Today I Go to the Circus

Last updated on: March 24, 2017 at 7:40 am by John Mark N. Reynolds

Today I Go to the Circus 2017-03-24T07:40:41-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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Right after I write this, I will go the circus and I hope to learn something from the experience of the Big Top while I still can.

I have been to Ringling Brothers and Barnum Bailey Circus twice, once as a child and once as a parent of children. I have also been to a few smaller circuses and to carnivals with circus-like features. I cannot say that I enjoyed the circus at any age, though I was one of the last generations to be told that kids love the circus. I did not even like the circus, at least the way I was told I would. Kids were supposed to love clowns, and with the exception of Bozo (cartoons and stories by Dad), I did not. Too many shows were making clowns scary on television, though perhaps the image that sealed the deal was from The Blue Angel. Somehow I bumped into this film as a kid and clowns were never funny again.

I am not the kid who dreamed of running away with the circus, but I am the kid who heard people say I should dream of running away with the circus! (Not my parents . . . who shared my “meh” attitude, I think.) Fundamentally, the circus interested me because it was full of things that were supposed to be full of wonder, but never seemed that wonderful. I have never actually seen a seal with a ball on his nose at any circus, but from my father to my children, people have shown us such images. The circus is a failed promise.

So why then am I going to the circus?

Oddly, I am going because it is dying, at least as Americans have known it. The circus is a very old form of entertainment and millions of people still go, but the circuses as great spectacle and not just nostalgia are nearly gone. FDR kept the circus trains running for morale in World War II, a future President might stop them for the same reason.

Perhaps, the death of the circus may be overstated. Perhaps the “greatest show on earth” can no longer make it, but even with declining ticket sales many people still go, just not enough to justify a huge arena size event. Will the circus return to the roots of a spectacle for small towns that bring live entertainment, three-dimensional (!) fun, to people who tire of screens?

I don’t know, I cannot be sure, but this much is true: great fiction used the circus as an image and I intend to see why. Tonight when I step into a great canvas tent, I will do what Mark Twain could do. I will see animals, acrobats, and clowns and wonder. I can also watch people and see what works there and what does not.

If not now, then maybe never. Educators take note: at least one great mind thought we could use some circus in our pedagogy. Charles Dickens used the Mr. Slearly’s circus to stand in opposition to Gradgrind’s evil “fact” based school in Dickens’ novel Hard Times. The circus was the world of dreams, imagination, and hope, though nobody could, quite, live there as a person was meant to live. The tinsel was not real and Dickens knew it. The performers were often frauds and a bit roguish, but Dickens liked them anyway. He thought they served as a rebuke to the practical men of affairs who were choking the life out childhood even then and who have commodified everything down to our very dreams since then.

If Dickens could see something in the circus, perhaps I can too while it is still possible to do so outside archival material.

And here I have a bit of advice from an older man to the young men out there . . . when just a boy, it occurred to me that the World War I generation was dying and that soon . . . very soon . . . I would not be able to talk to those who knew Russia before Communism or America before the Great War. If I waited until I was a grownup, it would too late and so it would have been.

I am glad for the few letters written, for talking to those older folk who were around, and doing what could be done to experience the world of Titanic and Teddy Roosevelt from people who saw it all with their own eyes. Now it is too late. There is no man alive who stood in the trenches of World War I.

There are now few who had CS Lewis in class (died 1963) and every day more of the Greatest Generation slips away. If you can speak to them, learn from them, be still and see the world through eyes that were young when Franklin Roosevelt America to war.

When you can, do what they did as they did it. Fly in a biplane, watch film that uses film, and dress up to go to a ballgame. If nothing else, turn the television off, if you can, “a traveling circus may pass your way . . . make the best of them, not the worst.”

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