Clowns! Surreal estate agents. We love them – and we fear them. We love them for their jollity, and we’re amused by their adroit clumsiness and physicality, their crude, rude, and freakish humor. The name “clown” comes from colonus originally “clod” – earthy, dirty, with pratfalls that keep clowns faithful to the ground. So, what’s to fear?

For me, it’s the weird combo of a drunkard’s bulbous red nose on a corpse-white face. Clowns are inebriated zombies! Crazy, huh? If a bunch of zombies broke into a liquor store and guzzled whiskey, a slew of clowns would reel out onto the street. Crazier yet, there is a drunken corpse deep in the circus of our minds. (Do you feel the cosmic shudder I do?)

It is fearful and wonderful to meet the very presence of death in life. Clowns make me feel the mortal fact of me, the absurdity of thinking that I, the walking dead intoxicated with life, am anything but a clod, an earthy and dirty experiment in the workshop of evolution. The joke’s on us if we take seriously this drastic and dangerous undertaking called life, risking everything on making sense out of nonsense.

To love and trust the world we’re born into is a clown act, because trust is as blind as love. And change is never a choice. Very like clowns crammed into a puny car, we’re all jammed together in the now. The past is dead. Whatever future we imagine is dead. And every alternative to the present trips us up.

As we run around each other in a daily frenzy trying to escape now, our thoughts float away like helium balloons. Try as we might, there are no rational arguments among the clowns. Here’s what the master punster James Joyce has to say in Finnegans Wake about the entire spiritual, philosophical, and artistic history of our world: “Herenow chuck english and learn to pray plain. In the buginning was the woid, in the muddle is the sounddance and thereinofter you’re in the unbewised again. Kick nuck. Knockcastle! Muck! And you’ll nose it, O you’ll nose it, without warnward from we.”

You’ve got to be kidding me.