Who is Robert Elesco?

Build a character, you say? Well, his name was Robert Elesco, and he lived at 7 Treehouse Gardens, Middlepool, Warks. He took to wearing costumes that would have fitted someone much larger than himself – outlandish shoes, flip-flopping, clumsily forward-heavy. Black rosettes as mock-buttons down the middle of his white baggy suit – black rouge on his cheeks. And a red plump nose contrasting with the otherwise sepulchral tokens of ill-health.

If he had been found naked in the river, he could be identified by the strawberry birthmark in the middle of his back. And a sunken hole in the middle of his chest that had been there since he was a boy. Religion? If he had one, it was a religion that in itself could make us all laugh or, at least, become a complete and utter belief that he could make us all laugh and go to bed happy. That seems to me to be the best religion of all, bearing in mind that most religions seem to become self-contradictory or sorrowful given the default lines of human nature.

Perhaps 'philosophy' would have been a better word to describe this aspect of Elesco’s character. Philosophy seems naturally to embody possibilities by strength of logic, while religion to cultivate impossibilities by strength of often misplaced faith. His philosophy, then, was one that put his own sorrow and gloom to the use of diminishing, by pitiful mime or mimicry, the sorrow and gloom of others. A paradox that made philosophical absurdity, if not philosophy itself, a goal worth pursuing.

Relationships, you ask? I suspect his sorrow and gloom prevented Elesco from entering into any meaningful relationships. Women somehow knew that his innermost core of being was the gloom and sorrow that he claimed to fabricate simply to use it as a comic device to remove gloom and sorrow completely from the world - his own gloom and sorrow necessarily being left to last when the job of removing all gloom and sorrow was on the brink of being completed ... completed, presumably, when his own gloom and sorrow was the last gloom and sorrow left in the world and thus safely able to be removed as a final act.

One rare comely woman with whom he did have a brief passing fling pointed out that his was not so much a Philosophy as a Religion. He laughed. And, so, somehow, that was the end of that.

However, recently, there was a second relationship. A tiny lady, so very tiny that she, in less politically-correct days, would have been considered a freak, came to watch him perform. And they took to meeting in the pub after the show. The show was in the same pub, and so they did not have far to go. Whether she was ever to see his hidden defining features of identification remains a moot point.

In the recent past, his ambition was to earn an actual living as a clown with a big one-man theatrical show, rather than mixing tricks with a whole circus of clowns which had been his original ambition. He had always tried to be an independent soul. His current ambition, as second best, had gone full circle towards joining a circus. But the credit crunch meant there were now no circuses. It seemed his professional ambitions were ever destined to be a series of never-ending second-bests. The state of never-ending was never a second-best in itself, however, and it seems strange to need to remind you of this.

His other hopes, etc, you ask? Yes, like most people, he always did have hopes, etc. The trouble with most lives is that the ‘etc.’ bit always peters out and either you forget voluntarily or involuntarily that you once had an ‘etc.’ or death autonomously puts a full stop to it. The tiny lady was the only person at his funeral. Too far at the wrong end of a telescope to tell whether she looked sad or happy.




written today and first published here.

EDIT (2 Mar 2009): There are two further parts of this 'story' below: 'The Orchard' and 'Demolish a Character'.

EDIT (18 Apr 09) to change title of thread to 'Who is Robert Elesco?'