meinewissenschaft, through time: 2.

7. Henri Bergson believes laughter occurs when a human (as a nonphysical,

unbounded being of psychological continuity) serves instead as a nonhuman

object: is reminded of its finitude. He claims this is because a stationary body, an

inelastic one made of matter, is bound to confine the perpetually moving,

immaterial, graceful soul. This creates discontinuity. We laugh.

8. Humor is thus what reminds us we are souls and not bodies.

9. In reflecting on this I consider an incident I remember, sitting on your bed

opposite you, grasped through hazy bass and clouds of smoke. I lay back and

watched you make conversation I could never take part in and share jokes I

could never hope to understand. This was your recovery of a soul I previously

thought only I could unearth.

10. There I watched your soul release while I stayed tethered to the bed. The

auburn-red comforter seeped into my skin and turned me into a solid brick of the

same color, stationary, dense, unmoving. I have never felt closer to my body.

11. This led me to wonder what there is to do for those of us who were deprived of

the sociality that presupposes humor. If I cannot laugh with another, how am I to

break from the stone that envelops me? What tools can re-excavate my fluidity—

how am I to feel myself again?

12. If there is an answer to that question I cannot know it unless I stop asking in the

first place. The question itself keeps one fettered. Everything is both beautiful

and necessary, to a degree, is what my father said: all I can do is take care of the

material that makes me and hope it will eventually know itself enough to be free.

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Cover Photo by Egon Schiele, Museum of Modern Art. Edited by Madison Case.