My psyche is built of mordancy and keenness. I laugh oddly because I’m one of those souls who thinks playing chess by our own rules is truly funny. One of the highlights of my life was being allowed to spin Marcel Duchamp’s bicycle wheel in the Museum of Modern Art. That was a Rabbinic moment for me—I was aging Adam and being granted one more look into Paradise.
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Carl Jung said modern science tells mankind there’s no one looking after us, and so, accordingly, we’re filled with fear. I can’t explain my contrarian feeling—but I’m not afraid. I had one mother and one father and they were helpless people. I don’t need a heavenly father or mother. I’ll be happy to return to star dust.
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So what makes me laugh my ass off? Greek poetry! Become what you are!
Some mornings I make up my own Greek poets. Here is the ancient poet “Hygiene”:
The drip of the bathroom tap
Morse code of a sort—
Wash your fingers separately
the gods say
But they don’t tell us why…
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Mistakes are funny. I once stepped on a water lily. I was four years old. Stepped right out of the boat.
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BTW—not very funny, but illuminating. The Brothers Karamazov and Carl Jung’s Psychological Types make excellent paratactic reading. I love it when books go perfectly together.
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When the old queen dies, who will burn her secret, impious books?
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Great moments from Auden:
“After Krakatoa exploded, the first living thing to return
Was the ant, Tridomyrex, seeking in vain its symbiot fern.”
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Even in winter I dream of insects.
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The able bodied people laugh at the infirm. This is because we’re still living in the Middle Ages. Science was working to pull us out, but the Cold War buffaloed the effort. It’s all darkness and lesser darknesses in the public mind. Science got slaughtered in its cradle.
There is nothing funny about this.
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Here’s wishing you a neutralizing peace and an average disgrace, as Auden would say…
Planet of the Blind 