This Week's Laughter #11

An archive in roaring bliss

What is it to write about laughter when, really, you’ve had a sad week? An exercise, a futility, a hope, an exasperating noise that rasps the throat.

Insights aside, and as a promise as so many of you are caring individuals, I am alright - it is perfectly healthy and natural to ebb-and-flow between happiness and sadness. I have a pathological condition which makes changes psychically difficult for me, and I suspect the abrupt seasonal shift here in Seattle has left a fairly delicate internal psychic balance of mine slightly upset. I mean, I might very well be the most tanned I’ve been in my life, to speak of how much time I spent in the sun this Summer (mind you, still pearlescent). I think this also causes some whiplash — this more immediate shift into overcastedness, this drought of light.

“Foggy City,” by Maurice Freed (1937)

I became obsessed with the image of looking for a four-leaf clover in a clover patch that was small enough to actually count the individual number of clovers. Many sources online say that the rate of finding a four-leaf clover is about one-in-ten-thousand; however, someone in Europe studied about six-million four-leaf clovers in 2017 and found the effective rate to be more along the lines of one-in-five-thousand; however, genealogical science can mathematically assume the recessive appearance to form once in every five-thousand-seventy-six clovers. If the clover protrusion (the green thing with petals) is around two millimeter long and four millimeters wide, this would mean you need a patch of clover to be 10152 millimeters by 20304 millimeters, or about 33 feet by 67 feet, to find one four leaf clover. This is about 2211 square feet.

I’ve also obsessed over a new bus-line being added near us recently. It’s made some eight parking spots previously available as in-the-know for otherwise busy parking times unavailable. Public transit is a good thing. And it’s a marvel to me how seemlessly this shift in parking, shift in access to a sidewalk, shift in the structures of interurban traffic occurred without much comment. Now I can see people run to catch a bus in the mornings. I hadn’t seen that in some time before.

It isn’t that I didn’t laugh in this past week, nor is it that I don’t remember any of my laughs, but that I find it just as important to document the lack surrounding the noise of a laugh. When a laugh’s substance does not fill the belly, does not enunciate the spirit into something less hollow and more sturdy. I think of the below paragraph from Samo Tomšič’s Lacanian study in the psychoanalysis of pleasure:

Self-love and the necessity of exchange are thus preceded by a constitutive lack, inscribed into human nature, by the premature birth of the human being—indeed, an ontological weakness. In contrast to Aristotle’s differentiation of the forms of life, which ultimately reflects the social segregation introduced and sustained by the ancient master’s discourse, Adam Smith more or less explicitly proposes weak life as the universal political form of life. Premature birth makes human beings automatically depend on other human beings, who are subjected to the same lack. In distinction to Aristotle, where social relations are ontologically grounded in the fullness of being and the homeostatic pleasure specific to the divine state of rest, Smith envisages the rootedness of social relations in the ontological negativity of the human being, a being marked and moved by lack. Lack then appears as the ultimate fabric of social links, both the condition and the main obstacle to the full deployment of human narcissism and egoism.

Samo Tomšič, The Labour of Enjoyment

Tomšič, this excerpt from the opening chapter of this work, is toiling through Aristotle, Lacan, Freud, and this Adam Smith whose name feels too fraudulent to be anything but fake, but apparently wrote an effective treatise on narcissism. That final sentence — that lack is both the condition and main obstacle to narcissism and egoism — has been very striking to me, when thinking about it paired with laughter. Tomšič is writing through sexual pleasure, but I suspect that the pleasure within laughter is somewhere within or adjacent to sexual pleasure. Haven’t you ever broken into the giggles during sex?

Narcissism and egoism aside, I offer you in this week’s laughter lack as this ultimate fabric of social links. That I document this lack such that you may fabricate (minus the deceitful or underlying negative implications) our social link. While I worked in engineering, fabrication was a necessary part of electrical-mechanical assemblage — the point in the product creation process where one creates the physical components of the machine and determines what is necessary to shift, change, or replicate for success. I used the word several times daily for some three and a half years, and so its negativity has been lost on me and replaced by some sidelong association with laboratories.

After discussing the lack available for you, I would write the lack I might encourage you by. I am in no shortage of physical energy, lately, and wish to give you the means you need to lift your couch or change up your office or clean your garage. By no means am I lacking motivation, inspiration — the damnable offenses of comparisons sidetabled for a moment — I, thankfully, live aware of so many immensely talented individuals whose kindness and creativity fill me to the brim nearly every day with admiration of their passions. If you lack in motivation may I tell you to try doing for someone, something else? It can be me, it can be any of your friends, family, precious objects. An example, I have a small snow globe with a polar bear inside that a friend gifted to my for Christmas one year; I cherish it with my whole heart, and have re-arranged my desks multiple times if they had been arranged in a way that did not give me ample visionary or physical access to this gift. But do. And if you need an audience, or you need support, please ask for it. Say what you need and trust your loves to return bearing the gift of satisfying need. And through this our united lack may our social fabric quilt something beautifully.

I will leave you with some recommendations for readings and things as I try to do when I can.

1. Teruyoki Nobuchika’s Sonorite album. Specifically the song “cafe du parc,” is such a whimsical, soft, playful melody that surprised me. But the album is immensely fun and I can’t remember the last time I described an album of clean instrumental-piano music like this.

2. These poems by Sam Cha, and Francesca Leader from Antiphony.

3. These poems by Rasha Abdulhadi and mónica teresa ortiz from Scalawag.

As always, take care of yourselves and if you so have the energy, please like, share, or reach out with your laughs.