Each tear you shed pierces my heart. Because you laughed, you say. And I have no answer. It had seemed trivial, in that moment. What you always do in similar small crises. Don’t you ever cry? you say. Many times, I think, but the drops are kung fued into chuckles, snickers, guffaws. I am from the Emmett Kelly school of tears. I sweep the spotlight around the arena, blow up the balloon till it pops, bury the aftermath in the sawdust. You are from the Annie Oakley Shaolin School, calmly shooting backwards over your shoulder with a hand mirror, bullseye every time.

We consult the Wallendas. Use a harness, they say. Look how many of us we lost before we learned. Pride goeth before the fall. Bodhidharma advises wall-gazing to achieve the absence of self and other. Bodhidharma sat in front of a wall for nine years and what did it get him? He cut his eyelids off to keep from falling asleep. We decide we are lovers, not pack animals, and decline to be harnessed.

You pull out the blades, I burn the balloons. We found a new school. No walls. No safety nets. If we fall, we fall as one. Ringling offers us a contract. We laugh until we cry.

Publisher’s Note:

See also “Tears of a Clown,” an essay by William Browning in The Paris Review (6 July 2016) about the Hartford Circus Fire of 6 July 1944, which broke out just as The Flying Wallendas were beginning their highwire act. Includes an iconic B&W photograph of Emmett Kelly in costume as Weary Willie the sad tramp clown, as he carried a bucket of water toward the Big Top:
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/07/06/tears-of-a-clown/

Bio: Robert L. Dean, Jr.