The Swamps Clown

I was born in the forest, out of layers of mossy hopes and wine berry breaths. For my education, the roots did not falter, mooring me to the earth and showing me the ashes of the dead which would feed my blood. In the beginning, the immodest barks of trees proclaimed my freedom. In the beginning, the illegitimate scented moist lianas taught me my poverty. The leaves minced my vert green eyes, granting my look the legacy of the dying armorial bearings of a world I would be bound to sing to blindness.

Then the words clung onto my skin by a carnivorous love for sharpened lanceolate weeds which tattooed the pitch-black night of my condition on my body.

Dressed with these tear-made hierograms, I have, by the song of birds, ascended time to a rebellious horizon that would not accommodate to any wall, any door, any window.

Then, unfolded from myself, I became the forest stretching from the edge of a savage chimera to the swamps of my humanity.

As you can see, at first, all this is not so funny. It is even quite tedious.

You might think I suffer from some explorer mythomania, wandering in the forest, eyes lost into the placenta of his genesis. A man fevered by himself who'd have no goal but to sabre strike his way forward under the sun through the entanglement of his fears. A man inoculated with imaginary desires, who'd hit every shadow around him until he'd collapse of exhaustion, for the erotic hope to offer himself, covered in sweat, to the somber night of anthropophagous insects that would slowly eat up his skull.

In short, a frenzied mind that would seek to pull itself out from the workings of this world, for it would deny it what it is. That is to say a paradox where living is a tale which has to be endlessly lit up and endlessly put out for it not to clot with cold nor blaze up with light.

One must accept what is, or else use make-up to make it more presentable. Sometimes I watch my face, it is like one of those old colonial houses gnawed up by moisture and termites. I can remember, being a child, these long nights spent spying their obscure nibbling, on the look out for the time when the worn out house would crumble. Under my bed, in a small bag, I had hidden a few things that I would ever list before going to bed. The window of my room was always open. I was ready, anytime, to jump out through the window and flee the crumbling that would engulf the tiny world my mother and my father had carpeted around me. A tiny world of castles, battlefields, shipwrecks, romantic gallantries, heroic drollnesses,  that was cast out from its magnificence by a  modernity reaping chivalrous illusions.

I was ruins-baptised.

Still does my clown practise the memory of those holograph wills.

I put on make-up with that time fighting vain indecency. I am this child who hugs his oldster before falling asleep in his arms; for they both sleep in the same bed and both, with a gullible faith, believe they hold the bridge where this mortmain inherited rout flows back.

Putting on make-up is not a very sensible activity, but does have the benefit of concealing me behind the haze of a sweet melancholy, which, as to my neighbours, is safer than spreading out my rage into a phlegm of unforgivable words where my ancestry's ghosts would babble jargon. As a consequence, I do not like mirrors, for they reflect the shambles of a genealogy which takes shape into my face features and whose erosion I must endure each and every day.

Putting on make-up transfixes for a moment this curse of seeing myself vanishing from this world where words' witchcraft fades away into pluperfect sluggish enjoyment.

When I vanish below my clown's white, I may rest again, lying on the wooden veranda hammock and savouring the scents of sugar cane, geraniums, vetiver and anthropic dreams humus which inflated my tongue and my genitals.

It would be better to make all this simpler, more audible, to stop using this peat made tongue which hides essentials and only expresses itself through tiny gas bubbles, but I cannot. I love the intricacies of my manure. I wallow in it, as a wild boar into boar's den, to clear away the parasites of life. I may confess to you that I fuck with words, furiously rubbing myself against tree trunks to bear spring buds at the tip of my tits.

To avoid self-encamping, you sometimes have to extract from the elegance of a silence the dignity of a lisp where the soul shall more freely be articulated.

My tongue, that of my early days, dislocated into acrobatic mimes. It became a prancing gibber-gabber, dancing on a volcano with buffaloed scatterbrain postures. I have dreamed up a new one. A scarecrow tongue which thieved its bones from the dead, its muscles from rum-suckers, its skin from a starry vault.

You may ask, why bother? Why on earth wear rags as a mute fate predicate? Acknowledge that as the choked acquiescence of a man standing half-way across a bridge not knowing which bank to reach. By the way, maybe isn't there any bank? Maybe is there only a bridge between a sketch and an ending? A bridge crossed by ghosts to whom I beg for alms. Acknowledge that, or do not. After all, that is none of your business. We all try our best and mock our companion's stammer as a firm proof of the fluidity of our truth.

I do not confess anything to you. I just cannot. Do not take what I tell you at face value. Tomorrow I may tell you something else. A scarecrow has no consistency. He wobbles according to the winds and paints his face with rainwater.

One day I fell asleep. One day I woke up. Some other day I will fall asleep. One day I will not have to think anymore about the posthumous nights' auto-da-fé which burnt down this favour of being alive. In the meantime, I fool death's vigilance laughing like a smouldering fire that would wish to fool the meticulousness of a kitchen servant.

Let's go back to this clown. This would-be clown who appropriates my life. This talking clown who whimsies with my freedom's substantive.

He's a devil I live with. He hasn't got much humour. Funniness is not his purpose. His capers may be entertaining though. Who wouldn't laugh at a demon pretending he's a child? Who wouldn't make fun of a dislocated fool's garb? I do also laugh at this mischievous who pokes my body to prevent it from building a proper memory. I laugh to avoid being eaten out by this ponk who cuts out, without compensation, too large and too heavy a garment for the skinny little naked chap I am. What a merry curse to be thus inhabited by a tailor from hell. But the garment suits me so well that I just have to wear it. Here do I, with the indulgence of a vanity, turn a pajama into a subjectless king's paraphernalia.

The nature of this clown is a pleonasm. He wears the white of a hospital room where I heal the confinement of a face that no longer knows what it is since it no longer knows what makes up the border between the atrocity of being and the beauty of existing.

Its first appearance occurred the year I turned thirteen. A high school teacher had organised a film society for which I had volunteered as a projectionist. For me, cinema was a curiosity, I had only watched very few movies and TV had not upset our household furnitures yet. I was craving for those images that were freezing time into a movement. I believed that the role of projectionist would allow me to immolate the soft hours I was wasting staring at the horizon. If I could ever understand this machine, the eternity of a moment would have no more secret for me. The first movie I projected was Babes in Toyland, a 1934 Laurel and Hardy film directed by Gus Meins and Charley Rogers. I had laughed a lot. A laugh I did not know about. A crazy bird laugh, the laugh of a raptor happy to be  heavens' merry sword. The second movie was Night and Fog by Alain Resnais, the famous 1955 documentary on Nazi concentration camps. I did not know what I was projecting. Listening to Michel Bouquet's voice-over, I did not know that my bird would crash from heaven with burning wings, that it would never be able to resurrect from this ordeal. Later I learned that Michel Bouquet kept a humiliating recollection of this recording. Whatever though, for here, there and henceforth, I would be the projectionist of a memory that would snatch out my tongue, of a fear that would carpet my body with rusty nails, of an unutterable that would drop off cold ashes over my eyes. Another laugh appeared. A laugh of terror that bit my tongue and soiled my saliva. To avoid hearing it, I deprived myself of the forgiveness whose hope had been brought onto my forehead through a holy water drop. I was only a child but I already could no longer be a man; and since I could no longer be child, some day I would give up my body, that this Clown would pick up. In the meantime, I was nothing but a carcass wandering in a mass grave. Soft hours were replaced by dead hours. The horizon was staring at me and I was shamefully looking down.

Courage, with me, is the furor of last hours of hope. I will hold à l'outrance. I will perish with a laughter. I will be charming to history's coarseness. I will haughtily look down to fatal clouds. I will show piddlingness when horror will become a convenience. I will be silly and indulge myself with refusing the heavenly kingdom offered to the impotent. This is what I am repeating to myself each morning when I wake up, and each morning I force myself to believe it.

I practiced comedic slaps, solitary quarrels, kicks in the butt, wanton whacks, sloven wallops, redeeming thrashings, revengeful pounding comedy, I banged myself in every possible way in order to wake up from this conceited daze. These jolts didn't offer me anything. They were nothing but the beating of a miserable jokester who, smiling to the smacks of his own insignificance, believes he is merry. Through practicing this nitwit demeanor, those ill-treatments carved out a smiling and grinding mask. Today, his funny faces are the grimace of a memory whose out-of-control associations muddle my laugh with my sobs into a cheerful pout of which I am, sewn with white threads, the faceless puppet.

What I am telling you is a bit disheartening. It is about digging down a hole trying to fill it up. It is about coming into light groping around in shadows. I don't have the tolerant humanity which would be fit for that. That being to banter. That being to turn a water droplet crush into a love-stream. That being to turn ignorance into fancifulness. That being to be the jester of an incontinent morality. I know not how to act the uselessness of being a man who walks looking down at his feet. I have not the playful garrulousness to take a step forward without worrying about a dead body lying under my foot. I limp leaning on the jaded corpse of a happy life which, pattering the publicity of it, drinks out its century's surrender. Beaming, I drink with you to the crystal of this monstrosity that no entertainment may ever exhaust.

One should love and relentlessly enjoy this verb. Love a tree when it is struggling to bud, love a word when it dithers to speak out, love a moment when it refuses to fade away, love someone when suffering not to meet him, love enough to turn your bones into furnace firewood, love the blue to the absolute of a failed hug, love enough to capsize your heart, love enough to forget who you are. Love life without denying her anything. Then sing, and sing and sing again the triumph of being this living metal forged out by the  imperative of this verb which bestows existence upon us.

I, with my rusty tendons, I, whose etiolation is the star of my modernity, I, who is nothing but a ghost house, I want to give a banquet, inviting strangers to drink, to laugh, to eat me up.

Now is the time to break the ancient injustice to be born from the night! I have sided with life. I will remain faithful to her, I don't mind a fearful-to-burn sun's defunct loves. I don't mind, I whose name is secret. I don't mind, I whose name is a forgotten rebellion. I am the clown whose art is to escape. He yells and I yell with him! I am the clown!

I yell out my skin! I yell out the world which would want to jail me! I yell and I vanish! I yell and I flourish! I yell and I will yell out my freedom!

Facing ill winds, don't be afraid to cross through yourself.

A wild beast! A wild beast! A wild beast! I will bring civility to what you leave behind.

Dismount! Dismount, my friends! For long is the river for the stones which turn their emotions into a bank. Where do you come from? Where do you go to? These questions have lost their meaning now that little tune of hatred gets back to its slutty choruses. Omit the ripped mouthed Célimène. Omit her! She who ensures her own prosperity into your little ideas bed and who, wrapping you up into your blood, stuns you with caresses. If you have to, play the nightingale. Embrace yourself with wind! Make love to the rain! Or drink, my boy, for in this world everything can be drunk. Keep your present busy with this delight which can be poured without yearning. Be happy a hundred times squandering your liver to increase your light. Break the yoke of too proud a jalousy and entrust your soul to the barrels angels. Welcome any appearance of this Clown and support him with a glass of life. Remember you are to mimic the vine arbour god so the clown may dress up, stand up, speak up and tame your tormented senses. Too long a time halts for a daring which brings up climate to your skin. Inebriated by your own blessed vapours, you know everything about void when you have drunk enough! Furthermore, this Clown is nothing but the Gods memory's brook flowing through your veins to overcome the raging love for a noiseless life's virginhood.

A drink! A drink for God's sake! One long shot and let's get drunk with beauty! A drink! A drink for God's sake! I cannot be without you. A drink! A drink for God's sake! I leave those swamps! A drink for the Clown who stuns himself from not envenoming anymore the possible reason to talk. Clown of me, it is in the impossible that I live. It is a night and day garment. It is a clay and rain house where mud kneads man, digs out his mouth to turn it into the infinite enjoyment well. Clown of me, more as more Clown of me, a drink! A drink for God's sake! Craving for all your water, more as more, for I can live no more but being your brook's clown, more as more, for I can live no more but being the brooks clown.

by Jean Lambert-wild

translated by Marc Goldberg

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