The Adult, the Artist and the Circus

When something joyous, which made our childhood particularly worth while, fails to delight us as adults, we go through the apparently serene process of assuming a lofty attitude toward the "outgrown" pleasure. Upon close inspection, however, this process proves to be far from serene. Take our grownup disdain of the circus, for instance ...

[At] the very thought of "circus," a swarm of long-imprisoned desires breaks jail. Armed with beauty and demanding justice and everywhere threatening us with curiosity and Spring and childhood, this mob of forgotten wishes begins to storm the supposedly impregnable fortifications of our Present ... [Under] the influence of a powerful anaesthetic known as Pretend, we forget not only the circus but all our other sorrows, including the immortal dictum of that inexorable philosopher, Krazy Kat: It's what's behind me that I am ...

To the objection that the three-ring circus "creates a confused impression," I beg to reply: "Speaking of confused impressions -- how about the downrush of a first-rate roller coaster or the incomparable yearning of the Parisian balançoirs à vapeur ... ?"

Let us not forget that every authentic "work of art" is in and of itself alive and that, however "the arts" may differ among themselves, their common function is the expression of that supreme aliveness which is known as "beauty" ...

[I wish] to state (1) that an extremely intimate connection exists between Con Colleanos' forward somersault (from and to a wire in mid-air) and Homer's Odyssey (2) that a sure method of understanding Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps, is to study the voluminous precision and frugal delicacy of Mr. Ringling's "Ponderous Pachyderms under the direction of the greatest of all animal trainers" (3) that El Greco, in painting, and 'Ernest Clark, in his triple somersaulting double-twisting and reverse flights through space" give strikingly similar performances, and (4) that the fluent techniques of seals and of sea lions comprises certain untranslatable idioms, certain innate flexions, which astonishingly resemble the spiritual essence of poetry.

-- E.E. Cummings Vanity Fair October 1925