Sunday, May 09, 2010

P.2 Zen and the Art of the Joke

Sinning Against the Load

Last weekend I took my son and daughter to Dairy Queen. For the record my son is 5, or will be 5 at the end of the month here, and my daughter 8. We sitting in the back eating, and in comes this huge guy; by huge I mean fat. I didn’t really pay a whole lot of mind to it, but as he was approaching the register my daughter leans forward and says quietly to me, “That guy must come here a lot.” At the moment I honestly didn’t know what she was talking about until she pointed it out. Then of course I laughed and said, “Kylie, that’s not nice. Just because he’s overweight doesn’t mean he eats here a lot.” Then I said something along the lines of, “You never know, maybe he’s eating off the low fat menu.”


I’ve been thinking about that incident with my daughter on and off for the last week now. Did I say the right thing? I don’t want her laughing at overweight people everywhere she goes, pointing and snickering. Should I have told her that it wasn’t funny at all? Then what? Should I be telling what’s funny and what’s not funny? Somewhere mid week the words of Joseph Campbell rang in the form of a musing on Nietzsche’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra”. I went as follows:

In a kind of parable, Nietzsche describes what he calls the three transformations of the spirit. The first is that of the camel, of childhood and youth. The camel gets down on his knees and says, "Put a load on me." This is the season for obedience, receiving instruction and the information your society requires of you in order to live a responsible life. But when the camel is well loaded, it struggles to its feet and runs out into the desert, where it is transformed into a lion -- the heavier the load that had been carried, the stronger the lion will be. Now, the task of the lion is to kill a dragon, and the name of the dragon is "Thou shalt." On every scale of this scaly beast, a "thou shalt" is imprinted: some from four thousand years ago; others from this morning's headlines. Whereas the camel, the child, had to submit to the "thou shalts," the lion, the youth, is to throw them off and come to his own realization.
And so, when the dragon is thoroughly dead, with all its "thou shalts" overcome, the lion is transformed into a child moving out of its own nature, like a wheel impelled from its own hub. No more rules to obey. No more rules derived from the historical needs and tasks of the local society, but the pure impulse to living of a life in flower.

I imagine many people in that situation would have just said, “That’s not funny!”. Then add something along the lines of, “It’s not nice to make fun of people that way.”. Now we’ve just packed a load on our child’s back, without even knowing we did it. It seems to me there’s a fine line between packing such a load and allowing them to be themselves. But of course in this instance (and others like it) Nietzsche’s reflection shines through with a blinding light. He’s quite right, and perhaps the line isn’t so thin after all.

We don’t even realize that we’re essentially conditioning our children to find certain things funny, while at the same time find others not so funny. By the time they’re adults they’ll be walking around with so much baggage we’ll be unable to tell the difference between their social laugh and their real one, and neither will they. As a sort of example; every so often it’ll happen that I tell a joke (suppose it’s at work) and there’s always one individual who will instinctively give an initial half chuckle, then immediately there after regain control and finish with a sort scoff and departure that says, “That’s not funny. How dare you deceive me like that.”. In effect they’re mad at me because I brought to the surface their true laughter. More importantly it was revealed to me, and anyone else present, that they find something funny which represents a load they’ve been carrying around, something they’ve been told by parents, teachers, clergy, etc. not to laugh at, and now I’ve just caused them to “sin against the load”. Hm, it’s not me keeping you from yourself. If they just would have laughed maybe they would have seen a little glimmer of something.

So therein lies the paradox; to find oneself, or to stay true to convention. It’s interesting that that which leads to knowledge of oneself also stands as a sin against god, or a sin against convention. It’s not enough to understand Zen by just laughing at the joke, you have to at the time be laughing at yourself, and indeed ourselves… The very thing we’ve been told not to all these years….

6 comments:

  1. Perhaps the proper thing to do then is educate our children on the differences in people and to respect those differences. Learning not to laugh at a fat person is simply learning to respect other peoples feelings not resisting the temptation to be ourselves. Its important to always to remember that we dont know why he was fat...as you pointed out, it doesnt mean he eats there everyday. When I see someone who is that fat I see pain in their life or some other emotional issue their satisfying with food. Laughing at them or allowing our children to laugh does nothing but cause more pain and prove to them that they are as ridiculous as they think they are. You did the right thing in telling your daughter it wasn't nice but perhaps take it to the next level and explain why...its in explaining the why that she becomes armed with the knowledge to make a choice to be nice. Make sense?

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  2. Maybe it was a bad analogy... I suppose what I'm highlighting here is the idea that we force convention before understanding, which I think is unavoidable, and that's the essence of Nietzsche's allegory. You often times have no choice but to pile a load on your child's back because their not going to grasp the what's and the why's behind doing and acting in certain ways.

    Here's an example, the boy (Evan) was sweeping our garage floor over the weekend with a big push broom, and I was sitting a chair just sort of watching and smiling. Every time he gave the broom a push, he'd smack it down on the floor, and then push again.

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  3. Okay, well, why was he doing this? He got it from watching me do it of course. You know the drill, when you're sweeping up dirt and crap from your garage floor some of the muck get's caught in the broom and you have to smack it down on the floor to knock it out, otherwise it leaves a smear pattern every time you push the broom and it takes you twice as long to do it. Of course, at 5 years old the boy isn't going to grasp all that so it's hardly even worth bringing it up; and in this case I didn't, he just started doing it that way. So in that little moment I've built in him a sort of social dogma which he'll carry with him until he gets old enough to figure it out on his own. I realize how seemingly trivial it sounds, but I imagine it would be nice to catch him in the act (in how ever many years from now) of actually figuring that out, of having that realization – that would be exiting in a real personal way.

    Here's the thing though, little dogmas like that are easy to overcome, and some not. As a result I'm very cognizant of all the little commands, commitments and socially pressured ideas I force on the kids. Which is, in the end, what I'm really saying in this post.

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  5. Let me offer up another analogy that I've always enjoyed with regard to raising a child within a system of Christian dogma. Suppose you have a son or daughter, and at the age of 6 you tell them, “You're going to one day marry person X, you will love them, cherish them and be with no other. In fact, to love and be with another is wrong and sinful, punishable by hell.” Now, this might sound a bit unrealistic but in fact, this is what many churches force on your minds starting from sunday school. At any rate, what do you suppose would happen? For a time what you were telling the child wouldn't be made heads or tails of, more then likely you'd get some sort of acknowledgment and he moves on. So lets fast forward a bit. In the teenage years (after years of forcing this dogma into their head) they will no doubt start to develop what normal people consider natural feelings for other people. Of course, since he was told that having feelings for other people is sinful, he will either not know how to interpret the feelings, or, he'll know what the feelings are and call them evil.

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  6. Okay, so he graduates from high school, starts a job and marries this woman his parents have for him. Now it very well could be that he does learn to develop a certain fondness for this partner of his, however consider something else. Consider that in the course of his daily life he's met someone else, someone who's actually a much better fit, and someone who (had he not been so screwed up in the head) he should probable have actually married. Consider that he actually loves this person, however he's unable to interpret it that way because he's been told that he can only love this one, and that to love another is evil.

    You see, what's happened here is that “love” has been institutionalized, and because of that the now man is unable to live the happy and fulfilling life he could be leading. He's confused, doesn't understand why he's with the woman he's with, and doesn't understand why he's feeling the way he's feeling for other women. The same thing happens when the church institutionalizes and capitalizes on spirituality. You end up with a woman or man that gets older and can't sift through the bull shit of their own religion. Once you start associating things like love and spirituality with the dogmas of certain ways of thinking and talking (and those ways of thinking and talking only), you've completely missed the point of what it was all about in the first place.

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