January 16, 2006

Humours

Some, not many, have wondered from time to time about how come Out of Nowhere. Well, let me tell you, it’s like this.

Once upon a time and not so long ago, our forebears in the practice of medicine thought that the humours were pretty much what life was all about. They postulated four: yellow bile, black bile, phlegm, and blood. (Aargh. We’ll get past this shortly.)

The old medics presumed that too much or too little of one or the other could unseat a balanced life and thus, as a consequence, make one ill. Therefore, it was said that to be healthy was to have a good “sense of one’s humour,” meaning something like, to say the least, not be so hard-nosed and uptight.

Later on, the English playwrights took these theories of the humours* to put an Anglican spin on things and, as well, produce a whole literary corpus of their own brand of sit-coms, as it were. Dominance of one humour over another produced an eccentric character, hence, a more risible stage effect. So it was that humour, once specific to a medical state, came to mean, after all, something to laugh about.

Maybe the docs were right. Humour is pretty much what life is all about, that is, when we’re not taking ourselves so seriously and when we realize that humour is what often transcends and, in effect, seems to run across all kinds of boundaries and always to connect us so well. In the Koran, it is written, “He deserves paradise who makes his companions laugh.” (Note to wiretappers: I didn’t actually read the Koran to find this out.)

In our sometime aloof manner with words, we Episcopalians call this connecting up the consensus fidelium. It’s sort of like what Riders in the Sky call the “cowboy way.” It has a lot to do with our preferring our prayer to be common, not empirical, our leaders collegial, not pontifical, and our faith corporate, not manipulative. It’s a good way to keep from losing one’s sense of humour.

In a manner of speaking, these more or less daily segments called Out of Nowhere are contrived to have, I trust, an element of humour in them, humour that takes any number of forms, but which is corralled and connected mostly by irony. Now in their third year, they are an assemblage of little stories, pericopés. Some of them actually took place at a time and place, but like myth and story as a whole, all of them, after a fashion and in their way, are true.

*It seemed more consistent this once and as they always seem to know best, to use the British spelling.

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