This Week's Laughter #24
An archive in rompery and frolicking
Laughter, this week, for me, comes from the body. And so I read about the body and read about the laughter in the body as a form of inspiration.
First, a moment of laughter. Soccer time, yet again, this time in the snow. I haven’t played soccer in the snow since I was a kid, and even then that was immensely rare. The slush gripped the ball and we saw patterns form, lineatures of movement. Everybody was sliding around and nobody was running full speed. It felt utterly childish in that way that rewatching your favorite cartoon restores your innocent hope for the world. The second game I watch as my goalkeeper did a cartwheel approaching the goal. If you know anything about me, I joined in. Then another joined in. It was this giggling moment that nobody else seemed to notice or witness or remark on. My handprints in the snow. And after, everybody talking about how cold they were in something mirroring happiness. How cold their feet were, wet their socks were. For this brief moment there was no melancholy.
Next, a literature to help me think through the body. This from "Becomings Explorations in Time, Memory and Futures,” by Elizabeth Grosz, Manuel DeLanda, John Rajchman, Linda Martín Alcoff, Edward S. Casey, Dorothea Olkowski, Claire Colebrook, Eleanor Kaufman, Gail Weiss, Pheng Cheah and Alphonso Lingis (Edited by Elizabeth Grosz). The snippet in question comes from Alphonso Lingis’ essay, Innocence:
It is a point of departure. You come alive, you become alive to the dragonfly, to the twist of cloud over the twilight mountain, to the gleaming cheeks of a boy. Awakening is a birth. Awakening is joyous. The innocence of awakening, the active disconnection of the past, make possible this joy. How good to be alive! How refreshing is this silence! How calm the evening is! How pungent it smells! In every joy there is an awakening. Joy surprises you, waking you up out of the state of awareness become listless and phlegmatic by the continuities and recurrences. How truthful is joy! … Joy gives you the strength to open your eyes to all that is there without being foreseeable or understood. Where, if not from this joy, did you find the strength to see so far into the darkness? To see as far back and as far away as the tyrants held sway?
I find laughter in the body for even when the mind is loud, when tensions are high, or when headlines bombard the soul with this cacophony of suffering, the body still holds room for this escape.
The above quote made me laugh from its utter enthusiasm. How good to be alive! How calm the evening is! How pungent it smells! There is an awakening in joy just as there is joy in awakening. If you’ve noticed, I try to note the archive that each of these ‘This Week in Laughters’ belongs to - mirth, guffawing, boisterousness, glee - not collating purely to the laugh but speaking to something of happiness as a whole. Right now, happiness, for me, is anything that rebels against the misery that would be inflicted on Us through the actions of our government and of our capital society. The governments efforts speaking so utterly damning about the body, about trans bodies, about queer bodies, and while I am privileged in some way to avoid this gaze of damnation if I wish, I am threatened in that very same way of killing some core source joy that has awakened with me as I come to understand myself, my body, my identity.
The full quote from above I’ll post below if you wish to read it all, but Lingis writes in an examiner’s travelogue style about a Nancy Gilvonio. Labeled a Peruvian terrorist for rebelling against the US-influenced insurrection, Vindra Dass describes the essay as, “The essay focuses on their shift from quiet members of a rural village in Tarapoto, Peru, to members of a rebel movement, who sought to liberate the country from the capitalistic influence of North America in order to establish a communist state in Peru.” There is a necessary joy in rebellion! Just as there is rebellion in joy!
A second laugh. The year of the wood snake. Transformative change and the shedding of skins. I went to a beautiful poetry reading and ate two oranges within 10 minutes of taking my seat. I had sticky fingers the whole reading and while at first I was uncomfortable, the citrus scent was fresh and pleasant, and by the end I realized the only one who could be bothered by this would be me. So I opted into being unbothered. Then, poem reading. Someone elocutes ‘sssssnake, nake, naked, snay-ked.’ Had people come up to me and ask “Are you the host of Other People’s Poems?” I mean, odd to be in a space like this. Time. But euphoric, nonetheless, especially with that cake afterwards.
A third laugh. A tag on the side of a building I was walking by read ‘Bun 4 Bun.’ I’ve been thinking about this so much. I see a lot of tags for ‘T4T,’ in Seattle; I see a lot of, ‘Puppy 4 Puppy,’ kind of things. But this was my first Bun 4 Bun. I loved it. Who is the bun who wrote that and who is the bun they wrote it for?
A fourth. A donut with a strawberry glaze titled as a ‘pretty boy,’ and being sold for $2.25. This is, of course, the crux of my gender identity.
There is another — Simon Critchley — who wrote a book titled “On humour,” within which there is a great deal toward the philosophical tradition of humour. A quote from within that I’ve been mulling over —
For I want to claim that humour is not just comic relief, a transient corporeal affect induced by the raising and extinguishing of tension, of as little social consequence as masturbation, although slightly more acceptable to perform in public. I rather want to claim that what goes on in humour is a form of liberation or elevation that expresses something essential to what Plessner calls 'the humanity of the human'.
I appreciate this sentiment that humour is ‘the humanity of the human,’ even when in an interview with Cabinet’s Brian Dillon, Critchley says, “So one philosophical strategy is the exclusion of laughter because laughter is animalistic and bestial.” And so you have this oxymoronic sentiment that humour somehow liberates us of the societally constructed machinations that restrict our humanity as well as believing, philosophically, that laughter is something animalistic. I mean, a bit of a joke on my part because I don’t think either are particularly negating the other, and just above this quote Critchley does explicitly mention that this is one of a great many possible stories here.
But the source! A liberation! Isn’t that what we’re all after, these days, from the melancholies and suffering of witnessing such virulent plunging of the values of our humanity?
And still such a bodily sentiment.
I think about laughter and queerness very similarly. That they represent very similar machinations of the soul. That divergent gender and sexual identities represent something of a gasp rising from the stomach, from the chest, as an exhalation giving “you the strength to open your eyes to all that is there without being foreseeable or understood.” And so in a way I speak to you about laughter to encourage that freedom, that liberation to experience your body’s loudness and quietude, your body’s convulsion and trembling, and your own joys in ways that require less distress.
A fifth laugh. I’ve already made a post about Gary Lemons. I have not read the book yet. I mean this in complete celebration of, there is utterly no mocking here. I love that name. Ga-ry Le-mons. I think it’s so wonderful that his last name is LemonS not just Lemon. Rolls right off the mind.
A sixth laugh. It has snowed four times in Seattle in the last three days. I busted my wrist at Soccer unintentionally (a shot on goal deflected off my knuckles that I was holding to my chest to try and keep out of the way, the wrist collapsed). The snow has been so wonderful to look out, to wander among, to see hiding in the shadow trails of trees and signs and cars. I like its temporariness. I do not yet have to drive in it. I do not even have to risk slipping on any ice. It’s purely aesthetic for me. Not cold enough to threaten. Love your neighbors, friends.
Thank you for reading my laughs and thoughts as always, continue resisting in your joy, and as always, if this reaches you in some spectacular or moderate fashion, please don’t be afraid to share or support my work. I do appreciate any money you might entrust me with, any likes, any thoughts.
What are your laughs lately?
I must apologize to my friends who wish to read themselves in these logs, as I have been very within-body this week, and you may likely not appear, though you are funny, and you do make me laugh.
The full quote from Alphonso Lingis below.
For you existence is not a burden and a task. A child you are, without being on your own. You leave the burden of carrying on the projects initiated in the past and the task of securing resources for the future to your parents. You play out your existence. One day you can take on responsibility for the past they are carrying forward. But your birth, the innocence and newness of existence in you, is of itself irresponsibility and revolt against the past.
… To be born is to awaken to the world. Is not every awakening a birth? Your luminous consciousness…
Once awakened, you move on, noting only the familiar patterns and general lines of the house, the landscape, and the workplace. By noting continuities and recurrences, your awareness endures and becomes redundant. It persists as a state of awareness. The state of awareness is listless and phlegmatic, as though drunk. But in the course of a day there are dozens, hundreds of soberings up, awakenings. It is one thing to take note of things, of landmarks and benchmarks, your glance passing lightly over them as you pass among them. It is something else to wake up to something, say to one of those very things. While kneading the cornflour dough, to wake up to a hummingbird sizzling in the sheets of sunlight. To wake up to the huge eyes of the grazing alpaca, enigmatic as a song brooding over a love lost centuries ago.
The spring force with which awakening vaults is not the momentum of continuities and recurrences; awakening is a leap out of that momentum. The flow of the limitless night or the continuum of appearances in the day and the flow of duration are interrupted. A cut, a break is made, and across this gap the past passes out of reach. The awakening awakens as from nowhere. You shake your head and peer about to find where you are. Awakening is a bound not weighted down with the past that inculpates the present and demands compensation from the future, a bound out of the drunkenness of remorse and resentment. Awakening is a commencement.
It is a point of departure. You come alive, you become alive to the dragonfly, to the twist of cloud over the twilight mountain, to the gleaming cheeks of a boy. Awakening is a birth. Awakening is joyous. The innocence of awakening, the active disconnection of the past, make possible this joy. How good to be alive! How refreshing is this silence! How calm the evening is! How pungent it smells! In every joy there is an awakening. Joy surprises you, waking you up out of the state of awareness become listless and phlegmatic by the continuities and recurrences. How truthful is joy! You Nancy Gilvonio cannot not believe in the visions delight illuminates. Joy gives you the strength to open your eyes to all that is there without being foreseeable or understood. Where, if not from this joy, did you find the strength to see so far into the darkness? To see as far back and as far away as the tyrants held sway?
Your awakening is innocent and just, even if it has no consequences, even if it subsides, even if it fails.
Alphonso Lingis, Innocence