A French doctor named Rabelais in the 16th Century wrote poetry along the way of his life adventures. One line of his advice stands out above the rest, though, like a fortune cookie message magnetized to a fridge as epochs of daily life come and go.
“For all your ills, I give you laughter” he asserted.
Rabelais elaborated:
“Seeing how sorrow eats you, defeats you.
I’d rather write about laughing than crying,
For laughter makes men human, and courageous.”
He then added the rejoinder, to wit to woo to our lives online and at AU: “a child is a fire to be lit, not a vase to be filled”.
It’s up to us the life and world we see and feel. As Viktor Frankl famously stated, we do not control what happens, but we have all the power in the world to frame how we respond to the circumstances and stimuli we face. To light those creative and scholarly fires we might have to lighten up. Like Plato’s convict who escapes the dark cave lit only by a blue screen fire of asinine video clips, true education is about going outside our normal conscious awareness.
Our little candle of awareness burns best when it burns for something, for creativity and erudition and laughter and poetry rather than against annoyances and pariahs using tools of cynicism and negativity. We know, each of us, that there’s a certain laughability in life itself, but often we may fool our earnest beings into believing that things in our world matter so much – the better to convince ourselves that we matter. Consider a summation from Cuban media, helpfully translated into English.
“Anxious to be noticed – the only way they have found to exist – they engage in a kind of vulgar and aggressive bullying on social networks, with ramblings saturated with virulence, rage, envy, and even revenge against those who do not share their ideas. Faced with a point of view they do not share, they pounce on the person who supports it with “you are wrong”, instead of “I think differently”. As if they owned absolute truth!”
Sometimes for online ills, then, we just have to laugh.
Sure, to assent to this prescription of Rabelais that we bring levity to our spirit by way of laughter is easier said than done in that we live in a realm of wry memes, replete with bitter assessments of life’s meanings, struggles, and entanglements. Yet, a cursory glance through a cross section of historical thinkers awakens us to how if we are to overcome the overbearing maw of darkness, the yawning existential gulf that seems to haunt every young generation since the dawn of modernity, we must incite a new dawning realization that, in the end, life’s foibles are what elevates us above the level of apelike beasts. (Nothing against monkeys, they are great ham actors and pratfall comics and banana snatchers! Check out Jason Armstrong’s 1996 movie Dunston Checks In.)
Switching Gears from Computer Chair to Comedy Stage
So, let’s give comedy a try—with a Dad joke like gives peas a chance. Did you hear the one about the Nun and the Mullah? Well, uhm, in the 1500s there was a Nun named Teresa whose illustrious life works arose due to several years of calamitous sickness; having entered a cloister against her Father’s wishes she shortly found herself sick as a dog for several years straight. During her convalescence she focused her attention on prayer and learned to play the castanets. Now, you don’t have to have attended a Mexican fiesta to know that any handheld noisemakers that you play by shaking rhythmically implies a certain kinetic energy. Teresa had a certain it, you might say. But okay, there’s nothing too funny here, maybe a bit paradoxical and disconcerting given that our modern mantras tend to focus on sickness as stillness and mindfulness and gratitude rather than literal List-For-Santa prayer, let alone religious liturgy. But as the centuries after St. Teresa of Avila’s life unfolded, her writings, recalling the teensy weensy number of literate humans on earth during her time thus making any remaining documents crucial to the science of history, speak volumes.
She had humor and grace—warning her fellow Nuns to get enough sleep while also pondering the highest reaches of theology. Her goals were heavenly, to be sure, and perhaps vaguely comparable to earnest idealists promulgating political beliefs in the net-o-sphere. But she knew enough to laugh along the way. To this end, Teresa wrote a wonderful fable about, perhaps, the danger of speaking too much about the literal world around us, lest that hole in our soul comes to be filled by whatever happens to be in the area. Karma doesn’t only paddle or manifest as an unspayed hound, sometimes it even hops!
“Oh, mi padre, what a terrible thing happened to me! While we were sitting on a haystack considering ourselves lucky to have found it, next to an inn that we were unable to enter, a large salamander or lizard got in between my tunic and bare arm, and it was the mercy of God that it didn’t get in somewhere else, for I think I would have died, judging from what I felt. But my brother got hold of it at once and when he threw it away, it hit Antonio Ruiz right in the mouth.”
Perhaps peace in the middle east can begin with everyone laughing about this slithery little encounter? Less talk, more laughter. We all learn to relate, as infants do, from eye contact and shared emotion, shared affect; only later do beliefs and ideologies come into play. What we put into our minds produces what we put out, as Rabelais reminded us earlier.
Of course, not all that we absorb is fully of our own choice. Social osmosis, a concept that we all know when we spend time in the company of people who are not of our usual cultural type (hip hoppers, for instance, or sports fans if we are a sporting neophyte. Or bitter family members) comes into play here. And we have to bear difference with a grin, the better to realize how very funny it can be when people take things in their lives so very seriously. Laughter of the right sort is contagious, like sitting quietly and reading until your peers settle down likewise.
