Yesterday our little niece came to visit.
My brother played "Cruel Monster" with her. He hissed and growled and she pretended to pee her trousers in fear (she's six), jumped on her father's arm and hid her face against his chest. But she was already waiting for the next attack.
There is a sense in this child that she both believes in the monster, is actually quite genuinely and terribly afraid for seconds, immediately replaced by the certainty that her uncle is an uncle and not a monster. Though he could be one very well.
- Now he is,
- now he isn't.
Was it my brother who did it? Was my brother the causer of her emotions? Who was it? Was it the imagination, neither fully hers, nor fully his which brought such delight to the moment?
Hiding her face she acted out this hide and seek game. She wanted to become surprised whenever she raised her head from her fathers shoulder, in order to see if the monster was still there or if her uncle was back. Monster or uncle, uncle or monster? Not fully sure what to expect but open for the shocking moment.
I recently had a stimulating conversation where I was trying to get someone to understand what it is like to be surprised by oneself.
It brought to mind the thoughts that I have all the time on an ongoing basis combined with the feelings that I love to share but don't seem to be able to.
The example of the joke might explain what it can mean to be surprised by oneself.
Why do I laugh? If someone tells me a joke and I immediately understand the punch line, did the joke teller surprise me or was it me? One could say "both", but in this case I would like to emphasise that it is the line, laughing through me. The element of surprise is expressed through spontaneous laughter, the punch line generates a situational cheerful delight.
I feel surprised by the feeling of surprise.
Where this form of becoming surprised is absent, I already know the punch line or else I don't understand it.
The joke teller himself, when he heard the joke, laughed heartily and now expects me to do the same. But since he cannot know how I will react, whether I will laugh or not understand or whether I will enjoy myself, he is not the actual cause of my spontaneous reaction, he is merely the causer of an open end situation. What exhilarates me is the punch line, less so the bearer of it.
In no way can I make someone laughing, the laugh arises through the surprise-motion of the one who hears a joke. Hence my statement that it's the "self" which surprises the "me".
Now there are jokes, and there are statements that are something other than jokes.
Which can nevertheless provide the same exhilaration. If I think of myself in the way that I play hide and seek with myself, I can now judge this very statement it in many ways. Is "hiding" in the sense of "fooling" something bad?
Children, for example, are much more receptive to silly jokes than adults who have learned to suppress their spontaneity. If you want to play a trick on a child, then you make your hand into a fist and make the child believe that something is hidden in it. It will pull and tug at your hand until you finally open it and lo and behold (!), nothing is visible! The child will laugh at this fun. It intuitively understands that you were the fool who tried to fool it.
The adult, who watches the scene and knows that nothing is in the hand of the joker, only smiles but does not feel surprised.
This adult may even think that there is nothing which he can surprise himself with any longer, if he makes himself believe that future lines will have no punch potentials.
[Have you ever heard that "you can be too self-aware"]
As a joke teller, I cannot convince anyone of the funniness of a statement if they find absolutely nothing funny in it.
An attempt to explain a punch line that is as clear as day to oneself can cause a lot of trouble. Confusion, fatigue, frustration.
If I myself am in the role of the one who cannot comprehend something that another has found to be successful hilarity, then it is up to me whether I want to find out what made the other person laugh. If I don't want to find out, why ask the other person for further explanation? He can't then do it and please me because I don't want it to please me at all. I may even find that it aggravates me.
But who wants to predict all the future punch lines of situational life? Why not anticipate the surprise? If I want to know all the jokes already, I spoil the fun.
Do you know this? Someone says, "The universe is cooked spaghetti". And you, "Huh?"
What is this nonsense? He could have said, "The cosmos is the fart of infinity" and you can't laugh at that either.
What can one say so that you allow yourself becoming irritated by it and perhaps would only come to want to follow an initially moronic statement?
He cannot. He can only laugh about it himself and trigger a slight inspiring itch or stumble in you, which then motivates you to want to get to the bottom of such nonsense.
But it is not "he" or "she" that triggers this, it is what you perceive as expressions of spontaneous mirth, not his person or his identity or what he has said to you in the past that now somehow disturbs the moment, it is the hiding place of the mirth itself.
Once you have located its hiding place, it creates a clear and bright moment of realisation, that "eureka" with a twinkling eye.
And already, as you begin to enter into the deeper philosophy of the whole matter, the serenity seeks a new hiding place and escapes from you. Barely grabbed by the scruff of the neck and already gone again.
A poem moves you and tunes you into a form of the aforementioned serenity.
But as soon as you want to tell this poem to someone else in your own words, exactly what the poem itself expressed does not happen. Impossible to explain a poem. It explains itself.
The poet says: "At the edge of the forest the pine tree dreams", and the logician answers: "No, the poet dreams - not the pine tree!"
Ghastly.
When I heard that "the atheist is the greatest believer in God", I felt spontaneiously being caught by this statement. I recognized myself as a former atheist! The joke had found ME instead of I found the joke. LOL
After five years, I saw a childhood friend of mine again.
We had had quite a rough go of it the last time we met, to say the least. But now, in the context of a gathering of six women who grew up and went to school together, we were confronted again.
A very brief exploratory look into each other's eyes, we hugged and talked as if nothing had happened. What must have been over an hour of just talking to each other, my friend started conversing to my seat neighbour. So I sat in the middle.
Since I had become cold, I took my cardigan off the armrest and held it in front of me to distinguish up from down and fiddled with it for a while until said friend poked me rather rudely in the arm.
I had completely forgotten where I was sitting (!), but it could also be that I had been playing hide-and-seek and wanted to annoy her and my seat neighbour a bit because they were talking to each other past my face. I don't know for sure.
This clear indication that I was in their way caused me to spontaneously laugh out loud. I just imagined myself in this scene, the two of them trying to have a conversation while I danced obliviously with my jacket in front of their eyes.
After I laughed myself dry and so did the others at the table, I got up and chose another seat. I think I had expressed in some way, without having had it in mind on purpose, that each of them might have changed their seats. But since I had already felt so funny, I didn't mind leaving the chair at all.
In this very moment of fiddling, I was not thinking, not expressing a strong will to control the situation. I did not observe myself doing something "in order to ... ".
That's what I am trying to tell. That you do some things purposefully without doing it on purpose.
Understood? ;-)
Picture source:
Von Fraxinus2 - Eigenes Werk, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=60773500
I laugh because it resonates within me, not because I'm surprised.
When you laugh at a joke, aren't you laughing because you didn't know its punch line?
No, there are many things that come as a surprise that are not funny at all. I laugh mostly because something that is taboo (coerced to be hidden) is acknowledged by another. This doesn't always translate into funny either though. It is usually the acknowledgement coupled with an exaggeration of sorts.
The laughter comes for me from the fellowship, often an acknowledgement of the pain that is inescapable in life. For that brief moment in time, two souls passing by on their journeys alone connected outside the cult-ural demands.
I can readily agree with that, while it still doesn't rule out that something surprising can also be very funny at the same time.
You used a very good example, I find.
The moment you are able to turn pain into joke, it is not a surprise? In the sense that you are able to do that at all? Isn't it the case that you don't always succeed, and since you can't know where and when you might succeed, you are surprised IF it works?
For me, likewise, though this does not preclude the solitary. I can laugh when I am alone with myself, amused at myself for having just thought or done something that was absurd or of any other nature. I don't see communion as the only bridge to laughter, although it is a very beautiful experience.
Yes, very much so :) I acknowledge pain through my laughter and especially because such laughter is often forbidden as taboo (for example, I laughed about the moment my mother accepted her death, the way which she chose to communicate it, opened the space) it nevertheless often expresses exactly that, that people have received a cosmic joke at certain moments.
You describe by this:
what happened between my mother, sister and me when we gave company to our dying mom.
I was surprised that I had been able to do it at all and had previously assumed that accompanying the dying would be a sad, difficult and debilitating business in every respect. Now I found that it was, but at the same time an exhilarating, light and strength-giving one.
No, it's a release to keep the harshness of life from breaking my fragility. Never a surprise though.
I don't either. I used that context in relation to your question involving another telling a joke to us.
The scripts we have within us are often rigid, and if they refuse to bend or recede can easily break one. Many of our scripts have much attachment to them, values that are one of the largest weights upon us as time moves forward and we lose these treasured connections. The intensities with which we store these grateful feelings can often be both a blessing at the time and a curse once it has moved on from us.
Thank you for sharing this most intimate look into such an experience for you. I have not processed the loss of my dad in such a way and it is with satisfaction I see that you have been able to process it in such a way.
If you feel something heavy and burdensome and you manage to turn that heavy into something light, is it something that you have already seen coming? If it were, that you had already seen it coming, then it would be impossible in the first place to feel the heaviness as heavy, because you already anticipated that it could be just as light for you.
... You would have to allow me to question your premise that you do not surprise yourself. I don't think I've actually been given that permission. Would it offend you if I said I am a fool to keep trying?
Very welcome. I see life in many cases as a paradox. It helps me to navigate more easily, to let things pass. Though I am certain that there will be plenty situations where I will be put to the test over and over again.
This appears to be a barrier in our view I think.
Not seeing something coming doesn't make it a surprise when it arrives. Nor does ones reaction to it need be a surprise if one understands themself.
There is controlled folly and uncontrolled folly.
There are situations (this is my speaking solely for myself here) where it simply doesn't make sense to choose feeling light over feeling heavy. Say something along the lines of witnessing a cruelty to oneself or another.
And choosing to feel heavy over it is no surprise to myself. And if someone (or myself even when the heaviness becomes thick) makes an absurd magnification of it in lightness for that brief time there can be a lightness that in no way invalidates the heaviness of the situation.
I wouldn't be offended yet would be curious as to the motivations. As I mentioned earlier in this discussion I'm of the opinion that no one really ever surprises themselves and merely pretends to so that the facade (mask) their conscious mind creates doesn't get ripped off. I believe most folks are frightened of what is behind that tool so pretend they can't see it when it opposes the narrative they have created around the scripts handed to them.
In your case it feels to me that you would have a stronger connection with that ocean of thought which is where your genius bubbles up from that is so often displayed within your conscious explorations.
Routine:
Think - Think - Think - Chit Chat - Think - Think - Chit Chat Think - Think - Think etc.
Disturbance:
Think - Think - Think - DISTURBANCE!!! - Surprise! - Oh! Shock! What the?!?! Where the...?!? After-think - After-think - After-think --> Uhm .., Ah..., Ohhhh!! HaHa!! LOL!
-->Understanding the self.
https://blurt.blog/skillful/@erh.germany/rhkovc
I think in the conversation I have had with someone else, I find myself better in explaining what I was trying to tell you. You may even find the whole comment threat worth reading.