The Mask and the Crown of Life: a Brief Amusement

A funny thing happened on the way to the grave, and I couldn't keep a straight face, despite my destination. Of course no one really believes in the destination, and maybe that's the funniest thing of all.

Life is all play and we're all tricksters. We put on masks, try roles, tricking ourselves as well as each other -- Prosperos all, but not wanting to abjure our rough magic. We put on a mask, for instance, as magical protection against the "corona" (crown) of the pandemic virus that stalks us today. It's an act of faith, but certainly not faith in the government bodies and experts who told us to wear the mask, after telling us for months it would do no good. Oh well -- it can't hurt, we decide.

Funny things keep happening, in life, over the lifespan:
You spend the first half building your brain and the second half de-menting it (with substances, grief, wear-and-tear). But often old-age de-mentation is but a time of deeper wisdom (of "the best of brains, the worst of bodies").

When young we used to say we wanted to find ourselves, but today's young seem obsessed with finding shared identity, not self -- a programmed thing, not an individual thing. Bullying is often part of sports, and "anti-bullying" was briefly a movement. Now bullying's part of the rules of the game of censoring and de-platforming the wrong rights-movements. (Never trust a movement.)

Agatha Christie played a disappearing game at one point. Hide and seek. She left home and everyone ran around looking for her and coming up with theories about her fate -- and then she was back. Many people want to do an Agatha-disappearance, or at least to play-act one through dis-guise. Some people seem to have quite taken to hiding behind COVID masks, making a flag for the face covered with playful symbols. Shapes, colours, diagrams all mean something. At first we all felt awkward wearing a pandemic mask, but now we're beginning to feel naked without it.

That's one of the funny things: you disappear behind a mask, or you disappear into thin air like Agatha did, but then you resurrect. You are re-born. If you were born in the first place, that is. Some apparently weren't. If you were born in a place where earlier tribes lived before you, they say you weren't born in your natal place, but "settled" there. Where you came from is not explained, but you can only be native to the place where you were born. Maybe some of us are laughing on our way to grave because we won't be dying there, never having been born. We laugh at this thought, funny-humorous and also funny-strange.

We wear the crown of immortality then, and the double laughing/ weeping masks of theatre as we follow the muses through our comedy-drama -- never born, yet having the time of our life.

.