The Joker
We must know that.
The pink suit announces comedy
but the face didn’t receive the memo,
or received it,
read it carefully,
and decided
that the joke
was on the joke.
He stands at the mouth of the stairwell
the way all threshold figures stand —
belonging to neither
the city above
nor the dark below,
commissioned by both,
employed by neither,
holding the trumpet in one hand
and the bottle in the other
like a man who has not yet decided
which truth
is his today.
Guimard knew this mouth.
He gave it iron teeth,
twisted them into vines,
made the descent
into the Paris Métro
look like something
the earth grew
rather than something
men had cut —
as if the city above
were merely the visible part
of a larger, stranger organism
that did its real work
underground,
in the dark,
in the particular smell
of electricity and transit
and ten thousand people
going somewhere
they did not entirely choose.
Meanwhile in Buenos Aires
the Subte carries different ghosts —
the tile walls hold
the echo of old migrations,
European grief
pressed into ceramic,
the political hauntings
of decades that did not end cleanly,
the tango that seeped
through every surface
like damp,
like memory,
like something
you could not quite
scrub out.
He stands at the top
of both staircases.
He stands at the top
of all staircases.
He has always been here,
at the place where
rational city
opens its mouth
and swallows citizens
whole.
Diogenes lived in a barrel
and told Alexander the Great
to move out of his sunlight.
The medieval fool
wore the king's colors
and said the true thing
inside the joke,
the way a knife
can be carried
inside a loaf of bread —
present, concealed,
available when needed.
The saltimbanque of Paris
performed on the boulevard
for coins,
his sadness
so perfectly costumed
it became a different thing —
Baudelaire watched him,
recognized the Pierrot
beneath the paint,
the pale silent one
who refuses to pretend
the high-society ambition
around him
is anything
other than a longer,
better-dressed
version of the same
comedy.
The compadrito of Buenos Aires
walked his corner
with the specific dignity
of someone
who has nothing
and has decided
to carry it
like a crown.
The pink suit
is in this lineage.
The unsmiling face
is in this lineage.
The trumpet and the bottle
are the oldest props
in the oldest act —
revelation in one hand,
oblivion in the other,
the performer's eternal
negotiation
with the night.
Discépolo knew the bazaar.
Cambalache —
the world as junk shop,
everything for sale,
wisdom and stupidity
priced the same,
the bible and the knife
in the same window display,
the tango not celebration
but a strict
improvised contract
with despair,
two bodies agreeing
to navigate
chaos together
for the length of a song,
which is all
anyone has ever agreed to,
which is all
any agreement
has ever really been.
The song is not joy.
The song is the decision
to keep moving
after you have understood
that the floor
is not solid
and the music
will not last
and your partner
is also afraid
and also pretending otherwise.
This is not a lesser thing.
This may be
the only thing.
Jarry invented Pataphysics
in a Paris that needed it —
the science of imaginary solutions,
the study of exceptions,
the philosophy that takes
the arbitrary universe
seriously enough
to laugh at it
with genuine rigor.
The joker at the stairwell
is a Pataphysician.
He has examined the evidence.
He has reviewed the data
on human ambition,
on the morning commute,
on the way people
move through the city
as though they have somewhere
important to be
when the city itself
has no opinion
on their importance.
He has reached his conclusions.
The pink suit
is his conclusion.
The unsmiling face
is his transit
The trumpet is his calculation —
that truth,
when it arrives,
arrives loud,
arrives brass,
arrives in the middle
of the silence
people have carefully
constructed around themselves
to avoid exactly this.
The bottle is his footnote:
that even the rigorous
need occasional relief
from their own rigor.
And here,
at the mouth of the Métro,
at the lip of the Subte,
at the top of every staircase
that has ever asked a person
to descend into
the necessary dark —
the joker sings.
Not because the music is good.
Not because the room is watching.
Not because singing solves
what needs to be solved
or answers
what needs to be answered.
But because the alternative
is to stand still
on the threshold
and let the stairwell
decide for you,
and the joker
has studied the stairwell
and found it
philosophically unqualified
to make that call.
The philosophers look down
from their balconies.
They have excellent views.
They have complicated thoughts
about what they see.
The fool is on the street.
The fool has the trumpet
and the bottle
and the pink suit
and the unsmiling face
that has looked at the same city
the philosophers are looking at
and reached a different conclusion —
not that it makes sense,
not that it doesn't,
but that the question itself
is the dance,
and the dance
is not a problem
to be solved
from a balcony
but a threshold
to be stood on,
laughed at,
played loudly into,
again,
and again,
and again,
until the stairwell opens
and even then —
especially then —
keep playing.
