2.6 Camp Clown

Argument: Into the harlequinade, the pantomime and farce with joy and laughter and a dwarf knight, a dwarf clown and a looking glass appeal.
And this was it? incredulity is common at the cliff edge, reducing it to a step – well? what did you expect? we all conform in the end to the disc of the cloud-covered sun…

Here is Camp Clown where an army stands.

And I stood looking for terror and saw none – Lathy stood with a grin on his face - the circus is in town! – a cavalcade of lights with tripping, a clowning and jesting around – a carnival, a fiesta blaring – a harlequinade of colours apparent to the birth-right blind - a sawdust floor – a canvas roof and the towering pillars of wood, the supports to fall off of! – the dubious black and bankrupt white gone up the hooter suggesting to the ear and honking and currawing – a custard pie, clowns that fly like an elephant, some diligent cannon firing flailing arms and legs to a net made of buttons, a juggler juggling grenades with their pins out… so many sights, so many sights…

Let’s count the clowns and their numbers ahead of us:
- a dirge of Pierrots, sad-cheeked as the evening sun and bathetically falling, stood eighteen strong on the left of the cavern;
- a looking glass of thirty Joeys on the right – red-cheeked and manic with hot codlins and gin set out and laid before them;
- thirty Buddys before us, all tumbled and joked and laughed at the spectacle;
- Finn the bright and fair times twenty;
- Gelsomina, dazzling white with hair of nylon straw, small hat with stripes, there stood fifty with trombones and eyes unwiped;
- Gorm the dark, the shining clown of some small violence, seventeen of these, an anapaest apparent;
- Uaine, bright green-haired knight and rubber axe carrier – there was only one of him, but he towered above the rest and glowered to hilarity from all;
- Donn the bumpkin, brown to grey – sixty-seven dressed in the countryway;
- Odor – brown, scatological fool, uncountable hordes of Caganer a-shitting;
- Corcair, the pirate, red as a beetroot, purple as a peach – fifteen of the first, forty-seven of each…
I stopped counting at the chaos ahead and smiled also – there were more, there were Ruads and Liaths and Flanns – seven Lachtnas milked a cow made of paper and plastic, but I could not record it as each new image came to view.

“Some fools
and comedy
are all the wide-world can handle!
I’m amazing at views
lit by candle!”

Lathy laughed, I laughed also – this is laughter, this is entertainment, we need no more – each body assuming a form already made and apparent as the anapaest already stated – who rates these clowns? themselves and no others – this is a world of contained self-indulgence that cares not that it is.

We walked on into the mass and listened to their songs:
“Why is a clown like
a chicken when
crossing the road – why
do birds suddenly
appear on the inside
of a clown’s plastic ear –
why-or-what-and
who is Clown Excelsis
with the white face,
the red nose grand,
the shoes, hooped belt
hair and COLOUR appear
with a pump organ
pumping a pigeon
to the ground?”

“I say I say
I say did you
hear the one
about why
insert X
crossed the room
to fit a road,
door, who’s there
to hear the ways
I tell ‘em.
Boom, boom,
and boom.”

“Clown become
a regular, dumb
and miming thumb
‘s up of lift and rhyme.”
A flock of clowns yatters like a murmuration of starlings, a parliament of rooks and a library of darlings with a lover’s nest of books set out to adore them.

We walked through the crowd.

“I’m not
scared of any.
They are foolish, are imbeciles –
like walking through penguins
or herds of seals.”

A natural opening in the crowd always opened before us but all ignored us until we came to some calm – a council, a chamber whose walls were the madness and joy of the clowns all around – trapeze and tumble surrounding the ones who thought of the laugh and comedy and the buns to be fired at the enemy, the dangerous ones.

Twelve eyes, like the tribes of Israel, turned and stared – each pair above a blood red nose, each pair bright in a confidence of looking.

“Who are

[…one pair offered…]

these folk standing,
disturbing and unjestering
over there? they appear
quite unlike ourselves.

“No nose
like ours, no clown,
no comedy, some armoured dwarf
and a boy stood beside
who can never hide.

“Bring ‘em
to the centre –
the presenter and dissenter
in armour and in youth,
let me speak to ‘em.

“Let ‘em
know Dagonet
is alive and well and living
underground for ‘em all
to ignore again.”

I heard none of this and have invented somesuch for you – the eyes spoke in French, in Hindi, or in some Yoruban tongue I was too young to understand – my tongue is bland speech, not linguistic gourmet, not listening glutton – I was more keen on the clown who stood beside me: her Stan Laurel hair and green buttons appealing to a silence in me – a focus towards the eyes that never meet –

like knowing there’s a spider in the room –
a baby in the womb –
a continually unwound funeral shroud on the loom –
a flat path at the top of cold, blessed and sublime White Coomb –
an explosion, an explosion, a BOOM! a BOOM!–
like Doom juggling the juggler of Doom…

While Lathy claimed the clowns in totality, I could not claim the attention of this one beside me – so marks the difference between what the dwarf knight, some feet left of modernity, and the young boy squire require from their lives.

The speaker stood up – to the same height as Lathynarn! – some dwarf clown before us but wearing harlequin armour and shield – was he a knight or a clown? a fool or a hero? their faces were alike – were they twins? were they doubles? were they clichés or forms and little more than expected? their voices untapped, for one spoke longer than the other…

“I am
Sir Dagonet,
knight of the King, clown of him too.
Who, midget knight, are you?
What washes you here?

“We can
only say this:
fuck off away, you are not us –
not a comedian,
nor clown, nor jester.

“Pester
some serious
folk instead – take your dwarfishness
away and crack your head
on an audience.

“You are
not wanted here
at this carnival of laughing –
neither big folk nor small,
nor those worth halfing.”

And around us all the clowns continued their entertaining.