Living Wittily

Humour, Humanity and the Incarnation

Funny how unrelated things come together sometimes.  A TV personality caused outrage by suggesting strikers should be shot.

Explanations about being satirical with a sharp edge, or words taken out of context, or apology that people were offended, didn’t redeem the situation.

They simply betrayed the dangerous deficits of compassion, understanding and ethical responsibility that can lurk in what is intended to make people laugh.

 

Then I had a discussion with some students about laughter. A sense of humour is an essential attribute if we want to learn, understand, enjoy and come to love human beings. Humour and humanity come from the same word family.  What we laugh at says something unmistakable about what we live for and how we look at the world. Laughter with people creates deep bonds of togetherness, head nodding, hand-clapping, shoulder-shaking mirth, and joy in the oddity of things. Laughing at people is divisive, and tries to diminish the one laughed at.

 The contrast of inhumane non-jokes about other human beings called strikers, and one of the nicest compliments I ever read couldn’t be greater: “he looked humanely forth on human life”. The greatest humorists manage to bring humour and humanity together. Then our laughter brings us close to tears, because we see ourselves, our ridiculous, wonderful , mistake-making selves, in their work.

Advent is the time we celebrate the birth and humanity of Jesus, ‘when God almighty, came to be one of us’. Christmas joy is because Jesus shows us the God who does not mock our humanity, but takes it and restores it, and redeems our own humanity in that great original act of generous love. Emmanuel. God with us.

The two images are carefully chosen - the one smiley amongst the blue down in the mouths - and the Annunciation (Botticelli) of what would become good tidings of great joy, to all peoples. The juxtaposition of humour, humanity and the redeeming touch of God.

Living Wittily, Social Communication, and the Modest Aim of Creating Conversation

Sometime today Living Wittily will have received 200,000 hits, which is no great milestone for a blog, even though the blogger eschews Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social communication. Interesting use of both social and communication when they become married without a conjunction. Social communication should be a tautology, if it's communication between human beings then it's social; if it's social then it involves inter-communication of those who can express themselves in terms that each understand. I suppose the question is, are all forms of communication social? And if they are, how to we differentiate between conversations face to face, conversations on phone, Facebook, Twitter with known friends, and conversations with that world out there with whoever reads something and responds to it. Which raises further the question when does an exchange of information, opinion, comment, gossip become a conversation rather than an impersonal exchange of floating data, random thoughts, serendipitous exchanges, and uncontextualised trivia?

I think it's when the communication is between people who even if they don't know each other, are looking for more than a forum to opinionate, and more than a network to barge into with self-expression intended to make that particular self noticed - and that as a process of self-identity construction. Such communication will only become conversation when it produces one of the most important strands in human relationships - continuity. It's the continuity of communication, the desire to turn comment into conversation, and offer personal opinion not as the put down answer but as the gift of further questioning in which each side enters a partnership of respectful speaking and listening.    

I can think of a few reasons for keeping a blog and offering thought, and viewpoint and insight - and whatever wisdom we learn, to whoever will read it. For me it's quite simple. The offer of all the above to whoever is patient, interested and trustful enough to read and ponder, to offer their own wisdom and insight, to value their own experience as well as the experience of the writer. When that becomes an exchange, conversation begins. Most folk who comment on Living Wittily are people I know, or have come to know, and quite a few of you I've not met. Some email and these become private conversations, and often they have enriched and persuaded and edited my thinking and sharpened my view of the world.

So in a life a wee bit busy just now I still try to keep Living Wittily going, offering a voice amongst the voices, and now and then offering my five loaves and two fishes into the mix and flux of this kaleidoscopic second decade of the third millennium, and hoping that readers might have some nourishment, and not expecting there are too many baskets full left over. Blog posts are like the water in a Scottish burn in spate - they swirl downstream and quickly disappear. But in the flow of words, the aim remains the same, and the motto from Robert Bolt's "Man for All Seasons" still expresses my own spiritual and intellectual disposition. There are few pursuits in life more fascinating, fulfilling, frustrating and fruitful than seeking to serve God in the tangle of our minds, and doing so as those who try to keep the first and greatest commandment - to love the Lord our God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind and all our strength.

Advent - Enthusiasms and Idiosyncrasies (4) The Gardener at Christmas.

For some years now I've enjoyed the poetry of U A Fanthorpe. Her collected poems range across human experience as seen by a perceptive, compassionately critical poet whose emotional intelligence and moral sensibility make hers a voice that 'looks humanely forth on human life.'  Reflecting on the NHS, or the loss of passion and humanities in the Universities, or identifying those who now inhabit 'the draughty corners of the abandoned Welfare State', she has little interest in acid and lament, but rather holds up human experience to a scrutiny that is looking for what is of value, what is the dignity, what the obligations we all have to each other, to enrich and nurture life, and resist what withers, diminishes and devalues.

She always writes poetry for the Advent Season and most earlier collections include some of these - others are written for friends and family.

 

The Gardener at Christmas

He has done all that needs to be done.

 

Rake, fork, spade, cleaned and oiled,

Idle indoors; seeds, knotty with destiny, rattle

Inside their paper jackets. The travelling birds

Have left; predictable locals

Mooch in the early dusk.

 

He dreams of a future in apples,

Of three white lilies in flower,

Of a tree that could bear a man.

 

He sits back and waits

For it all to happen.

U A Fanthorpe, Collected Poems 1978-2003 (Calstock: Peterloo, 2005) page 400

 

Advent - and the shadow of malice from offstage

There is a part of my mind that doesn't want to say anything about Jeremy Clarkson.

But there is a larger part (it's made up of conscience, intellect, emotional intelligence - 0h and moral coherence) that simply wants to dissociate my own capacity to think, feel and speak as a human being whose world has horizons wider than gearboxes, and whose values are about more than speed, power and self-centred indulgence growing like giant hogweed out of an overblown ego.

His comment on The One Show about those involved in yesterday's strike are too crass, stupid, nasty and morally repulsive to repeat. If you didn't hear it, or the fallout, google his name.

It's Advent - and one of the most perplexingly predictable episodes in the Christmas story is what those with power do to those who are powerless - it's called the slaughter of the innocents.

Not that Mr Clarkson can compare with Herod and his methods of silencing dissent, holding on to power and eliminating opposition. But the instinct to identify, demonise and eliminate any threat to self interest is always the temptation of power - and thankfully Mr Clarkson has no executive power. Which is a good thing, a very good thing.

Incidentally I've never watched Top Gear. I think it's presenter should be taken out and made to apologise in front of all the families ( many of whom will be his ex-viewers) he had the insolence and brutality to besmirch with words that are socially toxic and ethically inexcusable.