The Clown

“I felt sick. I forgot to say that not only do I suffer from depression and headaches but a I also have another, almost mystical peculiarity: I can detect smells over the telephone.  . . . I had to get up and clean my teeth. Then I gargled with some of the cognac that was left, laboriously removed my makeup, got into bed again, and thought of Marie, of Christians, of Catholics, and contemplated the future. I thought of the gutters I would lie in one day. For a clown approaching fifty there are only two alternatives: gutter or palace. I had no faith in the palace, and before reaching fifty I had somehow to get through another twenty-two years.”

-Heinrich Böll, The Clown

Contemplating failure almost every day, I slowly turn from Marie into Hans.

I have always been attracted to Hans-like characters, but it never occurred to me  that I was reaching towards myself actually.

All these desperate missions, all this thirst for saving someone who cannot properly manage oneself -

maybe it is all just a fight with my inner desperate-not-capable-of-doing-anything-wannabe-artist-and-free-thinker demons.

I have never been a woman, then.

The kind of woman who ruins everything through her delicate, vulnerable gestures.

I am a living statue, without time for shaving my legs or arm pits,

dressing in wedding gowns on the streets -  just like Amanda Palmer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y00XnqSoUrY

Photography by Doru Moraru