The Clown’s Universe: An Unknown Story

Three years ago, I participated in a Clowning Summer School. The Clowning Summer School is a surreal experience. It’s like entering clown universe where all the normal laws of reality are suspended. In clown universe, some of the laws of reality work in reverse or are upside down to our normal way of thinking and seeing. Clown’s have an elastic reality. There is nothing fixed or rigid in the clown’s universe. Reality is elastic, changeable, flexible and full of possibilities.  The clown’s red nose is the world’s small mask.  The red nose is an alternative frame that celebrates freedom, play, elasticity and the ability to take ourselves lightly. In clown universe, we have the freedom and the permission to laugh at ourselves and celebrate our silliness. In clown universe, clowns fools, clowns and jesters take the mundane and the ordinary, pull it apart and raise it to a new and higher level.   

One of the Summer School workshops was based on a series of physical postures. The facilitator guided us through a series of postures that described an embodied emotional state. One of them was called the Office Worker. In this posture, the facilitator told us to thrust our heads and eyes forward, tightening our chests while we moved briskly about the room focused on an imaginary task. Office Worker is very uncomfortable position to maintain for a long period of time without feeling weary.  

After this session, I was walking through the Brisbane City Mall. In the past, I have walked through the Brisbane City Mall in a trance like state hundreds of times in the past as a member of the living dead. This time, I decided to opt out of the consumer trance and observe the Mall through the eyes of the clown.  I saw a line of men and women dressed in suits. Their physical expressions embodied the office worker. Like Robots, they walked along the Mall with emotionally blank expressions on their faces.   I felt a sudden surge of excitement as I watched the people walking through the Mall.  Office Worker I thought to myself. They’re in Office Worker. This was a transformative moment. I wasn’t sitting in judgement on the people walking through the Mall. I was simply an observer.  An ordinary moment yielded an amazing discovery as I watched this group of people living out a parable of our times.  I enjoyed every brief moment of this theatrical experience. This was one of a number of transformative moments I have experienced looking at life through the eyes of the clown or fool. 

Traditionally, fools and clowns have one thing in common. They refuse to play by conventional rules. Clowns and Fools are motivated by enjoyment and the desire to play. They live and play in a realm beyond critical judgement and rules. Paradoxically, clowns and fools are wise enough to value rules in the same way that artists need structure to support their creativity. This gives them an other worldly quality. In the Tarot, the Fool is called the Prince of the Other World.  Clowns use day to day ordinary experiences as the fuel to energise their lives and offer this as a gift others.  

This online journal is dedicated to my efforts to explore life, the universe and everything through the eyes of the clown, fool and jester. Foolish Times is the ongoing journal of my experiments in the wisdom of the Fool. My aim is to experience the gift of transformation in every area of my life. I also want to rediscover and re tell the stories of the Holy Fool tradition within Christianity and walk in the steps of Jesus Christ, St Francis of Assissi, and other fools [of all religions and none]  who understood that the comic potential of the ordinary is waiting to be revealed in every waking moment.

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