by Gary Borjesson
Last year my wife and I went to the circus when it came to town. I expected I’d enjoy it, but I was shocked by how much I enjoyed it. I was thrilled and inspired by the whole intimate spectacle, under a tent with a high top, facing the central ring and our fellow spectators across the way. It was moving in some of the same ways a great musical or theatrical performance is. But the circus had something extra.
I left the tent looking forward to next year, when The Flynn Creek Circus would be back in town. This year we went again, and loved it. At the risk of breaking the spell, of disenchanting the marvel by speaking of it, I want to say a few words about what makes a circus great. The kind folks at the Flynn Creek Circus have given me permission to publish photos from their show. (Visit their website if you want to see more, or find out where you can see them perform.)
1. History
Years ago my wife and I visited Knossos on the island of Crete. This was the center of the ancient Minoan civilization. (Settlement there began as early as 7000 BCE.) Among the ruins were frescos that once adorned the walls of the palace. One depicted a circus-like scene, in which two youths surrounded a bull while a third launched themselves over it. At the time it struck me as extraordinary that this image should have endured so long in so prominent a place. Looking back, I imagine it endured because it is humanly compelling and instantly relatable, depicting as it does a kind of glorious play, as daring as it was virtuosic.
In Egypt at Beni Hasan, 4000-year-old tomb paintings show women juggling. In the middle ages, jugglers, minstrels, tightrope walkers, and animal handlers traveled to different fairs and market towns. They were widely admired, but lived on the often seamy margins—an association that has followed circuses ever since. The sometimes grotesque and transgressive spectacles made the shows that much more riveting. I’m reminded of Robertson Davies’ absorbing novel, World of Wonders, where a young boy runs away to join the “World of Wonders,” a traveling carnival that is at once seedy, grotesque, and wondrous. Read more »
Socrates, snub-nosed, wall-eyed, paunchy, squat,
No one knows if it was really in the state prison, the ruins of which are visible today outside the ancient Agora of Athens, that Socrates was kept during the final days before his execution, so many times has the area been destroyed and reconstructed— walking past it sends a chill down my spine. Ancient Greece is visceral and vivid because it entered my imagination early in life; some of the most cherished tales of my childhood came from the crossovers of Hellenistic history and legend, such as the one in which Sikander (Alexander the Great) is accompanied by the Quranic Saint Khizr, in pursuit of “aab e hayat,” the elixir of immortality, or the one about the elephantry in the battle between Sikander and the Indian king Porus, or of the loss of Sikander’s beloved horse Bucephalus on a riverbank not far from Lahore, the city where I was born. I became familiar with ancient Greece through classical Urdu poetry and lore as well as through my study of English literature in Pakistan, but I would read Greek philosophers in depth many years later, as a student at Reed college; I would subsequently discover Greek influence on scholars in the golden age of Muslim civilization while working on a book on al-Andalus— the overlooked, key contribution of Arabic which served as a link between Greek and Latin, and its later offshoots that came to define the cultural and intellectual history of Europe.