Why do we need humour and poetry in our lives?
When we look at the state of the world today, the natural sentiment we experience is anguish and despair. At times like this we need to inject humour into our lives. As Edward de Bono stated, “Humour is the best anti-despair and anti-arrogance device we have”. Humour helps us overcome the world by laughing at it and laughing at ourselves. When we see the absurdity in the way we live, we will naturally burst into a belly laugh.
For instance, very often we live like the child who has built a castle out of sand on the seashore and created it into a fortress so that nothing can penetrate it. Nothing can be taken away from it. Nobody can hurt it. Nobody can destroy it. There is pride in the creation. A certain arrogance. And intense attachment. And then suddenly a huge wave comes crashing into it and dissolves the entire castle into miniscule bits of sand on the seashore. And the child despairs. How silly! The tragedy becomes a comedy for us to laugh at. And opens our minds to see other possibilities. To gain insights. We need to be involved yet detached from life.
Let us look at humour in the form of a joke. The anatomy of a joke is that it takes us along a main track and suddenly we are shifted to the end of a side track and immediately we see this track which we might have taken.
“If I were married to you, I should put poison in your coffee,”
“And if I were married to you, I should drink the coffee”.
(This has been attributed to Winston Churchill and Lady Asquith)
Going down the logical route, the above situation would have turned sour. But making a joke out of it created the possibility of laughing at it. In this way one can genuinely say that to laugh is to really love. However, humour should not be mean.
We need to see the non-sense in life. We are too steeped in common sense.
From the tales of Mulla Nasruddin, there is the following tale. One day Nasruddin took a well grown ox to race with horses in a race which accepted all types of entrants. Everyone laughed at him. “Nonsense” said the Mulla; “it certainly will run very fast indeed, given a chance. Why, when it was a calf, you should have seen how it ran. Now, though it has had no practice, no occasion to run, it is fully grown. Why should it not run faster?”
The Mulla’s logic flies right in the face of how we assume life to work. His non-sense makes us think. Is older better? Has the calf (a learner) developed into something different to perform a different function from what we assumed? And so on.
Poetry like humour makes us see life differently. We need to re-experience the richness of life which sheer logic has deprived us of.
Is a river flowing, H2O+gravity, — or is it “Thou wanderer thro’ the woods”? This brings out ‘the dead truth of science and the living truth of poetry’. Poetry infuses spirit into life. Gives it a soul.
Charles Kingsley in his poem titled The Sands of Dee states in this excerpt
“They rowed her in across the rolling foam,
The cruel crawling foam,
The cruel hungry foam,
To her grave beside the sea”
John Ruskin commenting on the phrase ‘The cruel crawling foam…’ refers to something he calls a ‘pathetic fallacy’ where a falseness is created in our impressions of external things. He declares that ‘foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl’. However, we are pleased with those lines of Kingsley’s ‘not because they fallaciously describe foam, but because they faithfully describe sorrow’. It tries to truthfully describe a man’s inner world. Give soul to an experience. Bring life back into life.
There is that extra energy that the poet infuses into life. Gives it meaning. As Wordsworth says;
“And ’tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.”
Poetry and humour help us to see the beauty of life in all its myriad colours and dimensions. We see our stupidity and our falsity. We are able to cope with our pain and our struggles. We become more real and true. We need poetry and humour more than ever today.
