ORGREASE BAIT & TACKLE
...are you laughing?

Gabriel Orgrease

Not every Buddha cries for us.

Hotei, the Buddha with the protruding belly, laughs. It is unclear to me whether he is laughing for us or simply laughing, in which case it is for us to catch up with the luck of his mirth by rubbing his fat belly. It is unclear to me whether he is actually a Buddha or simply somebody made up for the occasion, like Santa Claus. A surrogate savior, or a Coyote trickster meant to tickle our bones?

Tragicomedy, sorrow and joy, there is the whole issue of duality, and then there is transcendence—the odd idea that there is something other than crying and laughing.

We were burrowing a hole in bedrock inside of a building. It was forty by forty by ten deep. With pneumatic drills we made deep holes in the stone. We then set dynamite and pulled a woven steel mat over the area, went into another section of the building and set off the charges.

When we came back into the room the heavy net was a wrinkled mass. We moved it out of the way. We then proceeded to bust up the larger rocks with sledgehammers, and when the rocks were smaller, to throw them up out of the hole. We did this for many days. I laughed for many days. I love busting stones with a hammer.

My buddy and I, we were long-haired freaks working with two crew-cut marines, farm boys, who had recently returned from a tour in Vietnam. Neither of them had read Lao Tzu or Basho or Norman Mailer, but they knew hell firsthand.

My buddy and I would stand over a large chunk of rock and argue over the theoretical exact spot to hit the stone with the sledge such that it would instantly shatter into a pile of fragments. "First you make a stroke ... to the left, twist the handle just so before the strike, Grasshopper."

The marines were frustrated with our stupidity and would push us out of the way as they proceeded to bash the stone. We moved on to argue over the next tactical objective.

Years later I made friends with Bob, another ex-marine, who had endured the Tet Offensive. That was hell, the worst. We hung out together on the construction site smoking cigarettes and telling each other stories. Bob's life was a mess. His wife was psychotic and was continually being institutionalized, leaving him to care for his two boys, and work, and make it through another day. Bob was able to laugh even when he did not feel like it. There is a great deal to be said for the influence of friends and a cold beer.

Gurdjieff may have been a whirling Dervish. They sort of laugh, they go a bit nuts in their dancing and it is difficult to know if they laugh—though there is evidence to indicate humor. My favorite story of Gurdjieff is that he had a disciple dig a hole in the ground, all day digging a hole, and then when he was just finished with that task had the disciple fill the hole in again. There is a certain point where we break down; it is all absurd and we either cry or we laugh.

My buddy and I had dug a ditch in the frozen earth with pick-axes and shovels and a damp cold wind blowing in off the lake and up the rise into our bones. I thought at the time that this must be the end of my career—always to be digging ditches. I presumed too soon too quickly that it was a final low point. Frozen tears, laughter that cracks ice, my beard froze over with icicles of breath.

These are Bodhisattva stories, the follower of the way that renounces their transcendence beyond the cycle of death and rebirth in order to remain with us as a guide. The Bodhisattva are like angels that take on human life. They can be wounded, maimed, raise children, pay taxes, work 9 to 5, be killed, and yet they are as likely as any other life form to be caught laughing, or in tears. One needs to feel a reason to cry and a desire to laugh.

The star man that falls out of the sky, depending on your predisposed perspective, is funny.

Jesus could have made us laugh. He was sitting in a mud puddle near the River Jordan with a few of his boyhood friends on a Saturday, fashioning crows out of the mud. Along came a rabbi and yelled at him, "Jesus, you should not be working on the Sabbath!" Jesus waved his hands over the lumps of clay with their stubby beaks and dry stick legs and they took to life and flew up and away over the River Jordan. If Jesus did one thing to make us laugh, then this must be it. We should drink more wine and be merrier.

Rabelais drank wine, we believe, and he celebrated the lower half of our existence with uninhibited laughter. Gulliver may have urinated on the princess's burning house, but Gargantua literally filled oceans with his delight. May we rub the belly of Gargantua?

Or Godzilla, a torment of a gigantic lizard, metaphor for the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima. His belly is scaly and rough and cuts hands, which bleed. On the large movie screen, Godzilla laughs.

There is crying and laughing all over the place. We need monsters that can pass a good one-liner.

I like the phrase, "Life is a bitch and then you die."

Though I do not really believe that life is a bitch, the phrase causes one to stop and wonder why we should not be laughing. When it comes time for sorrow, it will be like listening for the sounds that we are unable to avoid. Sorrow comes at us and we have little defense, whereas, if we so desire, we can always laugh.

Laughter is an attainment, and it is our capacity for laughter that makes us human and worth crying over.

© Gabriel Orgrease 2005

Gabriel Orgrease (orgrease@optonline.net) often leaves good writing in strange places for inquisitive readers to find. Carved on stones in riverbeds, scratched on the backs of matchbook covers, plastered on placards of trams, fingered in the dust of old windows, he maintains pride in a compulsive obscurity and the pursuit of an independent vision of the written arts. In addition to his column in Gator Springs Gazette, GO's work has been published in Bonfire, Frigg, Magazine Minima, Opium, In Posse Review, Stoney Lonesome, Stile and Insolent Rudder.

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