Laughter

I love nothing better than to make Jami laugh. Look at that beautiful face, that beautiful smile. That's the woman I love. Thankfully I'm a master at crafting jokes, puns, anecdotes. In fact I am inspired right now. Reading Bakhtin's book on Rabelais I'm finally through the introduction and beginning his history of laughter. I'm very excited. Already in the introduction Bakhtin considers laughter, when combined with the grotesque (where he means with those elements that are earthy, natural, of the folk), regenerative. Laughter is regenerative.
He considers the laughter we have now, ironic, bitter, sarcastic, used like a whip, to lack that regenerative power: in fact satiric laughter "as the bourgeoise like" he considers not to be laughter but rhetoric. To appreciate the sense of regenerative laughter I think of what a belly laugh is. It feels good: it's the laugh I need when I'm feeling down. His examples are Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Cervantes - for their common folk elements, elements which he ties to the grotesque and to carnival. The Grotesque needs laughter to achieve the regeneration of the old into the new (in this way Bakhtin echoes Jung's thoughts on Alchemy, where old dominants lose energy and give way to the birth of new ones: the archetypes of the old man and the child).
Laughter is regenerative - think about that. In particular the laughter that comes from common folk: groundling humor, fart jokes; such that monsters are defeated by laughter. The dance of death, a grotesque figure on the surface, achieves a comic effect, a carnivalistic effect when we think of the bishop, the king, the peasant, the nun, the queen, the fishwife, the knight: all being lead by death in a line dance. This was the way the great plague of the 1300s was absorbed, was dented in its blow: by laughter, laughing at their situation, cavorting and dancing.
I was reading Lewis's Discarded Image tonight and was reminded that the medieval person did not think of space as cold, empty and vast, but as large (though limited), filled with beings, and festive, filled with light, that all the heavenly host were engaged in a dance.
Laughter and the grotesque level humanity, but they also reflect and offer a way of participating in the heavenly dance. We take what we are, made grotesque by sin, and imitate the dance of the heavenly host; the grace of such a thing, that not only are we allowed to, but encouraged to, fills us with joy, what Bakhtin calls "gay laughter."
Which brings me to something that occurred to me this evening, as I was in the trauma bay (what a curious phrase, Trauma Bay - who'd go there?), and I thought, what if a cargo ship carrying German cars were in a terrific storm, and in order to stave off capsizing they Jetta-soned some cargo. Now it's true, in the 1960s, VWs would float some.
See that's gold.