Angelic laughter

(On two kinds of laughter)
Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels warriors for Good accept the demagogy of angels. Thigs are clearly more complicated.

Angels are not partisans of Good, but of divine creation. The Devil, on the other hand, denies all rational meaning to God's world.

World domination, as everyone knows, is divided between demons and angels. But the good of the world doe not require the latter to gain precedence over the former (as I thought when I was young); al it needs is a certain equilibrum of power. If there is too much uncontested meaning on earth (the reign of angels), man collapses under the burden; if the world loses all meaning (the reign of demons), life is every bit as impossible.

Things deprived suddenly of their private meaning, the place assigned them in the ostensible order of things (a Moscow-trained Marxist who believes in horoscopes), make us laugh. Initially, therefor, laughter is the province if the Devil. It has a certain malice to it (things have turned out differently from the way they tried to seem), but a certain beneficent relief as well (things are looser than thy seemed, we have greater latitude in living with them, their gracity does not oppress us).

The first time an angel heard the Devil's laughter, he was horrified. It was in the middle of a feast with a lot of people around, and one afther another the joined the Devil's laugther. It was terribly contagious. The angel was all too aware the laugther was aimed at God and the wonder of His works. He knew he had to act fast, but felt weak and defenseless. And unable to fabricate anything of his own, he simply turned his enemy's tactics against him. He opened his mouth and let out a wobbly, breathy sound in the upper reaches of his vocal register (much like the sound Gabrielle and Michelle produced in the streets of the little town one the Riviera) and endowed it withe the opposite meaning. Whereas the Devil's laugther pointed out the meaninglessness of things, the angel's shout rejoiced in how rationally oraganized, well conceived, beautiful, good, and sensible everything was.

There they stood, Devil and angel, face to face, mouths open, both making more or less the same sound, but each expressing himself in a unique timbre - absolute opposites. And seeing the laughing angel, the Devil laughed all the harder, all the louder, all the more openly, beause the laughing angel was infinitely laughable.

Laughable laughter is cataclysmic. And even so, the angels have gained something to it. They have tricked us all with their semantic hoax. Their imitation laughter and its original (the Devil's) have the same name. People nowadays do not even realize that one and the same external phenomenon embrace two completely conctradictory attitudes. There are two kinds of laugther, and we lack the words to distinguish them.

The book of Laughter and forgetting, M.K.
Part Three: The Angels, chapter 4