In 1999 I wrote two short, topical essays a month for the Web site FEED. I thought, then, that I'd re-examine these pieces a year later to see what had been on my mind and to see if I still agreed with what I'd written. Here they are. Take a look at my 1999 Journal for this month, below, and join me in the Wicked Pavilion to discuss it.

7 April, 1999

The intersection of philosophy and daredeviltry is not a well-trodden one, but perhaps only because the path there is so narrow. In the April 5th issue of the New Yorker, Calvin Tomkins interviews Philippe Petit, the funambulist (tightrope-walker, to you and me) who in 1974 became a celebrity of sorts, by secretly stretching a cable between the World Trade Center's twin towers and strolling through the air 1300 feet above New York. Now, Petit gravely informs Tomkins, he will top that performance by traversing a cable 1600 feet above the Little Colorado River, crossing not just from the canyon rim to an isolated mesa, but "from the known to the unknown." Petit, you see, is neither a clownish circus stuntman nor a thrill-seeking extreme sports nut. He is a black-clad, aphorism-spouting "high-wire artist"—in other words, precisely the sort of philosopher the world needs desperately right now.

Philosophy, when done well, is always a balancing act. According to Hegel, at the center of human reality lies "the abyss of nothingness," a void in which all the forms and norms of our daily lives are rendered meaningless. In times like ours—when the New York Times no longer puts scare quotes around the phrase "ethnic cleansing"—it is easy to agree with philosophers who've argued that we're all standing on the precipice of this abyss with our eyes squeezed shut. "Vertigo," wrote Sartre, "is dread to the extent that I am not afraid of falling over the precipice, but of throwing myself over." Sartre cribbed this from Kierkegaard, who regarded consciousness itself as a "vertigo of possibility." Despite their differences, both thinkers described the human condition as that of a man teetering on a precipice; and both suggested that we relieve ourselves of existential vertigo by leaping bravely into the void. Well, we've been falling, and falling (and falling) for at least half a century now, and one begins to suspect that we got some bad advice.

Perhaps we should have listened to Nietzsche instead. Didn't he write, in Thus Spake Zarathustra, that "Man is a rope, tied between beast and Ubermensch—a rope over an abyss"? Didn't he suggest, in that same book, that we should see the abyss from high above it, and not from inside? Perhaps vertigo is not the problem, then, but actually the solution to the human condition. The great French sociologist Roger Caillois, who lamented the fact that the transition to civilization implies the gradual repression of the power of vertigo, would have agreed. Caillois looked to the funambulist for inspiration: he who "only succeeds if he is sure enough of himself to rely upon vertigo instead of trying to resist it."

Why, one wonders, didn't the New Yorker's Tomkins draw an explicit connection to Petit from this important philosophical theme? Why—instead of wringing his hands over the (non-)question "But is it art?," and describing how awestricken Baryshnikov and Paul Auster are in Petit's presence—didn't Tomkins spend some time exploring the relevance of the forthcoming Canyon Walk to our lives right now? Okay, he is an art critic, and it's probably a little crazy to ask the New Yorker's editorial staff to devote its energy to philosophical speculation ("Calvin—cf. Phenomenology of Spirit?"), but that still doesn't mean broader reflection isn't needed. Robert Warshow put it best years ago, in the pages of the Partisan Review: the New Yorker deals with experience "not by trying to understand it, but by prescribing the attitude to be adopted toward it." And what we need nowadays is a little more understanding, and a lot less attitude.

23 April, 1999

As though in response to this country's need for a little comic relief, the topic of "clowns" burst into the pages of this week's newspapers. In Sunday's New York Times Magazine—a special issue devoted to "The Best Ideas, Stories, and Inventions of the Last Thousand Years"—playwright Wendy Wasserstein proclaimed Lucille Ball the "Best Clown" of the millennium. There's something "delightfully subversive," she suggested, about the scatterbrained antics of I Love Lucy's "Rebel in a Housedress." By Monday, however, grouchy New York Observer columnist Ron Rosenbaum was prompted to reveal that there's something grating about the "arrogance" of clowns; that the assumption that "clowns are somehow in themselves triumphs of the human spirit" is a false and pernicious one. So... who's right? If we go by Dakota Sioux philosopher Lame Deer's definition of a clown as "somebody sacred, funny, powerful, ridiculous, holy, shameful, visionary," the answer is: neither.

In keeping with the Times' cautiously non-normative approach to drawing up best-of lists, Wasserstein didn't provide her clown-judging criteria. Apparently, the mere virtue of Ball's gender, which enabled her slapstick to break "centuries of tradition," and pave the way for future comediennes, is a sufficient argument. Actually, I Love Lucy owed its success largely to Ball's refusal to break with traditions; ultimately the Lucy character is a prime example of the rebel-everyone-loves, whose eccentric attempts at reform only serve to bolster the status quo.

Rosenbaum, of course, would bridle at the suggestion that Ball's antic schemes somehow contributed to "the transformation of the lives of women" (which happens to be the topic of the Times Magazine's next special issue). Writing about Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator, which greatly influenced the making of Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful, he goes so far as to insist that the 1940 Hitler spoof makes "the arrogant assumption that even the most intransigent evil can be dissolved in the mocking laughter of the triumphant clown." Rosenbaum argues that, by portraying Hitler as a figure of fun, Chaplin's supposedly anti-war film only served the interests of Hitler's appeasers. Describing Benigni as a "grandiose prophet of death camp fun," he concludes that the only people who could possibly admire the Nazi-themed movies of these director-clowns are "tunnel-vision film buffs who have estheticized themselves into insensibility."

But Rosenbaum's idea of a "clown" as someone who tries and fails to be subversively funny is a deep slight to the real Best Clowns of the Last Thousand Years. One thinks immediately of Abbie "Revolution for the Hell of It" Hoffman, whom Norman Mailer described as a "ballsy wonder of a clown," and whose guerrilla prankishness frightened the hell out of a nation of I Love Lucy fans. Another clown in the Lame Deer tradition springs to mind—the incredibly arrogant and mocking Andy Kaufman, whom Rosenbaum himself described as "a hero for our time" in Esquire last year. These are the kind of clowns who make us uneasy, who force us to question our taken-for-granted assumptions, and who not incidentally make us laugh. Send them in!