Making Fun

I've realised that I am really not a corporate animal in a particular sense.

Some corporate entities require that you work extremely well in ways which are comprehensible to the body corporate - it is a lot like asking that each component of a clock be aware of the other components and that the clock as a whole understands each part. The escapement must comprehend the hands, the hands must comprehend the casing, and so on. This is odd because these parts are non-sentient to begin with.

Some corporate entities require less understanding because a comprehensive code of governance persists - the military has a rigid but flexible framework of this kind; units need not understand each other so well as long as they understand the principles and the code. Some orchestras are like that too.

Some corporate entites are really corporate; i.e., they behave like bodies, in which the brain need not understand the other organs as long as the other organs deliver timely and useful product to the best of their function. The brain is of course the only organ that can understand the workings of the others, but it need not intrude (and often finds it better not to intervene consciously). I don't mind being part of this kind of corporate entity.

But in such a body, whether as part of a clock, an orchestra, a choir, or a flesh-and-blood construct, there are often odd pieces. They are non-essential but allow the body a greater range of function. They are analogous to a glockenspiel in an orchestra or a differential gear which allows a timepiece to keep track mechanically of the phases of the moon, or like a licorice jelly bean in a fruit assortment.

I think I am like this. I am a perfectly dispensable part of my organisation. It is true that I have many uses, but I tend to force the other parts to accommodate me in a way that some parts do not like. And I am subject to my own sense of what constitutes proper obedience to proper authority. It leads me sometimes to throw spanners at random into the situations where the machinery seems to have locked up already; it leads me at other times to say things which provoke or edify with discomfort.

But amidst all this, there is the idea that God made us all with a sense of humour. It is not within man's grasp to defeat or define that sense; it is a divine gift of great power. God gave us the ability and the right to laugh, although He Himself might call us to account for it. I am a laugher. I cannot help but realise that man's strivings are sometimes case studies for the God-given triumph of the foolish over the wise, the weak over the strong.

And I am so very foolish; it is an apprehension that is before me at all times - I am a fool before God, I am a fool beside God. I am weak, and I know that this gives me strength. I confess my failings, my faults, all the time. It keeps me honest. It shows me that I can be better. And best of all, I have the ideal target for laughter - myself. He who cannot laugh at himself takes himself too seriously.

In closing, here is a quote which I never forget. Dorothy Dunnett is the author of many beautiful and perplexing novels (my favourite of which is probably King Hereafter). In her novel Caprice & Rondo, she records the following as part of a conversation between a hierophant and a swashbuckler.

"God is my Master," the Patriarch [of Constantinople] said. "It makes for simplicity. I commend it. For that is your trouble, isn't it?"

This perhaps is the root of the problem. Simplicity is oft confused with folly, or more confusingly, with complexity. I am a simple man, of whom the Patriarch might conceivably have approved. Or perhaps not. Sigh.