Uncle, Whence Laughter?

The other children orbited Gunther like mocking moons. He had always moved and spoken slowly and clumsily. Sensing his vulnerability, his peers made an elaborate sport of teasing, deriding and ridiculing the poor lad.

The Feast of Thalia had just concluded; their parents were drunk and happy, their accustomed vigilance and probity washed away by lusty languor. Thus did their progeny receive the gift of liberty to torment little Gunther with special style and venom. Friedrich tripped him as he passed the butcher's table in the market and giggled fiendishly as he went down; Jacob emptied a warm, fresh chamber pot over his confused and shaking head; Gretchen pelted him with rotten fruit from her mother's kitchen. The setting sun touched their wicked faces, and the mournful perplexity of their victim's, with sepia and shadow.

Gustav remembered what a beast he had been in youth. How mischief and merriment had made the ape in him sovereign over the thinking, dying animal he knew himself to be now. His to know was the long cool afternoon of limited time.

He studied the faces of the little devils, recalling as he did so their sweet and soaring voices in the temple, their tentative steps in the sacred dances and their panicked tears, most of which had been patted away by doting parents, though some had fallen on his modest shoes and into the tangled grey of his beard as he advised them gently, curled on his lap in the library. How tragic and infuriating it was, then, and how embarrassingly reminiscent of his ugliest hours as an ignorant whelp, to see their teeth bared like hounds as they circled Gunther, who was as simple and gentle as a smile.

"Away, monsters!" Gustav's shout made all of their faces turn toward him like sinister sunflowers tracking the sun. He was formidable: his inky locks were wild about his wrinkled countenance; his frame, normally bowed by the weight of time, was made proud and fearsome by indignant wrath. His long, dark robe was thrown back as he raised his staff, as if preparing to dash out their tiny brains.

They scattered like the fragments of a smashed mug, flitting into shadow or racing to intercept their weaving parents as they made their way home from the feast. Gunther remained, curled in the stinking pool Jacob had poured upon him like a fetid baptism. Gustav knelt before the weeping boy, who looked into the old man's indigo eye as if seeking an answer to one of the Great Riddles in Erato's Pool.

"Uncle, whence laughter?" Gunther asked, wiping grime from his lip along with some worryingly bloody spittle. Gustav tried softly to cleanse the lad's face with the hem of his robe.

"A better question than that rabble could muster, boy!" was his reply. Gunther sighed. He clambered out of the mess to sit on a warm flagstone.

"Shall I make a salve of the story? Are you fit for learning, or have those brats spoiled your appetite for knowledge altogether?"

"It always hurts when they laugh at me!" said Gunther. "But when father tells that tale of Heinrich being kicked in his nether parts by the bishop, or when Auntie makes the cats dance by holding a saucer of cream over their heads, my laugh feels warm and good. How can one thing come from, and make, so many different feelings? Please tell." Gunther gently prodded Gustav's broad foot with his tentative toe.

"With your will, then. As Pater Olaf has told you in the temple, people are not the only breathing beings the gods made. The fish that swim and the birds that fly and the beasts that roam and hunt all have their boons from above. Even the trees and the grass and the flowers have gifts from the gods. But there are gifts reserved for each actor in the play of life, which shape and color every part accordingly. Thus is the tale made engrossing for readers like you and me, Gunther."

"I am slow at reading, Uncle!" The boy said this with some anger and some shame.

"As all wise people ought to be," answered Gustav. "Look at your wicked friends! They are agile and vigorous and swift, are they not? Do they not leave you in their wake when they read the holy books aloud for Olaf's pleasure? Which of them, though, really understands a word?"

Gunther was too good to hide his thinking. It was written on his brow. After a meditative pause, he replied: "I don't know for sure, but when I asked Friedrich what the sign on the goblin's tunic meant in Sigurd's Saga, he called me stupid and would not say. And when Gretchen had to be one of the Daughters of Dawn at her sister's Handfasting with Luther the Cobbler, she forgot the blessing and Pater Olaf had to whisper it to her; I could hear!"

Gustav grinned and patted Gunther's sodden shoulder. "There you have it! Too many mistake remembering for understanding, or mouthing words for grasping what they have inside them. Indeed, too many hear the sounds made by monkeys or donkeys or even brooks and name them laughter. Laughter, like speech or writing or clever thumbs, is one of the boons the holy ones gave clever animals like us, special and sacred compensations for the brevity of our days. Do you know what irony is, boy?"

Darkness crept over Gunther's face. His brows knit, he shuffled his feet and muttered, balling his fists. "Tell me, Uncle, for I think I have it, but it slips away, like one of the eels that Jacob and I caught for the feast."

Gustav nodded, sweeping the boy's pate with his broom of a beard. The twilight's gloaming gilded the square where they sat. With his staff, Gustav drew a bold line through the muck on the ground. "Irony is a living, laughing line between seeming and being," he said, showing the boy how the symbol worked by tracing it with his old eyes and waiting patiently for the young one's to follow.

"You know that not everything that is said is meant the same way, nor is everything written. See, you made this clear yourself when you said that a laugh can give pain or comfort, freeze or warm. Whether on the stage or the page, in the street or the market or the temple, seeming and real meaning differ many times. Irony is the spirit of that difference. Can you remember meeting that spirit before those whelps made you weep?"

Gustav could practically smell the boy thinking. As the shades crowded the square and the moon winked at their conversation, Gunther softly said: "When Auntie salted the stew too much, and father tasted it and said, with his mouth screwed up and his eyebrows jumping under his bangs, "Perfect!"

"Yes, Gunther! This we call sarcasm, one of the simplest dances that irony does. But its true name, no matter the particular way it capers or sashays for our edification and entertainment, is the laugh. Did you and your mother and Auntie not laugh at your poor father's remark?'

"We did, Uncle! Just as you say! But what about the wicked laughter that cuts me and makes my insides ache? What kind of irony is that, and why are the other children so mean?"

It struck Gustav as the boy asked this question that the page of his despairing face had script upon it older than any book he had read.

"You ask sage questions, my lad. You came into the world in a rush, did you not? Scarcely finished was the story of your sinews when you were published by your sweet, generous mother. So you are being revised, and life is a vicious editor, your cruel and cunning little fellows its aids. Laughter names the line between who you are, and who you will yet become, as it does for us all. Bitter is the recognition of that line, painful the crossing of it, no?"

Gunther nodded and sighed pitifully. "So the gods gave us laughter to make all of this easier, Uncle? I'm not sure they had a good idea there!" He did not shout this complaint, and blushed as he uttered it.

"Pater Olaf was in his cups and now he is in his bed; you can be bold with me!" Gustav winked. Gunther seemed to grow a few inches with belonging.

Then Gustav said, with a conspiratorial sparkle in his eye just for the poor boy: "Speaking of your early entrance into the comedy we all play out for the gods, think for a moment of your mother's kind, brown face. Suppose you are at temple or in the market or wandering around in my library. If there are many there, and you see your mother's tender countenance in their midst, like a sunny green island in a dark sea of strangers, what comes into your mind and out of your mouth?"

No deliberation slowed Gunther's loud answer: "Her name! I mean, I don't say the name her mother gave her; I say 'Mother!' the moment I see her, without thinking at all."

"So you do, boy." There was warmth and encouragement in every syllable of Gustav's reply. "We call this recognition. Other forms of life do this as well: calls and cries of a carnival of kinds do this for them. We alone have names, some of which are more ancient even than language. Laughter is the name that recognizing irony wrings out of us. We are irony's kin, for we live on the line between body and mind, living and dying, growth and decay, and unlike so many other living things, we know it. Every time we know it again, its name comes out of us like music from a flute or smoke from a fire. It is recognition's song."

Gunther masticated those words in the methodical mouth of his mind for a moment. Then he whispered, quite plaintively: "But how does that help? How can that take away the hurt that laughter makes me feel?" He shuddered.

Just then, a constellation of bats formed against the silver grin of the moon over their heads. Gustav put his old finger beneath the boy's chin, the better to lift his eyes toward their gathering.

"Consider those leathery louts. What makes hunting at night, with only your seeking scream for a compass, easier to bear? After all, nights are schools of fearful things of all sorts. Bats move through them as rumors move through the market. What shields them from fear?"

Another loaf was baking in the small oven of the boy's mind. He gazed at the pirouetting shadows over them for a long, silent time. Then he snuffled, wiped his nose with his dirty sleeve and said, "They do it together."

"Clever lad! That they do. They recognize one another, and that circle keeps turning: one sees (not well, but surely hears) the other, and is recognized in turn, and before you know it, the lonely, fearful dark is dappled with stars that know and are known. Thus are grapes made into bunches, wolves into packs and soldiers into armies. When you hear laughter, even if there is scorn or cruelty mixed with it, you will know that the spirit of irony is with you, coaxing you over the line between seeming and being."

In the pooling night, Gustav could see wisdom shimmer in the boy's sad eyes. "I start to see, Uncle," said the lad. "So how should I act, when they're mean and I want to hurt them back?"

Gustav put his arm about the lad's small shoulders. "When they laugh at you, Gretchen and Jacob and Friedrich are doing just what Auntie did when you were born. She was a midwife for you, and so is irony for us all. The gods gave us the power to recognize and celebrate his moments of manifestation, for he is invisible to every other kind of eye. Do not despair at any laughter. Read in it the story of your becoming, and be assured that the spirit of irony is that midwife who might give you a twist to bring you safely through to new life. It might hurt for a moment, sure."

Gunther grimaced. "It does, Uncle! I hate it!"

Gustav frowned. He was about to admonish the boy, but he remembered once more how cruel he had been as a lad, and how much cruelty he had endured at others' hands, and his heart softened. So he said, to the bats and the moon and the capering shadows in the square as well as young Gunther: "I understand. But tell me: are you as tall today as you were when Auntie first pulled you wriggling from your mother's womb?"

Gunther laughed for the first time since his thrashing at the hands of the young fiends, and Gustav felt himself grow a moment or two younger as a result.

"That's silly, Uncle!" Gunther jabbed his small elbow at the old man's side. "I am not as tall as Father or Jacob or Pater Olaf, but I am much taller than I was when I was just a baby."

"You are, and you will grow taller still," Gustav replied. "Now, try to remember what it felt like, crossing that line between babe's body and boy's body. Recall with your legs, especially. Listen to their memories."

Good as he was, Gunther did as his wise friend bid him right away. Night owned the square now, and he would normally have felt afraid, but the deep, old voice of the Master Reader was like a warm fire, and he felt good and safe under the two grins over him, those of the moon and his friend and teacher alike.

"It hurt. It felt like my bones were too big for my skin. Auntie told me my legs were teething, which was confusing!"

"Wise is your Auntie!" Gustav turned up his head to the sagely shining grin of the moon and laughed. "Your pup teeth clattered to the floor, did they not, and made way for newer and better teeth? So too did the limbs of the babe shudder and shift and swell to make you taller than Gretchen. One day, I will be counting your nose hairs, just as you tally mine together now, little lord!"

Gunther laughed so hard that snot bubbled out of his nose.

"The gods gave no gift more generously or widely than pain," said Gustav softly. He rose, and helped the boy up. "It grows too late for other stories, but that one I will share with you too, in time. For the nonce, know that pain is the name of a line too, like our new friend, irony. Pain is the name for the line between growth and decay. Sometimes we move one way, sometimes the other. Pain is the sign we follow both ways. When we grow, we feel pain, and when we recognize the difference between what we seemed to be and what we have become, laughter or tears leap out. Laughter when we celebrate the difference, and tears when we mourn for what was and is lost. Which kind of music do you like better, boy?"

"Laughing!" Gunther had a story about joy on his face and in his voice.

"There is a captain who knows where to point his vessel!" Gustav ruffled the boy's dark hair. "Now, before we part, let us see if you have had time to digest the little supper we have shared, bitter as the first course your friends made may have been. What have they been doing, while we have spoken and listened and laughed together beneath the bats?"

Quick as a mouse darting into a hole was Gunther's reply: "Sleeping--that's what people usually do by night, Uncle!"

"Truly have you hit the mark again, little lord. But what have you done this night, while those fools drool and murmur in their beds?"

Gunther thought. He swayed a little, and a bubble formed at the corner of his mouth, as if the cauldron of his mind was heating up. "I'm not sure, Uncle. You are as full of eels as that pool by the mill!"

Gustav hugged the lad, and whispered into his little ear: "You have awakened. Irony, and the laughter that celebrates his coming like the hungry celebrated the arrival of the eels you and Jacob caught at the feast, are known to you now. You have made a new friend. None are more loyal or constant, nor will anything seem quite as hard or cold or painful with this friend at your side."

The boy seemed to grow taller and stronger before Gustav's old eyes. "Thank you, Uncle," he said, smiling. He looked up at the silent serenity of the stars. "You have as many good ideas as nose hairs."

They laughed and parted.