In which Our Hero is a total grumpypants.
You only want some of my joy. You don’t want all of it.
Not the part that finds fascination in injuries at the Olympics.
Not the part that laughs when someone fumbles at a task they’ve been doing for months.
Not the part that goes for blood in silly games.
You only want some parts.
—
School is cultural honing: a repeated sheening and shearing and shaping of an impressionable child into the kind of person we want.
Graduate school is self-imposed honing.
Clown school is emotional honing.
—
Half of this school is calibration: make it light, make it pleasant, make it generous.
Half is tactical: learn the mechanics and try them out.
And the final half (yes, I know) is experience: stage time with a real audience who loves this peculiar art.
But what if I don’t want to be calibrated?
What if I like my joy?
What if I’d miss the parts of it you call cruel?
—
A friend recently said something that ruined my joy at watching this video (includes a severe gymnastics injury). I used to find it fascinating. Now I can hardly watch.
Is that a loss? Once I received a fascinated joy. Now that joy is covered with a patina of sadness and pity.
Why do we do that to each other: sand the edges off one another’s laughter? Isn’t there a terrible beauty in the Olympian moment: a lifetime’s work undone in one leap? It’s comic, in the oldest sense: man plans and God laughs.
The funniest part, perhaps, is the commitment to the bit. This athlete may never walk again. That’s deathly serious. But he hurt himself with flips and spins, in a contrived game, for which the prize is mainly collective fiction (a title, which brings fame and glory). Is that not fundamentally comic? For me, it’s the same humor I saw in the nod of a hotel receptionist in Bentonville, Arkansas. I commented that the front page of their local newspaper was about high school football. She nodded solemnly, explaining, “It’s very important.”
No, it isn’t.
And yes, it is.
With the receptionist, I let her continue her joy.
While my Olympic joy is now covered with dry rot.
Now, when I rewatch, I can barely locate that joy. It’s smaller now, covered in a “But you shouldn’t…”
—
We choose the games we play. I’ve chosen clown school.
And yet, when peers see me on the street, when they ask what video I’m watching on my phone, I hide. I make a joke. I assume they’ll hurt me if I’m honest.
It’s hard to be honest and open.
So hard. Since it’s been so aggressively sanded away.
That’s why I’m here.
Because people don’t generally value openness, or honesty, or play.
We value these in contained scenarios. But an intensely raw emotion, honestly expressed? Best put a lid on that, missy!
—
I generally don’t find the world a nice place. I don’t think openness is generally rewarded. People can be vicious outside the boundaries of their games. That’s why games exist: to make behavior safe.
Within a game (religion, law, sport), there’s form. There’s play. Simplicity. Meaning.
Outside, there’s a new game:
The honest negotiation between what we’re told to laugh at
and what still makes us laugh.
I’d like to laugh at you when you’re being an idiot.
I’d like to laugh at me when I’m being an idiot.
Have you considered joining me?
It’s funnier over here.
And if not,
I’ll take
my ball
and go home.
—
“The child not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth” —African proverb.
Julian Wise 