The Wallace Bros. Circus parade, Albion, Michigan, 1904.

Long ago, whenever a witness to especially odd or strange phenomenon, my friend Frank would turn and address you as though you were a character in a John Waters film.  "Taffy," he would say, wide-eyed and sly at the same time, "It looks like the Circus is in town."

I never knew whether he was quoting a line from Divine or some actual person or whether he'd just made it up, but he said it in a way that made you realize that nothing out of the ordinary ever passed by Frank he was too high or distracted to notice.  Plus it was his way of acknowledging the wackiness Life could send your way, and a circus certainly did seem to embody the otherworldly quality of existence in those days when, between careers, I lived in the attic room above him in an asbestos-shingled Victorian in a less-than-fashionable part of East Liberty, a section of Pittsburgh somewhere between the tonier Squirrel Hill and the trendy Shady Side. 

It was a summer as I recall of especially good dope accompanied by sundry pharmaceuticals from our mutual friend and supplier The Pill, and a prodigious amount of alcohol.  Sitting on Frank's porch, partially hidden by overgrown gas blue hydrangeas, watching the world go by while mostly dazed and confused, it did feel like a slightly deranged sideshow atmosphere surrounded us.  Peculiar goings-on and light trails when you moved your hand or tried standing up fast.  Odd behavior from the fat couple across the street, mother and son, who sat on their porch swing and talked about you as though you couldn't hear.  A tough kid in the triplex next door in a wife-beater who did just that to his girlfriend and held their baby like a sack of potatoes when he got in and out of the old pick-up with an Iron City beer in his free hand, laying rubber when he took off with his buddies.  It was the summer of Spiders from Mars and Wang Chung and old favorites like Yes ("I've Seen All Good People Turn Their Heads") and jugglers and even once an acrobat or some kind of contortionist found asleep on the sofa in the morning.  It felt like a circus had come to town.  It felt like Fellini made documentaries.

Now, the experience of Strangeness, drug-induced or Mystical, can feel like a Visitation, resemble the arrival of a foreign entity if you will, so the notion didn't originate with Frank, but it is this sense of Circus that is interesting to me, at least insofar as helping to understand not only the dissonance but the allure of that dissonance in the experience.  How do you describe that?  

I had considered the title, "The Presentation of Truth in the Form of a Circus as an Antidote to Ennui," except it sounded precious.  In any event, and because I can, I want to therefore abandon for the time being the previous metaphor of the Blogging Nanny (you can scroll down to check that out or ignore and no, I've never been or had one, but that was never the point); I want instead to focus your attention on two seemingly unrelated passages from articles in the November 8th 2007 issue of The New York Review of Books.  Both in their fashion help illustrate the special challenges of getting at the Truth in these fiendishly difficult times.

In the first, entitled "The Moment Has Come to Get Rid of Saddam," the author Mark Danner writes, "Surely one of the most agonizing attributes of our post-September 11 age is the unending need to reaffirm realities that have been proved, and proved again, but just as doggedly [have been] denied by those in power, forcing us to live trapped between two narratives of present history... At the center of our national life stands the master narrative of this bifurcated politics: the Iraq war, fought to elimnate the threat of weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to exist..."

I haven't seen Frank in many years but I can feel him nudge me whenever some televised mouthpiece of the current regime talks about "progress" in the war on terror ("Taffy, are they with the circus?  Is the circus in town?").  But wait! I want to say.  There's more! 

Malise Ruthven, in a review of books under the title "How to Understand Islam" writes about competing truths or contested versions of truth when it comes to religion.  "In a globalized culture where religions are in daily contact with their competitors," Ruthven writes, "denial of pluralism is a recipe for conflict."  No kidding.  The real problem, however, is that "acceptance of pluralism relativizes truth.  Once it is allowed that there are different paths to ultimate truth, an individual's religious allegiance becomes a matter of personal choice, and choice is the enemy of the certainties that religions -- especially monotheistic ones -- are supposed to uphold.  Fundamentalism is one contemporary response to the crisis of faith brought about by awareness of differences..."

Now, I'm warning you: because I do this for fun and for free, waiting for the coffee to brew in the morning or the turkey meatloaf to heat up in the evening, it may take me a while to pull this all together.  I have a full life, my precious tiger cubs, my darling fire-eaters, and like most autodidacts, I'm working without a net, I'm thinking on my feet on the high wire here in the Big Top, so hold your horses, okay?  Give me some room.  I could fall.

The point, as I see it, is that pluralism is just as scary a threat to some people (Christians in this case, although Ruthven's article is about understanding Islam) as the challenges (or "attacks" as they see it) to the "official" version of our reasons for going to war.  The political and the religious, of course, have been cynically and purposefully intertwined by their leaders -- I'm not making the connection, you see, but the damage has been done, and even if you aren't involved, you're caught in it.  Denial of pluralism -- a refusal to see that your religious convictions are a matter of choice -- is inextricably related to denial of the historical truth of the war; neither the "master narrative" nor the Bible, in this context, can be open to interpretation.  So you're going to have some conflict.  Which makes for a kind of bifurcated -- bi-polar -- experience on several levels, mind, body, spirit.  Crazy-making.  Crazy talk.  Like, what's going on?  Like, did the circus come to town?  Has everyone lost their minds?

And if I could embed music here, I would give you what's playing right now.  Yes (what else?).  "Long Distance Runaround" which Frank always said Jon Anderson said was about Kent State.  "I still remember the dream there."  

Wow.  Talk about crazy times.  Talk about bifucated politics.  Talk about a crisis of faith.

To be continued.