internet as agglomeration of kindnesses

Herodotus on Laughter

There are three kinds of laughter, according to Herodotus:

- That done by those who are innocent of wrong-doing, but ignorant of their own vulnerability.

- That done by those who are mad.

- That done by those who are overconfident.

I like this because there is often something really wrong with laughter. But these are all reflections, more or less, of one of category, isn't it? Those ignorant of their own vulnerability are by nature overconfident. Those who are mad are by nature ignorant. Those who are overconfident are naturally not mindful of the inevitability of damage incurred by all creatures.

Herodotus nowhere, as far as I know, offers this list as a formal hypothesis about laughter. The list was compiled by Donald Lateiner and published in 1977 in the journal Transactions of the American Philological Association. I think Lateiner is just trying to convey a sense about how Herodotus characterizes laughter in his histories (usually with hubris).

What about the sometimes salutary function of laughter? Freud asserts that laughter democratizes, it censures power, status, privilege. Northrop Frye in "Mythos of Spring" claims the comic mode drives literary plots toward societies characterized by forgiveness and inclusivity and that it tends to resist arbitrary and rebarbative law, expelling unsuitable and irritable people. Mikhail Bakhtin went so far, in RAHW, as to suggest that laughter prefigured not only the Reformation but the Enlightenment.

So it can work in a salutary way at a social level, maybe. It can also work at the level of moral cultivation in its ability to help a moral agent craft an attitude toward suffering that is elastic, wholesome, and emotionally competent.

In a roundtable discussion about humor with Rachel Loden, Kasey Mohammad, Silliman, D A Powell, Ange Mlinko, Gary Sullivan, Maxine Chernoff, and George Bowering, at Jacket, I write about this more ethical component of laughter -- and I wonder how much of this is true:

"If damage, flaw, hamartia, is a given, I think humor is a means of dealing with damage by appreciating suffering as just another form of change.

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Humor seems to be a method of equanimity. It seems to be a means of practicing and exercising that kind of equanimity some people call detachment.

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Seems to me the clown and the saint are really close in having this detachment from their own wounds. (Doesn’t the Yiddish word “zelig,” as in the Woody Allen movie, mean at once holy and silly?) The ability to “be at home” (in re Singer’s quote above) is what we see in Zelig,

and it speaks, to my sensibility, to a kind of ability to “be at home” in an existential sense too: if we are all damaged, including the tragic protagonist bound in his “hamartia,” the problem of humor amounts to what we do in the face of that imperfection and damage. If we can be silly in the face of it, we can be holy. Seems to me that blatantly flawed people, whom William James called “sick souls,” have been forced by circumstances to get some distance on life, to appreciate constant change as both a benison and a fact.

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I mean, a clown is someone who purposefully and theatrically makes a show of debasing herself by showcasing that innate damage: a clown takes on and “owns” her own flaws and wounds — and flaunts them so triumphantly that we, the audience feel on the one hand, superior to the clown and on the other we vicariously appreciate the courage of that clown for being so triumphant and skillful in the face of said flaws (big nose, funny moustache, whathaveyou — yet funny, awkwardly brave, and finally buoyant). In the case of a verbal clown [humorous poet], that “flaw,” that damage, comes in the form of buoyant nonsense, anarchic satire, tawdry rhyming, or incessant non-sequitur:

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In other words, maybe humor is a triumphant display of detachment toward the inevitability of damage.

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It’s a simultaneous owning and detaching from one’s flaws (and the fact that they are inevitably and incessantly incurred) that I think makes an inspired clown useful."

I like that we seem to live in a world in which this kind of laughter also seems possible.

how to write better poetry

Ride your bicycle. Wend in stuff.

Watch a documentary - The Future of Food

Consider Jean Dubuffet proponent of art brut who said "it is usually by racing on stilts that you learn to ride a bike by sailing on a pitching sea that you become a fine dancer by playing the flute that you learn to paint" -- Letter to Jacques Berne, 17 March 1947, Prospectus II, p. 248 and Prospectus IV, p. 110

 

Eat well? Know who Norman Borlaug was, died Saturday in Dallas. Know we all get to contribute to the ruination of kitchens, we can each continue to ensure poetry helps nothing, you too can alienate your poetry from the real by playing a sacred heretic*, I too can forget as Norman Borlaug did that good volition divorced from properly living in one's body can cause the destruction of subsistence farming, genetic security, food diversity, energizing nutrition, familial seed stocks, replacing them with gm, insecticidal genomes, monoculture, first-world chauvinism, national debts, cancer, poisons purposefully in fields. Put your poetry to use

Okay these are wild plums from the roadside outside Viroqua, Wisconsin. Hallie Ashley stopped her car and got them from a bush there

Nebraska and South Dakota and 8 other states have passed constitutional amendments to ban non-family-owned farming. Do not fail to ride your bicycle, it helps

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*Requisite Bourdieu or Simone Weil Commentary on the Weberian notion of  "sacred heresy":

"...it is a structural law, and not a fault of nature, that draws intellectuals and artists into the dialectic of cultural distinction -- often confused with an all-out quest for any difference that might raise them out of anonymity and insignificance, [and]....continually liable to degenerate into an anomic quest for difference at any price." PB, TFoCP, p. 117, "The Market of Symbolic Goods"

"The system of 'selection' objectively employed by the different groups of producers competing for cultural legitimacy are always defined within a system of social relations obeying a specific logic....As the field of restricted production closes in upon itself, and affirms itself capable of organizing its production by reference to its own internal norms of perfection -- [it excludes] all external functions and socially marked content from the work...." PB, "The Market of Symbolic Goods," as found in TFoCP, p. 140

rivers kettles bunnies

kettles bunnies earth

mind of boundless love

Puññameva so sikkheyya
āyataggaṃ sukhudrayaṃ

Dānañca samacariyañca
mettacittañca bhāvaye

Train oneself in doing the good that lasts 

and invites happiness

Cultivate generosity, a life of peace
a mind of boundless love

Itivuttaka 1.22

[photo - the New Delhi police force sitting a ten-day course in Vipassana meditation. 

Their female Chief of Police, Dr. Kiran Bedi, third from left, front row.]