Malchus. Charles William Johns

their fingers through their hair, playing with themselves, turning the universe into something deceitful, pernicious. I was extremely attracted to them. After sitting for a while I got out my notebook and started writing . . .

      IV

      A Girl/Woman.

      When did laughter stop denoting the uttermost depths of horror, joy, intoxication? When did laughter stop being a practice of overcoming the ghosts of the world and the ghosts of oneself? And when did it become a method of territorialization? When did laughter become a form of commodity? A girl’s/woman’s laughter promotes the quality of the bourgeois. A girl’s/woman’s laughter automatically advertises all the laughter industries that have conditioned her social role-her nonchalance. To laugh is to be accepted/acceptable. One is understood in humour. In many situations it is the epitome of comprehension, the condition for contact between individuals. Humour is mainly feminine now. The girl/woman laughs and thereby produces a consensus; a consensus where parameters are drawn-inside is humour and outside is non-humour. Her usually light, fluttery laughter never expresses joy but only represents it. It must fall within that arbitrary neutral middle between a sigh and a cackle. It must be calm and controlled like an artwork. It must give off an allusion to spontaneity, like the flapping of a startled butterflies wings, but be as considered as a puff of perfume. Laughter is perfume.

      One is taught what to laugh at and how to laugh at it, the style changing subtly like the style of fashion. Humour has dominated every aspect of communality today. When one does not react or answer by laughing then one is almost anticipating laughter from the other party. We talk in restaurants, gardens, and in our beds as if we were talking in an elevator. One in-fact needs humour desperately in order to convey a sense of continuity-the designation of a law. Humour is a wall that man clings to in the dark. I will attempt to go on but I find it so despicable.

      One covers up an embarrassment by laughter. One laughs at themselves in fear of being a victim of laughter. But they should attain a level of purity, of vulnerability, which affords them the capacity to laugh at oneself. It is actually a vicious circle; the condition for embarrassment is a humour whose purpose it is to humiliate. One should ask why something is ‘embarrassing’ in the first place, and they will always find some presupposition, some social rearing point its ugly head like a stupid monolith. There is a resentment in laughter; it is used to designate a weakness, an unorthodoxy, but the unorthodoxy is never found, only gaps in the orthodoxy, only boundaries where humour and sense stop (.. but that is the place of hilarity)!