Less Warrior, More Clown
Less Warrior, More Clown
Resistance, slaying dragons, eating shame, the false Grail, bus work, and Jackass S03E01
I keep running into the meme that what men need to do—and of course, men need, above all, to do—what we need to do, to achieve our goals, to manifest our purpose, to make something of ourselves, is to be more of a “warrior,” and, I gotta say, I kindof feel the need to call bullshit.
You know, discipline, boundaries, goals, limits, rigor, all of that. Now, I don’t disagree that if you want to get things done then you do have to do things, and being all hard about it may well be what you have to do to force yourself to do things that…you don’t really want to do—but what if you don’t actually want to do them? Or need to do them? What if you really shouldn’t do those things?
Not that everything should just come easily, let alone automatically. I deeply appreciate Steven Pressfield’s model of what he calls Resistance—the “shadow cast by the innovative self’s sun,” the size of which is directly proportional to the scale of the creative expression that it constantly exerts itself to keep dormant within. Our endless quest for the Grail wouldn’t be much without encountering a few fire-breathing dragons along the way. Not only wouldn’t be much, but perhaps couldn’t be at all—success, creation, art, life itself wants to be earned to feel meaningful. It seems to be fundamentally human that the search for meaning is a struggle—and if so, the struggle to find meaning is precisely how we create meaning. No struggle, no resistance, no dragon, no meaning.
The now-well-known Buddhist concept of dukkha encapsulates better than anything else the very familiar and all-too-persistent ‘unsatisfactoriness’ of life, and—here’s the thing—we can either just experience that unsatisfactoriness (and of course, resent it), or we can become aware of the suffering—which makes it a bit less insufferable. Either way, we are still unsatisfied and striving—either from trying so very hard to find, excavate or conjure up the purpose that will finally justify our existence, or because the quest never ends, but we may gain come measure of comfort from the awareness that the never-ending quest for purpose is itself our purpose, or at least the only way to find purpose—that is, basically, the same thing.
Said another way, if you’re wondering what your purpose in life is, it’s to struggle, or do your best, or to walk the path to find your purpose—and to remain unsatisfied along the way, because you feel like you don’t know what your purpose is. Just keep moving along the path, even it feels unsatisfactory. It may seem like a false Grail, but the suffering along the way will serve to reveal a bit more purpose. As Toko-Pa Turner writes, “Getting caught up in the question ‘What is my purpose? is like looking for shoes instead of walking forward.” See, the Grail is not the purpose or the goal. The Grail is a symbol for purpose, and your purpose is the search for the Grail—or, a papoose in a gale, a bush on a nail, or a pair of galoshes in a pail, or any and all of the above.
All of this might seem to point us further in the direction of training real hard to be a bad-ass enough big dark knight to go get that glowing-green goal of the grail, and no doubt, life really does require more than a big kitchen spoonful of old-fashioned sticktoitiveness. So be more warrior, man, and slay that to-do list, right?
Well, how about this “warrior” thing then? I mean, first of all, I don’t have the right tattoos, but, more importantly, there’s something missing even from a reasonably balanced characterization of the so-called warrior, the foundational example being Moore and Gillette’s classic treatment of the four fundamental archetypes of their so-called “mature masculine”—the King, Warrior, Magician, and the Lover. It’s not enough to think of the warrior as energetic, decisive, and courageous—and, let’s not forget, also likely unfeeling, power-hungry, and barbaric. To this, writer Warren Farrell went so far as to say that most of our actual warriors are, as he puts it, “armed prostitutes” who expect their bodies to be used to protect the lives of others at the expense of their own lives. Disposable “war slaves,” warriors are “not so much an elite class as a dead class.” Not so sexy, not decisive, not free, and not really the paradigm that I’m super psyched to embody in my ongoing journey of life, and especially not simply because I happen to have a penis.
Now, I do have some warrior in me, no doubt about it, but for the most part it just…turns me off. I never wanted to be that guy, and when I run into that guy, or when other guys want me to be that guy, what I want to do is leave the room. Getting in my face with your stone-cold third-stage man, silently demanding that I do the work in a particular way just does not fire up what bell hooks might have called my “primal positive passion”. Certainly, there are times I could use having my feet held to the fire—but—but, but the whole point of this piece is to say, what we, and first of all I really need right now may well not be more warrior. In fact, I think it’s less warrior, and more clown.
A friend of mine came to visit the other day and he was all wound up about how the electrical system in the short bus that he recently purchased wasn’t working properly. He felt misinformed, naïve, and ripped off. We were talking about how to fix the wiring and I said, “look man, four 100 amp-hour AGM batteries will only cost you a grand, so be it, no big deal, you still got a great deal on the bus,” but he kept shaking his body and making argh sounds like he was trying to swallow not a small lizard. Recognizing the all-too-familiar symptoms, I had to ask, “Are you feeling…shame?” Because you see, shame does feel a lot like trying to eat a spiny, serpentine and still-alive reptile.
He stopped and looked back at me and sighed and squeezed out a “…Yes.” My friend was stuck in a shame loop about having not been better informed about DC circuits and inverters and lithium iron phosphate batteries. Now, perhaps he needs to embody more warrior, just figure it out, get the job done—but what about the shame? It was the shame that was keeping him from acting, from moving, from doing—and so, how do we process all of this shame?
In my own life, my shame at having, just for example, gotten engaged twice and not married, at having started a company called—get this—“Ad Monsters” (meaning, er, ugh, big companies that sell a lot of advertising), at not having known more clearly what to do with myself—or, more accurately, at not having pursued it more directly (I see you, you little warrior!), at having become a stay-at-home solo drinker in the prime of my pre-middle-age—let’s just say that my own shame has kept me from doing a lot of things, and I think much moreso than a lack of warrior-esque drive. One of the primary ideas about this warrior thing that we’ve all been sold is the willingness to do the work even when it’s not easy, but I think that warrior energy is better directed at doing hard work when and if it’s for the sake of something notably positive. When faced with having to dig oneself out of a dark, stinking hole in the psyche, the hard-working warrior is often straight-up blocked by something even more powerful.
What I’m saying is that shame is just as much a cause of inaction than inaction is of shame. Overall, we’re all part of a sort of lazy-shame ouroboros, and at the moment, it’s shame that’s eating lazy’s tail. For example, even though it does seem that we have a problem getting people to do jobs, it’s not because people are lazy—it’s because most jobs suck. And yes, it’s hard to do a job that sucks, but even more important is that doing jobs that suck makes people feel deeply ashamed, and we shouldn’t necessarily just be sucking it up to do more suck-work.
Instead, what I’d say is that what we need to is more of the clown work. I think we’re are all so ashamed of where we’ve gotten ourselves, and also of our own individual behavior—and I mean our behavior as a species and as a culture, and also our behavior specifically as men, as well as my own, at times—that we are just straight-up paralyzed by shame. We just don’t know what to do because it seems like a lot of things we’ve done have been wrong—and now anything we do could be wrong—and so it seems better not to do anything at all.
What is the clown work? Say that again with me people: “What is the clown work?” When I think of Clown Work what comes immediately to mind is in season 3, episode 1 of Jackass wherein one jackass positions himself in front of a “12 inch, diesel powered” wood chipper into which his comrades toss melons, ground beef, sweaty skater shoes, frozen squid, and large, whole fish. The subject then directly faces the full output of the “two-hundred horsepower unit,” leaving him “caked in thick, liquified sludge from head to toe,” according to the Woodchipper entry in the Jackass wiki. Yes, that’s like Wikipedia, but for Jackass.
The point of the Clown work is to figure out what you’re ashamed of and let it smack you directly in the face like high-velocity pulverized seafood—to give yourself the opportunity to look not strong, courageous, and all-knowing, but weak, silly, foolish, cowardly, naïve—and plastered with soul vomit. The only way to diminish the power of shame is to get it out into the light—and when we do, some alchemy comes into play and what seemed like such a tragedy is freed to metamorphose into comedy.
In the case of my young friend, accepting that he had gotten clowned in his bus purchase allowed him to move on to the work of getting the wiring fixed. In my own case, getting in the habit of telling my own clown stories on first dates sure got me out of a lot of second dates—and also, eventually, got me unstuck enough to rid myself of my monster of a business, stop drinking so much, and start paying attention to my intuition, which was what had been trying to tell me all along what it was that I really wanted to be doing, or at least the direction that I should be heading in order to more likely stumble upon it.
As Richard Rohr writes, “I have prayed for years for one good humiliation a day, and then, I must watch my reaction to it.” He’s using the root sense of the word here, saying that what we need is to be brought down to humus—that is, down to earth—and that, more than anything else, it’s humility—and humor! that we need to polish the mirror. We have to celebrate the inner fool—and give him some stage time. We can’t warrior our way through this one, guys—we gotta do the Clown Work.
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Love reading?
You might enjoy some of my other writing on the subjects of masculinity and archetypes — in particular, Why I No Longer Cringe At Being Called a “Kitesurfer” and my memoir in progress — as well as these books:
Dass, Ram, and Rameshwar Das. 2014. Polishing the Mirror: How to Live from Your Spiritual Heart.
Farrell, Warren. (1982) 1994. The Myth of Male Power: Why Men Are the Disposable Sex.
hooks, bell. 2004. The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love.
Moore, Robert, and Douglas Gillette. 1991. King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine.
Pressfield, Steven, and Seth Godin. 2011. Do the Work: Overcome Resistance and Get out of Your Own Way.
Rohr, Richard. 2020. Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life.
…stick around — I’ve got some questions for you…
What are the archetypes—or stereotypes—that you embody most?
How has being a “warrior” been effective for you — or not?
Got any good examples of doing the clown work?
Who’s an example of someone out there who’s in touch with their inner clown?