542
PARTISAN REVIEW
looking ridiculous. He sneaks irreverent meanings into our trage–
dies, puts straitjackets on bronze soldiers, urinates on sanctified
emblems, takes a scroll of parchment and blows it like a trumpet.
With terrible pity he induces us to follow him into the circus.
Let's go, then,
to
the big top, where, from the shoulders of the
iron-bar-bending muscle king, the princess of the trapeze thrusts her
tiny buttocks skyward and closes herself like a book. See a polar bear
riding a bicycle while clutching a parasol, a seal bouncing a ball on
the tip of its nose, a flower-bedecked gelding on its hind legs, step–
ping rhythmically to music. A tiger, with velvet paws, strokes a
haughty pet lamb who munches on the tamer's grass skirt. Tiny
girls with inscrutable smiles jump over flaming stars . The band–
leader keeps rolling his huge baton underfoot. The sweaty, throaty
smell of fear pours out of the trumpets and distends the huge dome.
There's the knife thrower tying his wife to a wooden board . His
hands tremble; she takes tranquilizers. A sharp-eyed monkey makes
rounds on a unicycle.
The smell of stale possibilities makes you puke, so, while sitting
on a bench in the mental asylum, you wish for the revolutions of the
circus. You do have the patience now to place a board on a rolling
cylinder, and then another cylinder and another board. You keep
expanding the precarious structure under your feet until you are so
high up you have to shield your eyes with your hand and ask: Where
is the circus? And how can one climb down from here? You rose a
little too high and now are afraid to stand on the swaying tower all
alone.
I meditate leisurely in the corridor while standing around with
about ten others, waiting for our nourishing if bland meal. The oth–
ers don't believe they are sick, and I don't believe I am, either. Our
present state is worse than we ourselves are. We are insane because
we are considered insane, and our loved ones need us less than we
need them. When examined closely, each case history is unique , no
patient matches his disease. Diagnoses reveal more about the com–
monplaces of medicine than about us; I am buoyed by the realiza–
tion that nothing human can be clearly defined.
But however much I would like to , I cannot fool myself; each
station of my life was an error. I was forever up in arms, for some–
thing, against something, first as an officer of an occupying army,
then as a party functionary of a satellite state. I helped establish an
