Good for a laugh

Good for a laugh.  Our beginnings probably heard a lot of babble, and the earth and all the other beings on the earth then probably looked at us askew, like elders upon the young, asking themselves and one another what would become of these weak, fretful, and grunting lives.

We took our time, a painfully long time of not knowing at all what we were saying to one another, what we were trying to say, of attempting to practice our tongues and refine our speech, until some neat but powerful words came from our mouths, words like I, and Is or Am, or What or Who or Why or Where or When or How…then we thought most of ourselves, despite the earth and the other denizens of the earth still thinking the same of us, still laughing at us in our procrastinating maturity.

Neat, powerful, sure, but still laughable words, for the whole world laughed at our utterances then as it still laughs now, laughed at our first words as it shall laugh at our last.  Ages and ages of being the butt of the world’s joke, of refusing to come of age more thoroughly, we hold onto our stock phrases like a grace, like our only hope, as onto something that defines us, something without which we are utterly lost.

A sensible effort, holding onto these cries at any cost.  For we have nightmares now and again of the alternative, of what we could fall back into: the incommunicable, babbling and nonsensical grumbling.  But that laughter, it erupts all around us, overwhelming and infectious.  Our science and our organization of the world into bits and bytes and measurable chunks and pieces notwithstanding, the laughter of the world at us is infectious, so infectious that, in our stronger times–in our weaker ones too, though it comes differently then, this laughter–we laugh along with the world, at ourselves, we grunt with the grunts of laughter at all our grunting, both our old grunting and our new, more refined grunting. That evolution ever gave birth to speech seems laughable, from its beginning to its foreseeable end–but good for a laugh, good for a hearty, truthful laugh as emits from us now, the lines, planes and bodies of the world, the world itself, shaken by our laughter, convulsing, laughing along with us, as much with us as at us.