State of Mime

Jean Bgere

Issue 37 * Spring 2016

The trapedzoidal blackening of one eye; another starred in some feeble suggestion of grammar-school significance; the hands, flattened against imaginary glass, against all talk, against the commonsense palaver of the everyday; the mime is before us, ridiculous subject, for sure, but also: believer, necessary reminder of the place our imaginations go when unneeded in contemporary life, which is always.

How is it that you never see a fat mime?

The mime uses feints to deny flesh, to imagine the black into which erodes meaning, the mere suggestion of story.

We hate the mime because she reminds us of what dogs us every day, what blows us around, what tugs us to and fro by delineating our suffering as gesture.

We give money—one, two, five paper scraps--, and in giving is the final insult: that we only have that to give and nothing more befitting such an obscenely obscure commonality. We've traded away all else on a false sense of wonder, on the years of labor for the sake of a number, a number you trade at long last for what? For the piteous motions of a pale and painless wight.

This discrepancy galls.

I'll admit a love for the mime over the clown, the mime being a reminder and the clown a distraction. The mime may move us, but the clown threatens. The mime is the interior made external; the clown, in the end, is the exterior made flesh, the superficial pushed to a state of madness. The clown must be seen (and heard); the mime can be safely ignored.

The mime is gestural, and was so long before our technologies became so. Those cameras and phones, though, those games, have turned us all into impromptu mimes, into those hated figures, imagining our ways through imagined forests, one step and many miles removed from the lives we should be living, the lives in which the "ought" outweighs the need, where communication has come to supplant connection, where base concerns, that which we used to celebrate, those things that consume us, have all been subsumed into addressing the more immediate concern: the need to actively desire power and be blessed by its idiot approval.