In Praise of Silly

I'm sure I'm not the first person to make this comparison, but I'll make it anyway: grief is like tinnitus, or anyway my grief, in its current advanced state, is like tinnitus. I always hear it, day after day, just ringing away at the same pitch and volume. What changes is the attention I pay to it - loud noises or interesting conversations will distract me momentarily, but as soon as they recede, there's that ringing again. So persistent is it, and so loud, that most of the time it just sort of blends in with the other sounds of the world, as if it's become a part of the world. It rings through every song I hear on the radio, through every thought that drifts through my brain; it doesn't ruin the songs or the thoughts, but it does make them sound different.

Another comparison: grief is like a pair of sunglasses. You can still see shapes, objects, and movement through it, you can still read a book (in bright sunlight) or watch a (brightly colored) movie, but the world as you see it is not as it really is. The colors aren't necessarily darker (for a time in high school I wore these purple John Lennon sunglasses that actually made most colors more vibrant, especially reds), but they're often muddier or less distinct. After a while, you might even forget that you're wearing your grief-sunglasses, but then you walk into an empty, darkened room, and you remember. It's especially noticeable at night.

Speaking of high school: when I was a teenager I wore this black t-shirt with an Edgar Allen Poe quote on it that went, "There are moments when, even to the sober eye of reason, the world of our sad humanity may assume the semblance of a hell." There was no image or pattern on the shirt, just white letters on black cotton. I loved that shirt, and I loved the quote, not because I was especially morose or dark (although what teenager is not sometimes morose and dark?), but because of the convoluted, and, to my unformed mind, sophisticated way it expressed what was really a rather banal sentiment. I cherished that phrase the way teenagers cherish favorite poems and song lyrics. I wrote it on notebooks, chalkboards, and several yearbook pages. I think I thought it made me sound mysterious and interesting, although I now realize that I was lucky it never came to the attention of an overzealous guidance counselor, to whom it might make me sound troubled or homicidal. However - and this is my point - now that I've had some experience of tragedy and grief, the sentiment behind the quote, and, more importantly, the sentiment behind my fixation on the quote, seem utterly irrelevant to the actual condition of grief. Grief does not make the world of our sad humanity assume the semblance of a hell; it may make it assume the semblance of a funhouse mirror or an underwater city or a vaseline-smeared window, but not a hell.

Depression, now depression is another thing entirely, I gather. A couple of months ago Kate and I went to see the movie Melancholia, in which a depressed Kirsten Dunst accepts the impending end of the world (a wayward planet is about to collide with Earth) with something like approval. Her sister, Charlotte Gainsbourg, has a young son, and therefore a reason to live, and so she doesn't want the world to end at all, but for Kirsten Dunst human beings (including herself) are horrible and destructive creatures, and they deserve to perish. I suppose I can understand a depressed person feeling that way, but I, a bereaved person, spent the bulk of the movie in a state of heart-racing anxiety because I emphatically did not want the world to end. I guess I'm willing to endure the ringing in my ears as long as I'm still able to hear some music playing over it.

I haven't bothered much with quotes since becoming an adult, but I recently came across something I quite like. Humphrey Lyttleton was a British jazz trumpeter who, in addition to helping lead a jazz revival in post-WWII Britain, was, after 1972, the host of a much-loved BBC radio comedy show called I Haven't A Clue. The show was a sort of quiz show in which a panel of comedians played games and said silly things like, ""Hello and welcome to I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue. Tonight, we promise you a nail-biting contest. Which will be followed by a nose-picking contest." (That's not the quote I have in mind.) One of the games was called Mornington Crescent, which was a fake strategy game that required panelists to name a series of landmarks or stops on the London Tube, proceeding by a complicated (and ever-changing) set of rules toward the Mornington Crescent stop; the first person to announce "Mornington Crescent!" won the game. Of course there were no actual rules to the game: the whole thing was just an exercise in anarchic silliness. I had never heard of Mornington Crescent until the Scottish rock band Belle and Sebastian released a song by that title, and then I visited the Tube stop in London a few years back, which is in the Camden Town area, a part of London Joey quite liked. Whether he liked the song I don't know; I doubt he'd heard of Humphrey Lyttleton.

Anyway, Humphrey Lyttleton died in April 2008, but just before he did he wrote a note to his loved ones, which read, in part, "As we journey through life, discarding baggage along the way, we should keep an iron grip, to the very end, on the capacity for silliness. It preserves the soul from desiccation." This is the sort of thing that only a mature person, someone who had seen plenty of silly's opposite in life and knew its true value, would say, but it's also the sort of thing that Joey, young as he was, understood perfectly. He was excellent at not taking himself too seriously, and he never, either as a teenager or afterward, put on the airs of a tortured intellectual the way that I did. In that way, he was much older than I was.

Now I find that without him, odd though it seems, I'm probably sillier than I ever was. Silliness helps to shout down the grief, which, for all of its exhausting persistence, is something that really can be shouted down. And it helps to keep me connected to my brother, because when I'm being silly I'm often acting the way we acted together. But it is also a fundamental way of relating to the world that fits more and more with what I've come to value, and, well, it's just more fun to be silly than not to be silly. The tinnitus of grief, or the sunglasses of grief, or whatever you want to call it, is not ever going to disappear. I understand that. But as I get older, and as I contemplate becoming a father (have I mentioned here that we're having a baby in April? I'll have more to say about this soon), I grow further and further away from the moody, serious person I was when I was younger, before I had to deal with any real tragedy. So make mine a Humphrey Lyttleton, and Edgar Allen Poe be damned.