The world sees you in terms of opposites: light and dark, love and hate, good and evil… and that is how you learn to see yourself. You throw yourself from one extreme to another, turning your life into tragedy performed in the binary rhythm of a farce; you adopt grand poses and build unbelievable justifications, Don Quixote fighting conventional windmills… How precious then is your reflection in the eyes of a child, where values become unimportant and you can simply be.
Clowns – the soul of the circus. Not an act as such – a connection between the worlds. They engage our empathy and cruelty, provoke kindness and fear… Coulrophobia is translated as “the fear of clowns”, it means “the fear of self”. Tell me what makes you laugh and show me who you are.
Their bodies litter our roads: expected, almost unnoticed, left by the wayside… not murdered – killed accidentally by inattention to familiar routes, too trivial for pathos, too pointless for tragedy. We live our lives next to each other, leaving behind little corpses of our selves and of others’, unseen, extinguished by inattention of habit: road-kill. I wonder how much will be left alive by the end of the day?
Zoos are difficult places… So many species and individuals saved, so many cared for… And yet all I remember from my visit is a gibbon screaming defiance at the crossed-out sky.
Little yellow flowers grow on the crumbling bricks of a ruined building. They dance in the warm spring air, they bring life to stillness and desolation. Their faint smell mixes with the sour odour of decay and makes it complex: no longer one note of sadness, but a palette to chose from. They bring joy to my eyes. In time, my eyes will turn to dust and – who knows – may be made into bricks for little yellow flowers to grow on. I would be glad to repay the favour.
When as a child you look into the world the magic of reality is there. The world is fluid, boundaries – weak, cause and effect – unclear and remote… The world is full of patterns to discover, it’s varied and exciting to behold, but also frightening… and you begin the job of organizing your impressions in surfaces and colours, when collected, they can define the things; you give them names, the names are then collected once again and through another level of abstraction form into language – so much more useful than spots and lines, but so much more rigid – the magic’s almost gone… You look again, look carefully – it’s bleeding through the edges, it’s seeping in through places of confusion, creating chaos, giving you the option to see new things, to name them, change the rules, expand the language and the world we live in… The spiral turns again.