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Serious
- Red Hen Press
- Chapter
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73 Serious Why can’t i just be serious and stop screwing around, instead of making light of everything, instead of always trying to find a way to subvert the moment, drain off my anxiety with a lame joke, using humor as a shield, a deflating pin, or at the very least an obvious mask to hide my discomfort, my uneasiness at the world’s lethal certitudes, its cruelties and relentless pain? instead i shrink, as though suffering were a flame that might scorch me if i once reached out, a blistering drink to someone sworn off drink for fear a single drop might send them hurtling to earth. ~ ~ ~ At the most inopportune times—moments of tribulation or extreme grief, moments of horror, grave emergencies, rituals and ceremonies meant to solemnize an hour, a life— something in me disengages and floats free like one of those cinematic double exposures unseen by anyone but the audience who after all is witnessing a tragedy, not living it, unlike the characters who writhe in anguish at the fate that threatens to extinguish them while i look on, a bloodless ghost, disembodied, untouchable, pallid voyeur safely adrift in the limbo of my own detachment. ~ ~ ~ Humor a coping technique: like those endorphins that coat shredded nerves in crisis, when the body knows the jig is finally up and nature provides this little dram of Lethe, a numbing draught that calms the animal between the ogre’s teeth—the “ogre” being death, of course, or pain so blinding we could not endure it without anodynes or madness or the hand of some consoling god, some drug 74 that has a sense of purpose and infuses us with sudden peace, of pleasure almost, then shakes us free, scoops out the soul to bear it unflinchingly aloft above the body’s wreckage. ~ ~ ~ i think of my forebears—germans, Jews, Poles—all of them marching to camps, or in camps, whittled to the bone by evil no compassionate mind can understand, lumps of meat caught-up with rotten cloth, faces hollowed out by constant want beneath a gray umbrella of rain and ash; i see them dancing in that sickened light, hands linked, feet flying, like lecherous serfs in Breughel capering wildly in their winter scenes, trees around them black as clotted blood, hear them jabber in strangled tongues jokes that kept them human in a place no unprotected heart survived. ~ ~ ~ once in Colorado on the steps of some crummy club, one of those rathskellers packed with smoke and noise and unabashed desire, i sat half drunk, woozy, crushed by the weight of my own anguish, my overall sense of isolation, a conviction of failure so pervasive and acute it caused a fissure in the wall of self-pity, and through that crack i glimpsed the burden of human suffering beyond my own, a misery grand enough to be called symphonic, or infinite, even cosmic if that word denotes massive wretchedness, torment almost eternal, that can only be endured by god. ~ ~ ~ That’s when the endorphins kicked in to plaster over the little crack in my head, a tiny chink [44.200.101.170] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 11:40 GMT) 75 that might have destroyed me—something in me lurched back from that precipitous edge to settle safely once again in the familiar embrace of my own self-concern, something protective and alert, source of my irrepressible foolishness, a folly so reflexive, so natural to my life you could call it a trait, a genetic imperative, and the depth of its force, its spontaneous appearance whenever i’m threatened might be used as a gauge, an unfailing measure of how very serious i really am. ...