Reassembling Fragments

When I was a little kid, I thought my uncle was hysterical. He told no jokes, but he didn't treat me like a kid, either. He was always a problem for the rest of the family. At one point, my mother told me, “If people in suits come looking for your uncle, you don't know where he lives.” Actually, he lived down the block. My uncle always had a job but never seemed to be working. He would sometimes store things—twenty Weber grills, freezers full of meat—in my dad's garage. The back seat of his Trans Am was piled with clothes.

At family events, my uncle would wait until he had my attention and say, “You know this is all bullshit, right?” Hearing this was a relief, but I didn't know why. Sometimes he would ask me, very seriously, “So, how you like being a little kid?” To this day, I don't know if he knew the impossible layers to answering this question. I hated being a kid, and he would never acknowledge the joke or the truth upholding the joke.

Poet Charles Simic revels in his jokes and disruptions as they ground us and mark our place in the world. In one two-line poem, “The Voice at 3:00 a.m.,” Simic summarizes this split: “Who put the canned laughter / In my crucifixion scene?” The poem's title, for me at least, hints at the despair Saint John of the Cross ascribed to those early morning hours. To superimpose sitcom laugh tracks onto the scene at Calvary, Simic lets the joke expand past the text, into the title, other poems, prayers, and every joke Simic has heard.

This dark humor is a trauma response, acknowledging the impossible questions with which we are left. This is the absurd truth hinted at with a rim shot to take the anxiety edge off the unknown, reminding me of the Christian mystic Richard Rohr quoting a Talmudic scholar: “God is not nice. God is not an uncle. God is an earthquake.” Which mirrors Michael Eigen's summary of Bion's unknowable reality: “We cannot count on the niceness of O.” Simic is able to be joyful about the horror of O.