Wandering Soul

The person compelled to clown manufactures the appearance of feeling to defend against experiencing his own feelings. He falls into a persona compulsion. The public face he turns to the world comes to substitute for his own, even does so perhaps to himself. Playing roles substitutes for being and owning true self. Thus all the emotion that would naturally be transmitted to his ego for sorting and and translation into feeling, amasses a change of energy that fuels the compulsion to wear masks all the time, getting just the right mask for the occasion, embellishing it, improving it constantly, expanding upon it.

The clown mirrors to us for our inspection our emotions and fantasies, in which we may find again the rudiments of a feeling life and its symbols. He himself, however, stays trapped behind the mirror, living on the other side of the glass, looking out. His humor freezes him in his chosen category, making an ego-identity out of an artifact, letting surfaces do the work of the missing interior reality. Clowning substitutes for identity.

haunting desire

Many of us have experienced telepathy–even the simple kind, when we think of a friend a second before she calls. We can’t explain it, any more than we can explain the felt presence of the recently dead. Perhaps what we sense is not the ghost of the person but the ghost of the pattern.

“Some things that are invisible and untouchable can nevertheless be seen and felt.”