Serious people take serious things seriously. And we’ve had plenty to be serious about over the past few years. For many of us, recent history has seemed like some combination of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
But.
Serious people take serious things seriously, I say—relishing the repetition, playing with the words. Don’t we all long to see the world returned to its pre-pandemic, pre-post-truth serious playfulness? Don’t we all want to dance—if not with our bodies, at least with our words, our sentences? “A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing,” says Clive James. But it’s more than mere frolicking. “A sense of humor is a sense of proportion,” says John Frederick Nims.
Knowing what to laugh at, knowing when to laugh—that’s sanity.
We are writers, and our first duty is to tell the truth, no matter how ugly, no matter how depressing, no matter how shocking. Writing is our calling. Writing is our work.
But it also has to be our play. Frost said that poetry was play, but play “for mortal stakes.” “The opposite of play is not work—it is depression,” says Dr. Stuart Brown, founder and president of the National Institute for Play. (The National Institute of Play! Aren’t you delighted it exists—in whatever form?)
When I get most serious, when I dig deeper into trauma or injustice or just plain horror, I have to remind myself that (1) writing is an art, (2) writing is playing with language. In college, I was put off by how my profs presented Eliot’s and Joyce’s works as perfect and sacred works of art that I was required to worship. Hell, I thought writing was supposed to be fun.
And I was right (though it’s a lesson I still have to learn over and over). When I heard that, working on Ulysses in the middle of the night in his two-room flat in Paris, James Joyce was constantly scolded from the bedroom by his wife Nora: “Jim, stop writing or stop laughing!”—when I learned that, I realized my profs were missing some essential point in that great novel. And when I read Eliot had added the notes to The Waste Land as an afterthought, as a kind of joke (he increased, rather than decreased, the complexity and ambiguity of the poem), that’s when I realized how funny, how wickedly witty, Eliot was in that poem. And how much sheer fun he was having keeping his reader off-balance and exploiting the darkest vision of his world.
“When you close your eyes to tragedy, you close your eyes to greatness,” said Stephen Vizinczey.
Well, maybe, but if you close your eyes to comedy, to humor, you close your eyes to life, I say. That bloodbath of a play Hamlet—like that heart-shredder King Lear—is full of laughs, for all its genuine horrors. We are restored to sanity by laughter. OK, I didn’t laugh once at The Road or Orwell’s 1984—but McBride’s The Good Lord Bird and Deacon King Kong? Yes, yes, yes.
Being serious does not mean being solemn. Being tragic does not mean giving up your humanity.
When my most serious poem or essay or book review is, well, boring—I write a parody of it. I dance with it, I joke with it. And then I find a balance. I find some humanity and sanity. I become human again.
About the Author
Ron Smith is a James River Writers Advisory Board member and former Poet Laureate of Virginia. He was also the writer-in-residence at St. Christopher’s School. His most recent books are The Humility of the Brutes (LSU Press) and a new edition of his Running Again in Hollywood Cemetery (MatHat Press). The first edition was judged by Margaret Atwood as “a close runner-up” for the National Poetry Series Open Competition and by Donal Hall as “the runner-up” for the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize.