A Plague of Seriousness

ABOVE: Robin Williams tries to help.

I haven’t been feeling myself of late. I’ve been feeling unwell. My head has felt heavy, my heart heavier still. Something is wrong with my eyes. Everything seems dark.

I worried it might be a tumor.

I worried it might be inoperable.

I worried.

I went to my doctor. She looked in my eyes, she looked in my ears. She listened to my chest.

“It’s going around,” she said.

“What is?” I asked.

“Seriousness,” she said. “Kids, teens, adults - it’s everywhere.”

I’d suspected as much. I’ve had it before, after all. I had it when I was younger. For the first twenty-five years of my life, in fact. Chronic. Nobody even knew it was an illness. They didn’t know I was in pain. They were proud of me. That’s the worst part of this plague – people actually want to contract it. When they do, they are praised for their illness. They are given tenure, they win prizes and grants, they win elections. Everyone claps for them. Nobody knows they are sick, because they are sick, too. They are superspreaders. They should wear masks. They don’t. They wear caps and gowns.

“Have you been watching the news?” my doctor asked.

I nodded.

“Is that a symptom?”

“Sometimes,” she said. “Sometimes it’s the cause. Have you been reading The New Yorker?”

“No,” I lied. “I’m not crazy.”

It comes back now and then. I usually catch it when I’m beginning a new novel or story. It’s seasonal. The season is a blank page. Suddenly, I am serious. I am very serious. I want to write Literature. I want to win Literary Prizes. I curse my unseriousness. I damn my humor. I want to sit like Tolstoy, like Schopenhauer, like Rashi, my heavy head in my weary hands, the intolerable weight of existence on my too-frail shoulders. I read that when Samuel Beckett entered pubs in Ireland, the patrons stood in silent admiration for the very serious man who had just graced their unserious presence. I want them to stand for me, too.

My doctor reminds me that the joke is on the boozehounds. Beckett was joking. He wrote stories about people who tie themselves to chairs, about parents in trash cans, about married couples buried in sand. His most famous play ends with one of the character’s pants falling down.

But then he got sick.

He won a prize.

Prizes cause seriousness. It’s a well-known fact. He was never the same.

This is what his wife said when he won that prize: “What a catastrophe.”

I have a Stickie on my desktop. It’s from a review of two serious books about Beckett, who seem, in the review writer’s point of view, to have missed the basic point:

“Beckett is a writer who is most serious when he is most comic… heaviest, so to say, when he is lightest.”

My doctor reminds me of these things when I get sick with seriousness.

My doctor is my wife, Orli. Sometimes she gets sick with it, too. Then it is my turn to care for her.

To do that, I show her my forearm arm, where I have a tattoo of Groucho Marx. Groucho was immune to seriousness. Groucho laughed. And so Groucho won. He won Life. The whole game. On the tattoo, a red halo encircles his head, and the word “MARXIST” is tattooed in red beneath him. The smoke from his cigar spells the words I have determined to live by: “Funny is enough.” My doctor Orli designed it for me. To remember. To not fall sick.

If you’re feeling serious, too, I’m sorry - there is no vaccine. But there are cures. These work for me:

- Voltaire

- Twain

- Vonnegut

- Kafka

- Eddie Pepitone

- Talking Heads

- 1970’s National Lampoon

- “All In The Family.”

- Blazing Saddles

- Doctor Strangelove

- MASH

They won’t work for everyone.  You have to find our own.

I stood and thanked my doctor for helping me.

“Stick out your tongue,” she said. “Now cross your eyes. Now screw up your nose. Now say “Duhhhhh.”

It’s a nasty bug. Stay away from people you think may be infected. Social Distance from the grim, the doomed, the heavy, the weighty.

And if you’re feeling serious, stay home. Don’t infect others.

Watch Blazing Saddles.

We’re in this together.  

Yours in the Fetal Position,

S.

PS: People tend to forget this, but Rodin’s The Thinker, being mocked by Robin Williams above, sits atop the sculptor’s Gates of Hell. Rodin was no fool. In Heaven, they’re laughing.

artwork by orli auslander