It’s high time to come back to my BlogSpot
for a second post, taking advantage from some friends’ remarks: the first point
is— why to address
ourselves only to Parkinson affected people?
We are part of a multifarious universe of differently
afflicted individuals; indeed everybody on earth is moving toward her or his very
personal death and behind this only too obvious acknowledgment what the duce
remains to be said to encourage our poor fellows? Can we devise a message that
can help anybody to live a somewhat better life in the meanwhile? Are we perhaps
pursuing what Henri Bergson[1] called momentary
anesthesia of the heart, through some sophisticated form of wit?
Well, in fact— based on my personal
experience, I had started with the idea to make easier specially the burden of
my Parkinson afflicted colleagues, keeping them in high spirits - as far as
possible - by means of humorous anecdotes revolving on our peculiar propensity to
fall with our face on the ground and make a fuss everywhere through the
irrepressible tremor of our hands.
This is why I posted my first blog piece here but sure
it’s right to say that not only the Parkinson sick is in need of solace and
comfort.
Thus this blog of mine ought to become
something of universal purport. The inspiration comes from a club of handicapped
youth, not far from my home. They are still too young to be victim of Parkinsonism:
it is some other variety of illness that constrains them to move on a
wheelchair. At times I am joining someone of their group to have a drink in the
bar of their association— and sometimes we joke
about the way “normally walking people” call us “differently able” types. We
have our own kind of fun. Lately I have been called, by some of these young
wheeled friends, not an old person and neither a decrepit fellow but … a differently young man! I am fond of these new friends who enjoy frolic
and would probably welcome pages written by a jester story teller like me. Thus
I feel confirmed in my calling vocation, directed to each and every soul waiting for it, independently from the type of her
or his ailment.
Let me commence in a rather dull way, since stupidity is where
I succeed best. (You know, to avoid calling someone stolid, you can say differently clever) So: in which corner of our psyche do we humans
find most of fun? What is that in our innermost drives us to laugh? Is it true
that when you chuckle you are inclined to laugh off, i.e. disregard, brush
aside and shrug off concerns, woes, worries and anxiety – at least for a while?
Hmm!
Until
recently I believed Arthur Koestler to be outstanding for his “Darkness at Noon”,
then after discovering in the Encyclopaedia Britannica an article of his about humor[2]
…
If
you manage to read it, you’ll enjoy the whole of it, starting from the very
explanation of how and why fun is rooted in the story of the marquis of the
court of Louis XV who unexpectedly returned from a journey and, on entering his
wife's boudoir, found her in the arms of a bishop (here is the tension that waits to be relieved). After a moment's
hesitation, the marquis walked calmly to the window, leaned out, and began
going through the motions of blessing the people in the street (here you begin to suspect where the relief of tension is
coming from).
It’s
like a click of the Geiger counter indicating the presence of radioactivity! To
produce the comic effect you must compel the reader to perceive the situation
in two self-consistent but incompatible frames of reference at the same time;
his mind has to operate simultaneously on two different wavelengths … When a comedian tells a story, he
deliberately sets out to create a certain tension in his listeners, which
mounts as the narrative progresses. But it never reaches its expected climax.
The punch line acts as a verbal guillotine that cuts across the logical
development of the story; it debunks the audience's dramatic expectations. The tension that is felt becomes suddenly
redundant and is exploded in laughter.
Simple, huh?
Here
we have, as Koestler notes, an odd mechanism of reflex quite unrelated to the
struggle for survival: no comparison with motor reflexes, such as the contraction of the pupil of the eye in
dazzling light, that are simple responses to simple stimuli whose value to
survival is obvious. Laughter is a reflex but unique in
that it has no apparent biological purpose.
One
might call it a luxury reflex. Its only function seems to be to provide relief from tension, and it
plays a subtle role with aggressiveness. On the other hand, psychologist William MacDougall believed that “laughter
has been evolved in the human race as an antidote to sympathy, a protective
reaction shielding us from the depressive influence of the shortcomings of our
fellow men”.
Be it as it may, here I’m going to give you a taste
of humorous anecdotes of mine, i.e. a brief history of tension-and-relief on occasion of our last year’s trip in France.
Let me be sincere with you, friends. I don’t feel to
be an unlucky fellow. So no strong tension is building up— in
the early stages of the process.
First of all,
Hildegard’s health and spirits are as good as ever, and that is the most
important bliss. In the second place, I am not yet - and perhaps won’t be for a
while - completely crippled. I can
walk some ten meters with the help of a stick and only seldom indeed I fall
ruinously with my face on the ground and need the help of at least a pair of
robust people to regain my vertical standing.
And then I can still drive my glorious Punto car and that’s the most delightful gift of all. Forget any airplane trip, with the handbags to be agonizingly dragged around! My car is quite the thing needed to reach many a place in continental Europe.
And then I can still drive my glorious Punto car and that’s the most delightful gift of all. Forget any airplane trip, with the handbags to be agonizingly dragged around! My car is quite the thing needed to reach many a place in continental Europe.
I can easily drive up
to 1,000 kilometres a day, just crawling out of the car for a few moments when
I need to visit restrooms, restaurants and fuel stations. That’s marvellous,
undeniably. And so I am going to report here my last trip to Paris on last
July, to make clear how humor is driven by tension-and-relief.
The opportunity was
given by an engagement of my daughter Carla, the physician, who was expected to
lecture at a conference of geriatric doctors up there in those days. My
daughter’s son, Fabio (who just finished his primary school this summer) was
eager to join his mother in Paris as a prize for his promotion, so Hildegard
& I proposed to be ourselves in the Ville Lumière on the same days, to keep
the boy happy during the hours in which his mother would be busy with her
geriatric audience. And so we did. When the young couple arrived in the Novotel
at the Défense after a night sleeping on the TGV train from Torino, we, the old
couple, were already there waiting for their arrival after a 930-km drive on
the previous day. (Torino - called Turin in English - where we live, is the capital city of Piedmont,
Italy’s north-western region bordering on France and Switzerland just beyond
the Alps).
I had enjoyed every
moment of that trip, first through the alpine mountains and then through the
lovely French countryside. I was a bit less pleased with the time we spent in
Paris, because we had to go around in the Metro and the stairs down and up the
underground system are not the most desirable exercise for a half crippled old
lad. However, I had also some long moments of rest on a wooden bench near the
Tour Eiffel, where I sat immobile a couple of hours waiting for the return of
Hildegard and the boy from the top of it, and then my glutei were thoroughly
flattened and hardened for the remaining hours of the day. We had some abrupt
cloudburst showers in those days, and found refuge in various cafés and bistros,
as well as navigating on the Seine on the very same Bateaux Mouche we had
appreciated many decades ago when we were young— Paris is never disappointing,
always the same charming enchantment.
In the late afternoon of the third day our dear guests took the train to
return to Torino, thus Hildegard and I had a last chance to have a good time in
the evening, alone by ourselves, as we had some 55 years ago, and on many an
occasion later. We both remembered a good place for oysters close to Place de
la Bastille, but we were unsure whether the huitres
were still served there: and surely the walk from Châtelet along rue de Rivoli and St. Antoine seemed incredibly longer than
we remembered it to be. I trudged grasping Hildegard’s arm and every now and
then had to stop leaning against a wall for a long while.
So we arrived very late at that posh restaurant, and
seeing the huge crowd queuing up at the inner barrier where the service staff
allotted the seating places, Hildegard proposed to take a taxi at once and go
back to our hotel at the Défence. But I wasn’t sure that we would ever return
to Paris, and addressing myself very privately to an old wise-looking senior
waiter, I confessed to being
René-la-canne (a renowned French racketeer just discharged in those days from
prison with his conspicuous orthopaedic stick and sun-glasses, as he appeared
on the evening paper of that day) and said that I had wanted for years to taste
again their excellent oysters and putting in his hand a wad of Euro bills, I
suggested we could bypass both the cloak-room and the staff barrier— so he
guided us through a “personnel only” door and we arrived in the dining room, incredibly
full of properly dressed people and baroque mirrors.
Our dripping umbrellas and wet rain jackets were looked at disapprovingly by our neighbors at the near table, and I felt a scornful glance darted by the lady sitting on the long wall-seat near me, when I awkwardly, unwittingly pushed my umbrella right in her soft flesh, while trying to settle myself down at the table with my stick and umbrella. Hildegard felt a bit embarrassed by all this, and by the fact that I ordered an enormous quantity (two dozens) of the largest oysters – while she was content with a simple onion soup.
Our dripping umbrellas and wet rain jackets were looked at disapprovingly by our neighbors at the near table, and I felt a scornful glance darted by the lady sitting on the long wall-seat near me, when I awkwardly, unwittingly pushed my umbrella right in her soft flesh, while trying to settle myself down at the table with my stick and umbrella. Hildegard felt a bit embarrassed by all this, and by the fact that I ordered an enormous quantity (two dozens) of the largest oysters – while she was content with a simple onion soup.
But this was only the beginning of her apprehensions:
the wine was an excellent Chablis that pleasantly warmed up my brain neurons
(what’s left of them) and while I was eagerly confirming my “Carpe Diem”
philosophy to my wife, a most intense tremor moved my hand out of its
trajectory and I overturned the glass and the divine wine was poured on the
precious Flanders table cloth and, what is worse, abundantly sprinkled the
naked right leg of the prim lady near me. We were in July but the unrequired
refreshment did not seem to be welcomed by her – and in fact she started to
shriek like a goose plucked alive.
I felt ashamed and confused and overwhelmed and in the
total irrationality of the moment I bent down to wipe her right calf with my
left hand— what a horrible moment, dear friends!
The whole hall was filled by the lady’s screams, I remember
confusedly a squad of waiters guided by the maître, all equipped with towels of
various sizes to dry up the table cloth, while a super-maître was humbly
apologizing to the neurotic husband of the neurotic lady and gazing at me with
terrible eyes - oh boys, you can imagine how much I wanted to disappear. The
adrenaline level in my blood could hardly be higher, no relief for my inside tension was possibly in sight.
In point of fact, I have a sort of black-out in my
memory (probably the benevolent Gods grant us, for such painful moments, some
sort of trance). I only remember being accompanied with Hildegard at the back
door on a narrow dark alley by a by-no-means-loquacious man who strongly
recommended that we should keep away
from the main entrance and tète-de-taxi, so we walked as unnoticed as possible
to the Metro station down at Place de la Bastille.
Hildegard, who had not been in a trance during those
dramatic minutes, told me, when finally we sat in the Metro carriage, that
apparently the furious husband was a functionary at the police headquarters in
Quai des Orfèvres and probably the idea of impersonating René-la-canne was not
quite the best choice. We even noticed too late that there is direct Metro line
from Défence to Bastille, so we could have been spared that terrible, long and
time-consuming walk on rue de Rivoli!
The following day was a bright, lovely day. On our way
home I pulled up to have lunch at Beaune, the picturesque capital city of
Bourgogne, where I was lucky stumbling against my own stick right while going into the restaurant (so I could
never be suspected of falling on the ground because I had drunk too much!) and
there I enjoyed a fantastic dozen of escargots à la bourguignonne duly
accompanied by a bottle of Châteauneuf du Pape and in the relaxing atmosphere
of the cosy place I asked Hildegard which had been her best moment in those
three-and-a-half days in France.
She said: <The moment that I felt I was your moll,
Carlo>
<Moll?>
<Yes!! At the age of seventy eight I eventually was
being looked at as “the moll of the gangster” – quite an exciting experience>
… and a text-book example of tension
relief.
Carletto Scara
Carletto Scara
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