laughing and clocks

George Szirtes is such a nice man. Here is a paragraph from his blog, about a strange subject: women's laughter. He writes:

"One of the loveliest of sounds: a woman laughing in another room. I don't know why it should so fill one up. Maybe it's childhood, the half-understood happiness of your mother, or maybe it is the deeper, almost archaic sound of delight in sheerly being-here-and-now. I have written on women's laughter before, the bubbling forth that comes so naturally to them but which is nothing particularly to do with humour since often it is without perceptible object, just a muscle that runs through the entire body, a kind of physical relief or, rather, release. Laughter like that sounds benign, pleased to be alive."

Strange to be a woman and read that. I read it and I wondered if it applies only to the laughter of women you love, but I think he means any women, generally. Do I laugh like that, I wonder? Maybe: I often feel I laugh out of sheer pleasure, rather than at a joke. Like he says. (When I'm feeling sheer pleasure, that is.) Maybe in any case the whole function of jokes is to simulate - and indded to stimulate - that feeling. That would explain why so many jokes - that is, why most of humour - is rooted in some kind of unhappiness, anxiety, tension, awkwardness, failure. Why so much of it is about death, for example. It takes our fears, our unhappinesses, and uses them against themselves, to create a sort of simulacrum of happiness.

But is all this a bit airy-fairy or sentimental? I've never really felt like the kind of girl whom, for example, the Victorian paterfamilias would have found "such a comfort" to have in the house, the soft, confiding, softly-laughing type; though it's certainly possible that I might sometimes laugh like a tinkling stream from another room.. (Except that in my case most of the time there is no one to hear it, inviting comparisons with yet another old chestnut, if not the entire chestnut tree, as it falls in the chestnut forest...) The following paragraph somehow resonates more familiarly:

"In a passage I have just translated from Krasznahorkai, two men are waiting for a dreaded appointment, an official summons whose purpose is not yet clear. They are sitting on a bench outside a door ready and impatient to be ushered in. The corridors are tiled, there is only the piercing buzz of the neon light, the whole place is dim. There are two visible clocks. A clerk comes and goes, glances at one of the clocks before disappearing again."

But as I say, George is a kind man; and possibly he is doing a lovely thing here, perceiving a general tendency and inviting one to consider that one has this quality without even knowing it. It could be beautiful. And where he says, "Now if suddenly they were to hear the sound of a woman's laughter down that corridor, a light, luxuriant laugh without guile and viciousness in it, it would be as though the light had brightened a little and they could go through the door awaiting them with a certain resolve," I wonder what would achieve this effect for, say, me.

Children's laughter? Maybe. There are certainly individual people I know whose laughter would have this effect on me, as being somehow more efficacious (or infectious) than most; & some, but not all, of these people are practically still children... but is it the same thing?

Then he says: "Light, light, light."

I think that might mean: "write, write, write."

(Sadly: some of Ms B's posts have amused her so much, if she says so herself, that she laughed like a drain for days. If not weeks. Not this one, of course.)