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Human Search Requests: Circus Stuff
I’ve been without internet at my house for many many weeks now. But now I’m in a new place and my connectivity finally got figured out, so I’m back in the saddle again.
Not having internet at my house was weird at first, but all I did was modify my habits, make new daily rituals of what I do when and where and then it was no big deal and everything seemed normal.
Moral of the story: you can get used to anything.
The upshot: I’ll have time now to get back into some of the heavier research I was doing for my carnival culture series before things got interrupted. I found myself unable to write anything of real depth - for the most part - while I didn’t have web access at my house. My research time was severely limited, but now it’s opening back up again.
Subject 1: Hospitality
So, to give a little teaser of where I’m headed next: I have two lines of research/writing I’d like to do which wrap around the carnival culture subject matter. Maybe you guys would like to help me gather good research scraps, clips and links for this. I want to write about “old-fashioned hospitality” and just what that means/meant - especially in its more extreme aspects.
It fits directly into the nomadic lifestyle aspect of the carnival stuff since hospitality is all about guests and hosts, travelers and and those who offer them shelter. Hospitality branches off, for me, into several different keywords, which I’d like to focus around the concept of the “publick house”. By that I mean not just a pub or bar, but inns and hotels, hostels and hospitals, bed & breakfasts and boarding houses (and flophouses). Places you can come and stay and have your needs taken care of, places of rest, refuge, sanctuary and shelter and the customs, rituals, values and lifestyles of those offering and receiving such refuge.
The types of information I like best for this sort of investigation are historical bits and fascinating facts from different cultures and time periods. Quotes from sacred texts (Bible, Koran, etc) would also be nice. What else? Use your imagination. If you’ve read any of the past carnival culture episodes, then you’ll have a feel for what my approach is with all of this.
Subject 2: Circus Symbolism
I’m also working on putting together a piece on “circus symbolism” which will be a complement to the regular carnival culture series, and which I may come back later and integrate into the whole thing. But for now it will probably be a stand-alone piece. I basically want to create a run-down of all the different archetypal characters you see in a “typical” Western circus (clown, acrobat, lion-tamer, bearded lady, etc), and the cultural webs of association which compose their meaning. I want to pull from alchemical, gnostic, esoteric (tarot and other occult), Christian, Egyptian and whatever sources I can find to really flesh out what each archetypal figure is all about. My aim with the carnival culture series has been to create a sort of “Rosetta Stone” with these things, and the circus symbolism piece will be no different from that. I also want to try and focus around a comparison of certain elements of yoga to the self-mastery required for various types of Western circus performance.
So a variety of different items would be useful here: probably first and foremost compiling or finding an exhaustive list of all the types of characters/figures in a circus. Next would be symbolic links from various sources to “amplify” their meanings (as Jung would do with mythological content to flesh out the meaning of dreams). Any help you guys could throw my way on this subject would be awesome.
I already realize that when I finalize my thoughts on all of this carnival culture stuff, I’m going to have to come back through and re-organize the whole thing, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Any questions?
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April 15th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
In regards to hospitality, if you haven’t read it before, you may want to check out SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gawain_and_the_Green_Knight
http://alliteration.net/Pearl.htm
Also, if you haven’t read any of Chaucer’s CANTERBURY TALES, you should. Many of them deal with stories of hospitality and breaches of hospitality (usually involving cuckolding the host’s wife).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Canterbury_Tales
A fine example is the Miller’s tale: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Miller%27s_Prologue_and_Tale
hope this helps!
April 15th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
Excellent! This totally helps. Another resource that springs to mind is the Biblical story of Lot, I think when the angels come to his house and the angry mob appears outside to “rape them” - according to Jack Chick. Lot offers his daughters to the mob instead, because the sanctity of hospitality is so great… Examples like this along with historical info about particular customs would also be wonderful!
April 15th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
In regards to the circus archetypes (and with a little bit of synchronicity thrown in as well) I am currently listening to some lectures/Q&A sessions Terrence McKenna did in Boulder a while back (my MP3s are called In Search Of The Original Tree of Knowledge).
There are 8 sections, each about an hour long, I think, and I was just out at lunch listening to section 3 where (about midway through) he compares the overall experience of the DMT trip to what he called “the circus archetype”. He goes on to discuss (albeit only for a few minutes) different symbolic aspects of the circus: The 3 center rings (ie: Dante’s Paradiso), the lady on the flying trapeze, the clowns, the ring master, how outside the main attraction are the weird and unusual, the side-show freaks and the carnival games. After lunch I came back to work and checked your site, saw this post…
I had thought it weird to describe the circus an archetype, as I had always thought of archetypes in the more traditional Jungian sense of “The Shadow” “The Anima/Animus” etc etc. but hey, why not make up more? Anyway, due to the synchronicity, I thought it worth mentioning.
I can get the MP3s to you if you’d like, just let me know.
April 15th, 2008 at 6:56 pm
Yeah, email me through my contact form at the main directory of this site. I’d like to hear what he has to say.
April 15th, 2008 at 11:04 pm
Thanks and got your email. Am downloading file as we speak. Tried to write back but it bounced for some reason. Oh well. Thanks again and look forward to listening to it.
See: this is exactly the kind of targeted specific information retrieval that a computer is not yet able to replicate…
April 15th, 2008 at 11:16 pm
Not sure if this’ll fit into the scheme of what you’re doing, but it seems like something you’d be interested in:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8887317701829510625
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freetown_Christiania
April 17th, 2008 at 4:38 pm
’scraps, clips and links… about “old-fashioned hospitality” ‘
Sure - why not? How about ancient Ireland?
“Turlough O’Carolan was an Irish harpist who lived in the mid-1600s and wrote pieces for the people he met and stayed with - playing music in exchange for hospitality. Tradition has it that the harp was played last thing at night, before people went to bed.” http://dedanaan.com/
“To refuse someone food and shelter where it is due would make the offender guilty of the offence of esa/in [literally, ‘driving away’]. Hospitality is the duty of every freeman. Refusal requires a compensation equal to their honor price.” http://www.ancientsites.com/aw/Article/256419#2
Vaguely connected to the general theme of nomaditry, as the Fenian bands would travel around defending the borders or hunting for half of the year and spend the other half relaxing at home; as per Hakim Bey:
“I would guess that the old life way of transhumancy always proved both enjoyable and practical, at least in small scale economies. Twice a year you get up and move, travel, change your life and even your diet - - a taste of nomadic freedom. But always the same two places. One place is typically more heimlich than the other — the village, the hearth; while the other place is typically wilder than the first, and this one might be called the place of Desire, of Summer.
In the tales of Finn Mac Cumal and his Fenian band we nearly always meet them at this wilder end of the spectrum, the greenwood, the landscape of the hunt which reaches “back” in time to a more golden pre-agricultural age, and also “aslant” in time — to Tir nan Og, the Land of Summer, realm of the Tuatha de Danaan, who are both the Dead and the Fairies. ”
http://www.t0.or.at/hakimbey/summer.htm
“The hierarchy of the time meant that a tuath was part of a mór-tuath (three or four tuaithe), which in turned joined together to form a cóiced, each cóiced (Munster, Ulster, Connaught, Leinster and Meath) forming Ireland as a whole unit. Every tuath, mór-tuath and cóiced had its own Rí, though no matter what grade of Rí they were, they ultimately were still the leader of one small tuatha aswell. Despite this hierarchy, decisions and power still lay largely close to the Gaelic people, decision making seeping upwards only in small amounts to the higher ranking Ríg, the mirror image of our modern system where power is held at the top and only seeps down to the Irish people in small amounts. ” http://craobhgalgreine.blogspot.com/20.../gaelic-ireland-craobh-gal-grine.html
All of which reminds me of this weird 1983 Semiotext(e) book I’m reading at the moment, “bolo’bolo” by a guy calling himself p.m. - basically a utopian thought-experiment where everyone lives in anarchistish communes and there is total freedom of movement between them backed up by a universal honour code of hospitality.
So there you go.