I present for your delectation a photo I took yesterday at Jumble it Up; it is of a clown.

The clown in question is Hannah Mulder, performing in a piece presented by Small Pond Theatre Company, A short, beautiful life. In this piece, two clowns explore with pathos and humour our relationship to the Earth as caretakers and guardians. Love is sketched between the two clowns and their ‘baby,’ the Earth, in poetic and moving ways. There were other clowns at the performance last night, like the inimitable Janine and Avis, with their incredible physical theatre piece, ‘fidus Achetes,’ which deserves its own post. I will post in more depth about all of the excellent theatre to be seen at Jumble it Up later in the week: For now I wish to concentrate on clowns.

Back in Ireland I had a painful but ultimately inconsequential relationship that ended with me hitching home, having been dumped, in the rain, on New Year’s day. This isn’t in and of itself anything to do with clowns and certainly wasn’t very funny at the time. But a very nice man gave me a lift and by the time we made it to my Dublin bound bus, I felt thoroughly cheered. The man had been a supermarket owner in rural Ireland and had been bought out for a million Euros. He’d spent this money, from what I gathered, on a spree of holidays for his family and had lived a life of luxury until realising that he missed working terribly. Whereon he had bought a van and now drove around the country delivering sausages and bacon from local producers to shops. I was a vegan at this stage and had never bought bacon or sausages or any such thing in my entire adult life, but as he heaped pork produce into a bag and thrust them, beaming, into my hands, I knew it would be utterly churlish to refuse them. ‘You’ll have a fry in the morning!’ He grinned and I thought ‘Yes. Tomorrow I, Felix, now single, shall treat myself to the likes of a fry that has never been seen in the history of the world’ and that small fact gave me some purpose beyond moping around in the dejected fashion of one recently spurned.

Thus the warmth and humour of that little exchange buoyed me up so that I didn’t concentrate very much on the sense of having been dumped, but rather on the glee of my naughty, very non-vegan breakfast. I also remembered my mother’s sausage casserole and called her to get the recipe. That night, sitting alone and contemplating all the events of the day, I found a real need to celebrate the resistant, strong quality of joy; it was clear to me that inside delight and laughter is the serious need to rise up against circumstances and to defy sorrow. And so I wrote this poem;

Smile in my pocket

There is a smile in my pocket,
I try to keep it quiet…
But it’s jumping round in there,
Whispering in my ear
That it wants to see the sun.

There is a smile in my pocket,
And I want to keep it.
To hug it in my heart when
I go to sleep with it.
Could I bear to show it to the world?
I squeeze it in my fist
Wanting it so much that I can’t possibly
Unfold my hand
And take the risk
Of it running away.

There is a smile in my pocket,
Warming my hand,
tickling my fingers,
Blowing a raspberry on my bellybutton,
Rubbing its naughty self on my palm…
Tripping me up,
Catching me out,
Making me laugh…

There is a smile in my pocket,
ESCAPING I can’t help it…
In spite of me the smile
wriggles and giggles itself free…
It slaps itself all over my face
Making a fool of my seriousness.
It doesn’t care if I think
its pretty or not…
It wants to be seen
AND it knows it’s gorgeous.
It has made a hole in my pocket
with its antics.
And pennies fall out all over the street…
When I look round to pick them up,
I realise that my smile
has made all the smiles
in all the pockets
of all the people, come out,
and none of us are hiding
anymore.

I have a memory from around this time, of going to a party and spending the entire evening distributing heart-shaped balloons and making white, chocolate-chip cookies. I took to wearing a daisy in my hat and having balloons about my person, always. It was one of many strategies for defying pain; the pain in my bones, the pain of love, the pain of being young and far from home, the pain of sickness, the pain of depression, the pain of heartbreak.

I wasn’t happy in my early twenties. But the clown was a talisman against all of this; a breast-plate against adversity; a smile in my pocket. And it remains so.

In Marina Warner’s essay on Bobby Baker, I was struck again by the excellent quote she provides from Freud about the role that humour plays in keeping the self intact;

The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows in fact that such traumas are are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure … Humour is not resigned, it is rebellious. It signifies not only the triumph of the ego but also of the pleasure principle, which is able here to assert itself against the unkindness of real circumstances.

Several times, watching performers last night, I was reminded of this mechanism of humour; its ability to make bearable many otherwise inaccessible topics is what makes it, for me as an artist, an invaluable and precious tool. I love the defiant stance of the clown; its voice of truth and its pathos.