Circus Acting

May 20, 1977 at 3:30 pm (1977, Journal)

A weariness is over life—No, a blanket, and beneath is the weariness. What is life for? We spend our whole youth being packed with gun-powder, aimed, and shot—towards what? It is supposed to be life—but it is just a net that we land in, as if at a circus. Outside everyone claps, a good feat. So we learn skills, a career, we get married with another who has learned a career—and walk the tight-rope as lovers, never quite able to relax for fear of losing our balance, and falling to disgrace and the death of illegitimacy. Married, and carry on our bedroom acts like trapeze artists—somersaulting from swinging bar to bar, clasping tight hands in death-defying grips, catching bent legs with bent legs, legs with arms, arms with hanging ankles—we know so many tricks! Yet we never feel . . . what?

It is all an act—a show, for approval. We so desperately need approval that we withdraw our own approval from those who don't appear to quite approve us enough. We are all afraid of falling.

How to cure us from our fear?

And how, alas, to catch the meaning of life—we catch the other in our death-defying leaps but why doesn't it feel like life? Why, somehow, somewhere, perhaps someplace, some before, something is missing . . . What is missing? Life. But why.

Both things are cured in one stroke. The circus has become a weariness—at first it was fun, with a deep, underground wonderfulness, so death-defying—but now it just wearies us to a pulp, as if we were ready for the paper-machine.

But look up my dear! Look up! And you don't see things flying between the day and the night! No swallows, no bats! You don't see them.

Why?

A blanket has settled over us, a canvas, held up by long tent poles. It is between us and the sun. It is between us and the moon, especially the moon. It is between us and bats. We have even blocked out the insects.

What a divider this blanket is, this canvas! It has divided us from life.

Now, be specific . . . what does all this mean? What does it refer to?

There is nothing wrong with thinking (it is good for people) so long as thinking hasn't got to be habit with you. Only when a word sounds new and fresh, is it keeping us free. Let it be a word old, a word "universally recognized" as true, and it is dividing us beneath a blanket from the vast stretch of world beyond blanket.

Charlotte said this afternoon, though tonight's party included swimming, she didn't intend to swim. Her in a bathing suit, among other people! What would they think of her in a bathing suit! (Her skin would be so white—and she is not, after all, Farah Faucet-Majors who looks so attractively sexy she ought to be squeezed flat in some machine and placed permanently into, yeah, Playboy.)

"You shouldn't let what other people think bother you. Just think: they don't matter, then." I told her.

I was wrong, though, as even I know. What they think does matter. But what I mean is that, let it matter, and still go out in your bikini. Reconcile yourself to that sort of illegitimacy. Don't be afraid of it. It is not a fun pain, but if we want to get outside the tent, we must take the blows. We must let them call us illegitimate. We must fly our legitimacy right into the face, like an angry moth, but with a flutter of moth-livingness.