A Clown Looks Back

 

I wrote the above poem when I was young and clownish. More than 30 years ago. I possessed an undue share of immaturity and vanity. And silliness. Egomania. Eager to impress, quick to speak, slow to listen, possessing the confidence that only ignorance could produce. So much so, the college where I taught for a brief period arranged a Catholic missionary to deliver a lecture (sermon, if you prefer) on the Seven Deadly Sins to me.

When you see all the vehicles coming against you, you realise that you’re on the wrong road. That realisation made me chuck the lecturer’s job and leave the place altogether. That realisation made me quite another person. Without all those ego hangups.

I was reminded of those days again yesterday when the news of a death reached me. The deceased was one of the many who assisted me copiously in my self-realisation. Obviously, a lot of others rushed to my memory all of a sudden. Some memories have this peculiarity: they keep returning though you don’t want them. Julian Barnes might put it like this: “Some memories are the self-delusions of the defeated.”

What actually took place becomes less important than their impact on our psyche. When I hinted at this in a WhatsApp chat this morning, the friend on the other side wrote, “Forgive all, Tomichan.” I responded: “I have. Long ago. Not only that, I accepted that I deserved it: I was a clown.”

How do I feel about all that now, more than three decades later?

Time has made me less interested in what people thought of me and more interested in what became of them. Did life make them kinder? Did they discover their own vulnerabilities? Did they ever find themselves occupying the role of the clown?

Does time redistribute the roles we assign each other in youth?

The older I grow, the less certain I am about who the clowns really were. Youth exaggerates everyone’s virtues and defects. The fool may become wise as he grows older. The confident may become humbled. The mockers may discover their own frailties.

Time eventually removes the costumes from all of us.

As I look back, I realise that human beings easily turn one another into characters in their private dramas.

Memory is a slippery witness, as Julian Barnes taught me in his novel, The Sense of an Ending. The past is never simply what happened. It is what survives in memory, what we choose to emphasise, and what later experience teaches us to see differently.

Perhaps age does not give us better memories. Perhaps it gives us better questions. The certainty with which we once judged others and ourselves gradually dissolves. The clown, the audience, the mocker, and the mocked – all become more complicated than we remember.

That, perhaps, is the true sense of an ending: not arriving at final answers about the past, but discovering that the past still resists our attempts to explain it.