Some passages from Animal Joy by Nuar Alsadir

Some passages from Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation by Nuar Alsadir:


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The dominant issue bringing people into my office for psychoanalysis is the sense that, after sacrificing so much to achieve the lives they had dreamed of, they’re unable to experience the pleasure they had expected to accompany those ideal lives they labored to construct.


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“Look at your aggressiveness,” Winnicott writes in a letter; “…it provides one of the roots of living energy.” By numbing aggression, as by supressing anxiety, you may avoid conflict with those around you, but you will also lose access to the taproot, the ability to feel creative, alive, connected to others, real. By harnessing your living energy – aggressiveness, anxiety, primitive destructive impulses, savage complexity, you can, as McGonigal suggests, “use some of this energy, some of this biochemistry to make choices or take actions that are consistent with what matters most.” 


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One of the exercises in clown school was to take the stage with others and spontaneously create a game. The first initiated action functions as a proposal that is then collaboratively developed through improvisation. When I performed this exercise, one of the actors onstage with me lifted his shirt and another spontaneously slapped his belly. We then created a game of shirt-lifting and belly-slapping.

However, as anyone who has participated in a group project knows, there is invariably an alpha participant, who, believing they have an idea superior to the one at hand, directs their energy toward changing course, switching from shirt-lifting and belly-slapping to some other game that has been proposed by them that is more in line with how they would like to be perceived.

One of the most meaningful lessons I learned in clown school was offered by Bayes in the moment when one of the actors onstage with me tried to do just that. “There is no better game,” he admonished, “than the one you’re playing.”

Or, as in driving, always turn your wheel in the direction of the skid –


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