Dear Friend,
There is a cactus plant on the window ledge in my lounge which has cast out a stem from its centre. I do not know what is going to happen, whether it will flower, or if it is an attempt to duplicate. Maybe the plant is aping the French beans at the kitchen window, which too have sent out lines, searching for their place down the allotment.
I have been staring at this black and white photograph, which hangs on my writing room wall next to the good one of Mum. It represents the time I lived in Nantes during an art college student swap.
Here I am posing as a life model for a photographer who managed very well with just the one leg. I was attracted to her, not only because of her strength, but because she was so passionate about art. Nothing happened between us, apart from one day she asked me to dress up as Napoleon. So I did, but with a topless twist. Our friendship fell apart after the night she threw small pebbles up at my bedroom window at 3am, waking me, then demanding I come outside. It was tipping it down and she thought the rain was perfect for another nude photo shoot. This time she wanted me to stand in the lamplight. Maybe she was drunk, or maybe it was me not understanding her French humour, but I didn’t appreciate being woken up for her art. I’d already spent six weeks there, and I hadn’t laughed once.
I know now that to not find the world funny, or be open to its humour, means I am unhappy, a little depressed. My humour is the first thing to go when I’m out of sorts. The world becomes sapless and I begin to feel deadened. I got to thinking about humour and wellness and creativity and it turns out, there’s something to all of this.
Humorism (note the ‘u’ is missing) was a system of medicine detailing a supposed makeup and workings of the human body, adopted by Ancient Greek and Roman physicians and philosophers. It began to fall out of favour in the 17th century and it was definitively disproved with the discovery of microbes. But for a while the concept of "humors" (chemical systems regulating human behaviour) suggested that humors are the vital bodily fluids: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. The word humor is a translation of Greek χυμός, chymos, literally 'juice' or 'sap', and metaphorically, 'flavour'. When these ‘humors’ were out of balance, the body becomes sick.
Try escaping death or illness. You can’t. One thing I now understand is that you can’t outrun grief. Booze doesn’t work, and eating family sized packs of crisps will only bring temporary relief. So for me, the sanctuary came down to what it always does: writing and art and seeking out the funny. You see I am doing everything I can to support myself and my creativity in these difficult times. This means moving in a way which won’t make things worse. I am trying to remain agile, flexed and light. A few weeks ago, after days of feeling flat and rather down, I made a decision to start filling up my well with comedy and fun. TV shows, books, films, radio, live gigs, anything I fancy I’ll give it a go. All in the name of lightness, to seesaw the heavy.
With this in mind, recently, on Easter Sunday I suggested to Min and her visiting mother we watch Mike Leigh’s film Secret and Lies. I remember watching it a few years ago and the overarching memory of it was that it was great comedy drama. On this occasion of watching, it was anything but enjoyable.
The story begins here: Following the death of her adoptive parents, a successful young black optometrist Hortense (the only character with clear vision) establishes contact with her biological mother Cynthia - a lonely white factory worker living in poverty. Cynthia lives with her sullen street-sweeper daughter. Her brother has been successful with his photographer's business and now lives nearby in a more upmarket house, to which Cynthia hasn't ever been invited to. She feels lonely and isolated and Hortense, adopted at birth but now grown up, starts to trace her birth mother…
Yet another storyline featuring a search for a mother (see previous published letter Things My Mother Taught Me) it seems I can’t help myself. I’d again inadvertently been drawn towards this storyline of looking for Mum. I thought me and Min and her mum, would be having a laugh while the lamb roasted in the oven and we sipped cool white wine, breaking bits off our Easter eggs into our mouths…
That’s proper art for you; the reading can change depending on where you are in your life. As I’d felt shaken up, it reminded me how raw things still were. How I keep kidding myself that I am healing, healed. I get so cross that ‘getting over’ Mum’s death is not linear, or quicker. People tell me there is no cure for this one.
Days later, while I lie on the osteopath’s treatment table, I tell her how hard I’d found Easter. ‘Every holiday and anniversary will feel raw,’ she says, her fingers pressing the back of my neck lightly. ‘The series of first times of every occasion will be hard….You could make some new rituals perhaps for next Easter?’
I agree and make a mental note to do this. Then she tells me how she had just been away to ‘The Wild Weekend’, which is a weekend of dressing up and crazy dancing held at a resort in Mallorca. For her fancy dress costume she’d made a giant paper mâché likeness of a femur bone. She was delighted because it had fitted in the overhead locker of the aircraft, and, unlike some of her friends’ homemade outfits, it hadn’t been ruined by the customs officers examining it at the airport.
An oesteopath dressing up as a shin bone on a Spanish island. This is funny, isn’t it? So now, all I have to remember is just keep speaking with people. Like the writer and performer David Sedaris who goes out daily to pick up litter, and in doing so collects his amusing and bizarre stories along the way. Humour can find its way to you if you turn up for it. All I have to do is leave my flat - even when I resist doing so - and keep putting myself out in the open.
Let me know if you have a story of how you rediscovered your sense of humour, or whether you’ve lost yours, or worry if you ever had one.
Write soon, write often.
Go out.
Love Karen xx
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I hope you find your humour again soon, Karen. May I be the first to tell you your cactus is a haworthia and it’s about to flower x