Do you eat to live or live to eat? Clown existentialism

What is more important, to eat to live, or to live to eat? This is one of those existential clown questions. My opinion is that I live to eat. For me, it could be a purpose for my life. It took about 4 and a half billion years to make it possible for me to enjoy the taste, smell, and texture of food in my mouth. It is a pleasure that "I" get to enjoy. 


The question is how and why and who? Every day I get to enjoy these sensations, so private, so exclusive. Others may join me and experience similar enjoyable sensations, but for each of us, it is ours' alone.


It really is an intriguing mystery how it is that some tastes are better than others and who or what it is that gets to enjoy the experience. I could be bound and blindfolded and someone could place a spoonful of food in my mouth and my focus would be limited to this experience. There would be nothing else but this taste sensation. This would be my whole world for this moment.


There could be 7 billion mouths open and I am the one experiencing this. Such a treasure pleasure! Of course, I would be even happier if I knew that everyone might have a similar experience and no one would go hungry. I wouldn't want to be the only one on the planet getting fed. It wouldn't seem fair. It would be like the father gets fed, while everyone else in the family goes hungry. It would not be a noble act and to be human is to be noble, anything less than noble is to minimize the human experience.


Of course we are not really human, that is just a term that we use to distinguish ourselves from other animals. It is not who we really are. It might be who we are as a species, but not who we are as individuals. We are much more than that. Right now, to be human embodies the whole range of possibilities from being a saint to a Hitler. I would rather elevate the term to mean to have a noble character is human and anything less than that is less than human. That is one way to look at it.


I could take it a step further and say, to be human is to find the "clown" within. Just as everyone has a heart, everyone has a clown within. This is why humanity suffers so much today; people don't realize the clown within and live too seriously and take themselves too seriously. Can you imagine a world where everyone is joking most of the time? This is the world I dream of. Of course, we might have to make a world that is more playful and plentiful, where everyone has the opportunity to fulfill their potentialities. Then everyone might be more lighthearted.


Unfortunately, as it is today, there are too many serious problems for people to really lighten up. Its almost a crime for one to be happy under such conditions. It is for the clown hero to break through this malaise and be happy and funny. Of course, he risks crucifixion, since some people might be offended by such behavior, like laughing at a funeral.


Most clowns are not funny and are naturally hated by the masses. After all a clown is supposed to be funny and if he really isn't, but merely cloying and sappy, its natural that people will be disturbed and disgusted, just as it would be if a singer would sing off key. So, this hatred for clowns is not really a prejudice, but something well deserved.


But there are those one in a million kind of clown that is original, charming, profound, and funny and people need to be open to him/her, just like you would open a curtain to let the sun in. That is, just because perhaps it has been cloudy for days, when the sun actually appears, it would be best to be open to receiving it. This is to not be prejudiced, as it would be as ridiculous as to hate the sun for not appearing during a long stretch of cloudy days, like in the rainy season.


Which brings me to the beauty of the "ridiculous". Something that is entirely overlooked and dismissed by most of the human species. Ridiculous is actually a pejorative term. People hate to be thought of as "ridiculous". When in reality, "humans" (forgive me for using this term, but I don't know what else to call them/us) are the only animals who have the sensibility to experience the ridiculous and hence the only animal, it seems, with a sense of humor. Imagine the world without humor, it would be as bad as a world without women, or a world without color, or music. Of all the animals, only humans can have a sense of the ridiculous..


To laugh is one of the most amazing things that we can do. If someone says something so funny, that you just have to laugh, just like you might just have to sneeze, its an amazing phenomenom, since I think only "humans" actually laugh. I am pretty sure that laughing hyenas don't really laugh. You will notice that most all these things that I speak of, involves the mouth. Can you imagine if we didn't have mouths and we had to eat through our ears or our noses? We could have been designed like that. It would have been one less step to create in making our faces. It might have been easier for the creator, or whoever is the author of our faces to have left out that step, just for the sake of expediency. So we can be grateful, I might assume that that didn't happen. Maybe we would only speak through our eyes. And if we ate through our ears, would our ears have tongues? These are questions only a clown would ponder.