The perfect pairing
Vesti la giubba. If you know, you know. (If you don’t, search it on YouTube. You won’t be disappointed.) Put on the costume, the makeup and make them laugh! Ignore that your heart is in pieces, as we all know, the show must go on. Canio the clown, while a clown, is not a cheerful one. He reminds us that the most devastating things wear the most beautiful faces.
I learned this pretty young, albeit instinctively because who even has the language for this feeling in elementary school.
As I mentioned in a previous essay, I took piano lessons, took vocal lessons, played clarinet. Classical music has no dearth of tragic operas and pieces in devastatingly minor keys. My piano teacher “assigned” a viewing of Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell and the whole story was a heartbreaker. But her dying aria, with the line “…remember me….but ah, forget my fate”.
I recognized something in that. Not grief, because I was only in high school, but recognition. The same feeling I got from Police songs, Stephen King’s Carrie and other works that refuse to look away from when people actually do their worst.
All beauty comes from pain. Art comes from pain. Laughter comes from pain. Don’t believe me? Tell me why, then many comedians: Robin Williams, Chris Rock, Adam Sandler, do so well in dramatic roles?
Ask Imagine Dragons.
This is not to say suffering is romantic, not at all. However, as an artist, you have to feel something to make others feel it. There’s a quotation: No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. (Robert Frost) For the creator who hasn’t gone to the very nether of their soul or noticed the shadows cast by the sun, it’s difficult to evoke emotion through one’s work.
This is why I adore dark fiction. It goes where the light of the soul doesn’t reach. It winnows into your deepest thoughts and says,
I see you, darling. I know. You are not alone in this.
That’s why I write what I write. I don’t write to frighten. I write to reveal what’s already there.
So tell me, beloved, what has reached into the cracks and made you feel seen? Tell us in the comments. We’re waiting.
I’ll see you when the candle finally burns out.
Dahlia
