WHY is there laughter in an existence that none of us laughs at? Why is there mirth in a world of struggle and precarious chances? We come into life with a scream of agony and go out of it with palms extended, signifying nothing. Proserpina is the goddess of death, and no one has been found stronger than she—except it be Momus, the god of laughter, whom Proserpina cannot slay.
Laughter is no accident. It is something rooted in the depths of our being. Pain is deeper than all thought; laughter is higher than all pain. Care cudgels us with an ebon stave—but look above! there is Laughter—the fairy goddess waving a silver-bright wand.
There is a comic spirit in things as well as a tragic spirit. The gods bowl us over and still we make merry. Hurricane, earthquake, war and fire conspire to an[14]nihilate us, but jocosity and joviality flow in an unbroken stream from the springs of buoyancy set deep within the soul of man.
Only the heart suffers. The brain is the peaceful, undisturbed, eternal spectator of the monstrous paradox called Life. The mind never worries, is never perturbed, is never in pain. The heart—that great lupanar of desires—may seduce the brain to participate in its earth-itches; but in itself the mind is a detached, impersonal observer of the great tangled web of passion and error that is spun in the heart of man.
Mind as mind has the placidity of a mirror. All things are reflected in it, but for the image of Lady Macbeth it cares no more than for the image of Falstaff.
The unconscious universe struggled and fought until it evolved a brain. In mind the star and plant rise to thought. The World-Spirit contemplates itself through the brain of man. It is the light born of darkness. Through the brain nature passes from actor to observer, from blind, eyeless combat to wide-eyed intelligence, from an immemorial pain to the beginnings of an immemorial mirth.
Impersonal contemplation—that is the [15] secret of laughter. Mirth is as old as the first mind that detached itself—even for a single hour—from the service of the emotions and the lower nature generally. The first man who said, “I will retire from the combat a little while to the hill to watch the fray” was the first man who laughed with his brain. Distance, aloofness, height strike out by a magic psychic friction the spark that bears in its centre the germ of philosophy. Only cosmic comedians become as the gods.
The elements of the incongruous and ridiculous run through all the affairs of men. The intervention of the unknown at each moment in their affairs and schemes whirls them off their feet and elicits from Intellect the same gleeful scream that children give vent to in a circus when the trapeze performer whirls unexpectedly through the air. With the significant difference that the circus acrobat knows where he is going to land, but the acrobat Man in this great cosmic circus is caught unawares and lands where Circumstance forgot to spread her nets.
The World-Spirit is a freakish, ironic spirit. It contrives strange outcomes to our [16] conscious plans. We plan and plan in one spirit, and behold! another spirit takes possession. Dante’s Inferno, written in a religious fervor as an exposition of theological conception, set at work the forces which finally overthrew those very conceptions. The Inquisition, instituted to fasten by force a religious creed on the world, was the means that brought about the final annihilation of the means. Anarchy spreads just in the measure that you persecute it. The means employed to enslave a people are the very means that awaken the passion for liberty in their souls. There is no surer way to keep forces in motion that you wish to annihilate than to persistently struggle against them. If you wish to see how far a pendulum will swing to the right, draw it to the extreme left.
This is the Immanent Mirth in things—the quiet laughter of the hidden Prestidigitateur; the exquisite mockery of nature which made hilarious the days of Rabelais.
Leisure is the condition of the growth of the smile in the brain. Laughter comes with contemplation. A man may take joy in his work, but he cannot laugh at it. Mirth is a kind of serene scepticism. It [17] comes only with intelligence. The perception that life is something of a joke may possibly come to a boor laboring in the fields, but it clothes itself to him as a bitter jest, for his brain is still the handmaiden of his stomach. The leisure of Mephistopheles, the intelligence of Lucifer—these must be approached to perceive the depth on depth of world-jollity.
Fanaticism, the man with the fixed idea—the antithetical mental attitude to the world-sceptic—is incapable of cerebral mirth. The finest minds are those in which intelligence and insight spread out like the gradual opening of a circular fan. They come to perceive all sides in one glance. They are like a man who stands at the north pole—all longitudes centre in him; he sees all the imaginary lines that men map and number and believe in. He is conscious for the first time of the absurdity of direction; he comes to know in a flash how purely arbitrary are affirmative ideas about anything.
And he laughs a long laugh into the skies.
The dominant note observable in Nature—observable only to the eye of the mind that has severed itself from the prejudices of the will—is blitheness. She seems always to be laughing; her most terrible moments are like the scowls that elders put on in front of naughty children who really amuse them—the mocking mask of mirth. Nature goes her way through her four seasons with a carelessness, an insouciance, a sangfroid such as men have who care nothing for death or who have learned the fine secret that the tomb covers but does not hide. Life is a huge joke to the Immortal Mother. She laughs eternally because she is wiser than her children. She knows nothing is lost. She knows that death is recomposition and pain is the way character is tooled.
How deep was Shakespeare’s mirth when he gave us Puck! Puck, the lordly imp of a topsy-turvy universe; Puck who is the seer par excellence of the world; Puck who put a girdle of laughter around the universe; Puck who smiled and smiled and was not a villain—only a divine sportsman who played battledore and shuttlecock with us in the fields of Eternity.
There is quenchless grief in all things—if we will have it so. Move up into the [19] higher altitudes and the grief in all things turns to a quenchless mirth.
The higher altitude is just that step from the heart to the brain.
Publication History
- [Unknown magazine or newspaper]
- Chameleon: Being the Book of My Selves, 1922, pp. 13-19