowns think, act and purportedly exist.

If you want to get to authoring your own true "clown", find the sort of geeks that drink this rare brand of swill.

I'm just one. There are others out there.

What is a Clown? The actual truth:

We are all a majestic, beautiful and mysterious thing that “clown” is only a place-holder for.

A place-holder for that which, upon first glance, may seem rather peculiar, scary, obscure, abstract or puzzling, but, upon honest inspection or revelation, is never-the-less our own single, secret, in-dwelling, divine-life in all it’s infinite and exotic potential.

A vacation, a home-coming or both.

We’re talking ancestral unity with the muses of ancient-to-present hilarity; Comfort with our un-qualifiable uniqueness, eccentricity, euphoria and liberation; Balanced possession of our own, more than human-centric, archaic beginnings, however burlesque or grotesque; and Our unmitigated, uproarious secret conviviality ending in glorious, ego-dream liberation and obliteration.

The You beyond limitations (beyond the Either/Or trap of limitation) calls for your deliverance.

Our attitude toward the world is paramount to our well-being. Through a Both/And frame of operation, continued self-initiation leads to continued growth and an abundance attitude, transcendent of the merely material.

A rich life is a deeply satisfied life. Whatever this entails.

The You in honest salvation.

Reconciliation for having taken yourself as too little, for too long.

Where the Both/And lens and attitude proves, forever more, that our thoughts, actions and words are all-powerful

and all-formulaic of our everyday dream-states.

The Both/And paradigm includes all; eliminates limitation; scares off scarcity.

The all-places-place where true and final freedom, like a Dancing God, equals deep and abundant Laughter.

Laughter, at once, for mere punctuation

(that is, toward the immediate context shared with others)

but then echoing down the misty, haunted chasms of remotest, personal antediluvian antiquity

(for try as some might, no other can know or name your personal, in-born experience)

and your solidity, such-ness and creature-vessel-hood is license to abide in what comes through as true.

Weather procured directly from The Muses or through the aid of Her plant-intoxicants,

whatever one’s case may be, our primary contribution to the collective well-being on this planet

(among the many other things),

is "getting-good" (that is, in correct-relationship) with the “world” as we experience it.

To participate in relationship to whatever "life" (another inadequate, four-letter-word) is or might still become.

Not endeavoring to "find" it. Or fix it.

But creating the way as creature-creators do.

This too is "clowning".

Clown or no, we are all sensitive beings, dancing between our various estimations of ourselves and others.

Are we actual objective entities requiring mutual participation and resonant dignity?

Or are we merely bit-players in each others dream dramas?

Figure it out.

What "Black Lives Matter" booms forth as a necessary, contemporary slogan about deep-seated racial history, is echoed, ever after, in how we fail or consciously choose to behold all the people immediately surrounding us.

Even, perhaps, our own family-members.

Fair Warning: While "clowns" come in every conceivable stripe, patina, color, spotted or paisley,

don't use "clowning" as a substitute for a truly liberal assessment of those immediately surrounding you.

Racism and sexism are deeply rooted in all of us.

However, if you are looking to have an experience of Self-development and are

wanting to discover your "clown",

chances are pretty slim that you're terribly or overtly racist or sexist.

Just saying.

We, ourselves, are the Art we show up as in our own and other's lives.

The truth is,

weather with human beings or "clowns",

our enigma and unsolved problem of how to exist and participate harmoniously with each other on this one small planet, remains a personal and yet social, human-condition question:

What, personally, can one do to be a better human being?

What is The Art of Being Human?

We all know that the answer involves seeking and achieving Self-realization in one way or another.

Taking this question further,

because a "clown" is really very central to the fiasco, riddle and liberation of Being a human:

How, personally, can one become more Self-realized and become a better human being

through this, oh so mysterious admixture? This Art of Human Clowning?

The answer is:

In a specific and instructive way, not always apparent to us, we are all wildly imaginative, open containers.

Vessels of radical variability. Agents of growing agency.

(And Not some sort of Privates concerned with our 'privacy settings'.)

And building a "Clown" is just one of many ways to become more Self-realized

and, most likely, a bit more fleshed out in the worldly, counter-cultural, perhaps seemingly transparent, yet truly esoteric, sacred and profane personhood-stretching department.

And what better way to make new friends than in a company of "clowns"?

ONE LAST RANT

"Clowning" requires amenability to change. Expanding to become more of ourselves. Risk taking.

The chaos-consumption we each proscribe and monitor for ourselves.

Think of a 'chao'. (not a real word, but it should be.)

A chao is a single unit of chaos.

Dose yourself accordingly and by degrees.

This is the point on which personal transgression begins to become identical with transformation.

Not unconsciously thrashing around with no direction,

but where mutation mirrors the need to become more of ourselves through personal mutiny.

You may not require such. But for those who want a little push, yes, mutation and mutiny could be called for.

That is, if and when the captain of our own ship/body/Self, has become a tyrant captain, keeping, as it were, our spirit and soul small, confined, docile, then we leap beyond this role of victim into empowerment!

We take back the ship!

For ourselves and the crew; the common good of all humanity.

Meanwhile,

with our automatic, always-functional mechanism of creature-agency, along with any clear desire for personal evolution (mutation and mutiny), we choose to hear the call of that shadowy, myth-susceptible dreamer waiting just below the surface of our awareness.

Our deeper, wiser, liberated, older self.

Not to be confused with the Higher Self, since this is best kept allocated in its rarified simplicity.

Although, in specific ways, one’s clown or clowning does produce avenues for further development and entrance into that first and final archetype known as The Self.

The ancient persistence of this 'tradition', (if it can be called such a thing) does not have to explain its existence, wisdom or purpose. It is beyond and was before all allocations and categories. The reason clowning is theoretically for anyone is that, from time immemorial and in all cultures, there has been a place set apart to contain, express and set-free our “god-given” freedom to our total or extended existence.

Historically and multi-culturally, within the Collective Unconscious there are eccentric, concentric and imaginal memories deeply buried or hidden within our ancestral memory. A channel for dropping our social, formal masks and expressing our inner freak-quencies.

People are not merely citizens or their occupations.

In the depths of our swirling and ever-creative subconsciouses, we are elvish-dominatrixes, we are cannibal-flowers, we are pompous ninnies, babbling armchair-historians, riotous gnome-wranglers, sparkling hunchbacks, uproarious choirs of midnight garbage-collectors. We are apolitical fishmongers, newspaper-tuxedo-wearing hypocrites, facetious clergymen, world-renouncing monks of unreason.

We, the free-spirited, are secret legion.

The multitude in its miraculousness. Today, we must seek out the opportunity.

Or recognize it when it falls into our laps.

If I could start a revolution to save the world, (well I suppose that this is a contribution) I’d institute a right and practice that enables all persons to express their entire inner lives, their own particular character essence and all the experimentation available to liberate the expression and self-governance of our souls.

With practice, our mythic imaginations can run unimpeded beyond our merely social-orientation habits and patterns. The mythic dimension in ourselves must be removed from profane, ever-dubious "history" and placed, once again, solely in our psyches. That being said, our life together on this planet must become the theatre of mutual participation, involving a consciousness of each other as objective entities and not merely bit-players in each others dream dramas.

So maybe play dress-up with your friends!

Be something/anything new and ridiculous!

Make silly part of sanity.

Some Final Denotations:

Clown =

Anyone self-realized enough to parody themselves and commit to the thing they are ragged-up as.

Play the vagrant, the high-society, the hunchback, the strange mammal, the social misfit.

Bring to light that which is socially kept out of sight.

All the shadow-sides of the supposedly "higher", collective ideals.

Clown =

Any creature-citizen super-subjective enough to transcend the social strictures that otherwise keep them tame, bored, perhaps anxious or lazy.

Clown =

A means of containing more of ourselves.

Clown =

An alternative, experimental, lower, higher and/or additional self, that, never-the-less, draws itself out of our total and entire Self.

Clown =

A character version of one’s realized alter-ego, super-zero, strange-angel, etc.

???????????????

Meanwhile, much of the time, becoming social actors can seem like an uphill climb. We can effectively circumvent being “good” actors in the realization that its not entirely mandatory. We can improvise or slide. In fact, there are as many rationalizations to the contrary as there are escape routes. Some actors adapt into remoteness (joyful or otherwise). Some become highly effective (“successful”) social-actors. And then there are the vast array of wholly-particulars, signifying the diversity between these rather predictable bookends.

“But wait!”

Some will immediately hasten to object here, because, “surely there must be lines of propriety drawn between play-acting (theatre-actor acting) and sincere, authentic personhood-expression and civility in the 'real' world!”

Now listen carefully!

This fear-based, morally questionable objection is really the over-controlling recipe for building and maintaining an ineffectual, stress-filled and nightmarish, sleep-walking modern man. And the compulsion to stratify all behaviors into well-categorized comprehension is actually the collective terror and balk against how shockingly diverse and actually incomprehensibly different and genuine (and therefore “contrary”) every single person and everything truly is.

But this vague or awkward, existential comprehending is invariably and immediately followed up by a fairly persistent compulsion to bypass our mythopoetic intelligence and birthright by filling the “emptiness” or apprehensive-state with what is most familiar (perhaps fear-based, safe and “normal”).

On one hand, “Clown” is just one, rather meager and inadequate categorical term and mechanism to tally every conceivable misfit, transgressor, vagrant, outcast or vagabond (not to mention their flip-side natures as rainbow-people, strange-angels and the generally illuminated) ever to exist. Everything we’re hard-pressed (or self-consciously conditioned) Not to become in our lives. If our social-mask is left unchecked, we stand the risk of becoming outcast in just the same way.

And, Gods forbid, we shan’t be found in our folly!

Or should we?!

Fine-tuning:

Like with any instrument (think of a guitar) our entire-entity (body, mind, soul, face, voice & imagination), can produce our living life-song and symphony tuned consciously or less than fully realized.

It's all in how we 'hold' our instrument.

It takes practice, but you don't have to become a maestro.

Musicians serve their muses. "Clowns", (like the words 'asocial' and 'apolitical') 'amuse' other people. It's a form of magic

Their art being too extensive, their profession being too cheap to serve any muse.

But there are exceptions to this.

Weather a muse guides us or thrashes us just shy of oblivion, what matters most is our passion.

It just so happens that clowns are known for being masterful failures.

Fail beautifully. The cover-up is art.