Chapter V

The chemistry of personality (subterranean in a sort of cemetery whose decompositions are our lives) puffs up in frigid balls, soapy Snow-men, arctic Carnival Masks, which we can photograph and fix.

Upwards from the surface of Existence a lurid and dramatic scum oozes and accumulates into the characters we see. The real and tenacious poisons, and sharp forces of vital vitality, do not socially transpire. Within five yards of another man’s eyes we are on a little crater, which, if it erupted, would split up as a cocoa-tin of nitrogen would. Some of these bombs are ill-made, or some erratic in their timing. But they are all potential little bombs.

Capriciously, however, the froth-forms of these darkly-contrived machines, twist and puff in the air, in our legitimate and liveried masquerade.

Were you the female of Moran (the first Innkeeper) and beneath the counterpane with him, you would be just below the surface of life, in touch with a nasty and tragic organism. The first indications of the proximity of the real soul would be apparent. You would be for hours beside a filmy crocodile, conscious of it like a bone in an Ex-Ray, and for minutes in the midst of a tragic wallowing. The soul lives in a cadaverous activity; its dramatic corruption thumps us like a racing engine in the body of a car. The finest humour is the great Play-Shapes blown up or given off by the tragic corpse of Life underneath the world of the Camera. This futile, grotesque and sometimes pretty spawn, is what in this book is Kodacked by the Imagination.

Any great humourist is an artist; Dickens as an example. It is just this character of uselessness and impersonality in Laughter, the fibre of anarchy in the comic habit of mind, that makes a man an artist in spite of himself when he begins living on his laughter. Laughter is the arch-luxury that is as simple as bread.