Topical Guide 39
Mark Dorset
Moonlight; Water; Eureka Moments
Clouds slipped across the face of the moon. . . . Then the clouds moved aside, and for a moment . . . everything glowed with moonlight: the sumptuous skin of the water, like pewter, and Margot and Martha, side by side, before the fluorescent white cabin, two smooth sprites, their hair as soft and bright as the moonlight, and between their long thighs, no penises.
Their dives were sleek and silent, and they swam underwater quite a distance before coming up. During the time that they were underwater, I figured it all out. They were girls. May had been a girl. They had all been girls from the very start. I understood the whole thing, more or less.Little Follies, “Do Clams Bite?”
Pratfalls; Faux Pas; Self-Deprecation; Clowns and Clownish Behavior
“I figured it out for myself. Clams don’t bite. Girls are just born that way.”
I have often wondered, of a Sunday morning, what imp made me say the things I said on Saturday night. As soon as my last sentence was out, I wondered why I had said it. I blushed, and they laughed. Raskol clamped a strong hand on my shoulder and said, “I knew I was going to like you the minute I saw you fall into the water.”Little Follies, “Do Clams Bite?”
Bergson attributes the cruel laughter at the sight of a fall to the break in the balance which dehumanizes man and changes him into a puppet. Other philosophers contradict his theory. They hold that man, on the contrary accustomed to his artificial mechanism, is de-puppeted by the fall and suddenly shows himself as he is. It is, they say, this rude discovery of man by man that provokes the laughter.
What vexes me is that neither the one nor the other carry their theory as far as the study of laughter at works of art.
The shock of new works, causing a rupture between its customary outlook and the novelty with which it is faced, makes the public stumble. So there is a fall and laughter.
This perhaps explains the laughter of crowds which, except by tears or insults, have no other way of expressing themselves.Jean Cocteau, “On Laughter” in The Difficulty of Being (translated by Elizabeth Sprigge)
[more to come on Wednesday, July 7]
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