Coming Unglued

by Frank Crocitto and illustrations by Leslie Bender, March 11, 2009

It never ceases to amaze me how integrated every-body’s life is. I don’t have to look any further than my own life to see how integrated every little piece of it is. One of the connections that keeps coming up for me is this—I’ve played a number of parts in my life. When I was on the stage, I played a lot of parts—Mercutio in “Romeo and Juliet,” Starbuck in “The Rainmaker”—lots of roles. One of my favorite parts was in a play by a Russian named Leonid Andreyev.

The play is about a man who is fed up with society. He appears at a circus and he’s wearing a top hat and tails. He says he wants to join the circus. Everybody knows that he doesn’t belong in the circus, that he obviously comes from another world and yet the circus people accept him, all the clowns, the bareback riders, and tight-rope walkers. They ask him what he can do. They keep plying him with questions, trying to determine what his value as a circus commodity would be, but they’re unsuccessful.

It finally comes out that he has the ability to speak philosophically, so they concoct an act. His role is to run out to the center of the ring and start telling the truth. Every once in a while, in the middle of his speech, a clown comes racing out from the side and whacks him with a stick. The act is called “He Who Gets Slapped.” As you might guess, this is also the name of the play.

It is a tremendous play, and I played the man in the top hat. It’s a part I’m still playing. In order to give you a small taste of the power of this play, of why I’m so impressed by it, let me quote this small passage from it:

“If I should gather from all the world all the goodly words that men have among them, tender speeches, sonorous songs, and loose them like a flock of birds into the joyous air; if I should gather all the smiles of children, the laughter of women whom none have yet wronged, the caresses of gray-haired mothers, the hard hand-clasp of a friend, and fashion all these into an incorruptible wreath for some splendidly beautiful head; if I should go all the earth over and gather all the flowers, whichsoever there are on this earth in the forests, in the fields and meadows, in the gardens of rich men, in the depths of the waters on the blue bottom of the ocean; if I should gather all the precious glittering stones, if I should unearth them in impassable ravines, in the darkness of deep mines, pluck them out of kings’ crowns and the ear lobes of rich women and pile all these, both stones and flowers in one glittering hill; if I should gather all the fires, whichsoever ones there are burning in all creation, all lights, all rays, all flare-ups, explosions, soft radiances, and with the glow of a single great conflagration illumine the universes as they shudder, yea, even then I still would not name Thee, would not crown, would not glorify Thee fitly—FREEDOM!”

The nature of all spiritual traditions is to arrive at the place this great-souled Russian describes—freedom, inner freedom. And in order to arrive at this place, it’s necessary to change. The glue holding you together as you are, keeping you in a peculiar sort of bondage, has to go.