REALITY! A WORLD FULL of ashtrays, street lights, trees and other artifacts—awnings, rocks, animals that appear to speak but cannot be fully understood, people whose wills resist ours—automobiles and wishes, jobs and orgasms, money and dirty dishes—it is all too much. Metaphor, the dream, you can’t do without them. Reality will just not do! We can bear tragedy. It’s so unreal. It is the ashtrays that can drive us to the brink.
Or take my own subtle form of ashtray despair: myself, Wolf Walker—apparently the clown, the charmer—actually the prey of metaphysical sorrows, the sad, searching eye unsatisfied with the comic vision as an answer; the middle-man, the divided man—and the despair of ever merging the two. The clown and the poet are not one. That is the cliché and naturally false. Between the clown and the poet lies the undefined land, a middle ground with neither comedy nor genuine sorrow, but the open possibility of a new metaphor for both. It is on this middle ground that the Suicide Academy stands.
I learned from that Greek psychiatrist who was here for his day that metaphor in Greek is defined as transformation. Perhaps that is why the Academy exists—for the same reason that the metaphoric and all the other forms of parody exist: so that that which we cannot actually experience may still be somehow lived.