Tigers and clowns

[sawyl]

Two striking quotes, one beautiful, one insightful, from Angela Carter. Here's the first, a brilliant evocation of the dreadful power and elegance of an escaped tiger:

It came out of the corridor like orange quicksilver, or a rarer liquid metal, a quickgold. It did not so much run as flow, a questing sluice of brown and yellow, a hot and molten death. It prowled and growled around the remains of the chimps' classroom, snuffing up its immense, flaring nostrils the delicious air of freedom fragrant with the scent of meat on the hoof.

Carter, A., Nights at the Circus

The second finds Buffo the Great, the Christ of Clowns, musing on the similarities between clowns and prostitutes:

We are the whores of mirth, for, like a whore, we know what we are; we know we are mere hirelings hard at work and yet those who hire us see us as beings perpetually at play. Our work is their pleasure and so they think our work must be our pleasure, too, so there is always an abyss between their notion of our work as play, and ours, of their leisure as our labour.

ibid.