[Dialogue]
I: Where does your humor come from?
I: Where does your humor come from?
The
Grieving Male: It comes from my getting the big joke. This stupid
predicament we find ourselves in, I get how fucking funny it is. Like how we
are born into a consciousness that gives us the ability to realize that we
will, no doubt about it, get sick and old and eventually die. It’s the joke of
the universe. And we, as sentient beings, seek to escape the reality of our
inevitable demise by totally submersing ourselves in the mundane minutiae of
career and personal life, all without realizing how small we are; like how none
of the things we care about matter in the face of this massive, infinite space
that we float around in. None of it matters. Your job, your personal life, your
kids, all of it, all of the things you hold dear are totally ephemeral and
insignificant. You’re caught up in a larger, historically contingent order
indifferent to your personal story.
And worse yet, even your suffering isn’t meaningful; it’s only
the consequence of an evolutionary accident that created a linguistically capable
being with an ill-advised illusion of a self. And this self, this individual
consciousness, thinks that it matters, that the pain it must endure has some
sort of teleological end—that it adds up when it’s all said and done. It
doesn’t. You suffer only to die. And that’s funny. Like really funny.
I: So
humor is the only way to respond to this, ‘s that right?
The
GM: Well, gallows humor. That’s the name of the game now. Before
I was speaking about the individual, but it doesn’t get any better when you
think about the society, the whole enchilada, all of us. Here’s another gut
buster for you: Human civilization will not continue. It will eventually
destroy the eco-systems that sustain it. And, with climate change and
environmental collapse all the revolutionary Left can do now is mourn. The jig
is up. The revolution isn’t coming. It may take a century or two, but our
complex industrial society will collapse under its own weight. Environmental unsustainability
and political rigidness is a lethal combo. This should scare and depress you. We
have just walked through the doors of our own funeral, and here I am,
whispering jokes in the pews.
I:
Suicide, you sound like you are writing a suicide note. First, you establish
that an individual’s aspirations are all meaningless, and then you establish
that the civilization is doomed. So then there is no way out, no matter how you
look at it. It sounds like you are in
mourning; your revolution isn’t coming; you have lost an infinite, a unifying
thing that was probably only a dream to begin with…
The
GM: Thus, now it’s…
I:
Now it…
The
GM: Now it seems impossible, sure. At one time the dream didn’t
seem like a dream at all, now it seems as if it’s totally lost. We are all
wide-awake and can’t remember what we were dreaming to begin with. And suicide
is another, very big, question; and I just don’t wanna talk about it.
What I am talking about is laughing in the face of despair.
In fact, humor is, for me, the only way to discuss what is most terrible and odious
and despairing. It's the only way to even begin to move towards an
ineffable monstrosity. Yes, monstrosity and despair, people write very long
books about these things and sometimes even get close to circling them. But
really you cannot even discuss them in a straightforward way because
they lose their actuality if you do; they lose their force and power. But I
think jokes begin to move in the right direction. Jokes are like a solar viewer
that grade school kids use to look at an eclipse––you have to use jokes/humor
to confront something that is truly horrible without getting burned. And
confrontation is important, because you can’t turn your back on despair; it
will swallow you whole if you do.
I:
It will destroy you.
The
GM: Yes, I think so.
