Misplaced seriousness, more than misplaced laughter, will drive a person to madness. Being over-solemn puts ankle weights on the soul, then sends it panting and limping to a marathon it will inevitably collapse out of. There is an ambition or a vision of glory which causes a person to do this; they imagine that through seriousness a higher range of truth can be reached, and that once the utmost seriousness has been achieved life can cease to be the survival of facts and finally pass over into being a ripe, pleasant, demystified harmony. Meaning that all over-seriousness begins with Romantic notions.
Wanting to be “anywhere but this world,” as Baudelaire put it, is bound to gather sensitive types as well as kooks and cranks. My personal theory is that for every Wordsworth or Coleridge there’s a basement full of moody intellectuals wearing French frowns and discussing the utter depravity of this-or-that. They can be categorized by many breeds, enough to rival the Westminster Kennel Club: mystics, culture critics, social theorists, literary prophets, scientific radicals and radical scientists, to name a few. All of them hell-bent and grim. They have much to say about ‘the end of history’ and ‘post-culture,’ the rotting dizziness of simulacra or the necessity of an apocalyptic age to progress our civilization-cycle. The misplacement of seriousness is not an affliction growing solely in the body of postmodernism, either. Liberals and traditionalists in the spotlight of academe are capable of brewing their own medleys of cataclysm, sin, and dreck. It all seems a poor attempt at translating the intimations parceled out to each of us, that what is immediate and obvious is not everything, that literal interpretations do not satisfy. These are not pretentious or obscure. These are apparent, if only fleetingly so, to everyone.
Yet the answer is not – can never be – the opposite, which is anti-intellectualism. Refusing to entertain what we feel to be true, simply because it is felt and not seen or told, in the end depresses us. Without the Romantic suspicion of a place outside of this world, we see ourselves as survival-operators, biological units with biological aspirations. At its furthest extremity, a rejection ends in amorality and a self striving painfully for greater dullness. Such a person, though touting another sort of solemnity, becomes a parody just as the ultra-affirmative theorists do. Saying the world is not the world and the world is a wallet comes to the same untruth, finally.
But levity, I write with no small amount of thankfulness, has yet to pass from currency and may well prove ineradicable. Wit and jokes – without them brute existence would be unbearable, and higher functioning impossible. The writing of philosophy and poetry can only be done if the author’s hand is light enough to move their pen. Ideas, abstractions, theories are all encumbrances; laughter not only shatters the constraints, but maximizes our range of movement. Only in a joke can the nuances of existence be given reality. A solemn nod of agreement is too much of a gesture, too easily faked. Laughter, on the other hand, cannot be counterfeited. It is involuntary, and therein lies its danger. Many are afraid that taking up the levity response to Romantic feeling would be an express ticket to a genuineness they cannot afford. These fears are not unfounded. On the contrary, they are utterly perceptive, but they fail to consider that levity is also an abiding sense of happiness, that the capability to take things humorously is immune to chastisement. There is no real punishment for unchaining oneself. Levity need not be irreverence. After all, the lifting of the lips in a smile is something like the lifting of a veil, isn’t it?