A long time ago, back in the the Age of Rock & Roll, a group called Aerosmith wrote and performed a song called “Dream On”:
I confess that I am a child of the Rock & Roll era. I hit adolescence at the time Bill Haley and the Comets released Rock Around the Clock, and the world was forever changed. Rock and Roll, and its first cousin, Rhythm and Blues, took over the radio airwaves, first A.M. and then F.M.
It is hard to imagine what life would be like if there were no music. Music contributes a lot to human well-being. As much as I like music, however, I am definitely not musically gifted. I can neither carry a tune nor play a musical instrument, although I spent a lot of time trying to learn to play the piano and then a guitar. When my friends who could play and sing gathered, my job was to remember the lyrics.
Even so, music has been one of the constant influencing factors in my life. The other is literature. I loved books and reading from an early age and stayed with English literature all the way to a Ph.D. That may be why I could remember the words while my friends remembered the tune.
A long time ago, a psychologist named Martin Grotjahn wrote a book entitled Beyond Laughter, in which (among other things) he said that the first joke was undoubtedly a fart. Shakespeare, one of the best writers in all of English literature, made good use of fart jokes. For one reason or another, farts have been a source of humor for a very long time.
Laughter and tears are not, of course, the only human emotions. Anger and its various cousins (jealousy, envy, rage) are another another aspect of human emotional life. Fear and worry constitute another cluster of emotions. Sometimes the connection is made clear:
Debra’s article this month focuses on the relationship between humor and healing. I am not so sure that a case can’t be made as well for the relationship between sadness and healing. It seems to me that the main thing is the awareness of the emotion.
Music, of course, touches on all the emotions the same way literature does. That may be why all cultures have had both musical and literary expression. It is hard to imagine life without both literature and music. All cultures have had both laughter and tears. The forms of expression that produce the laughter and the tears may differ from culture to culture, but we would no longer be human if we were to eliminate one or the other.
When we are aware of the emotion we are experiencing and use it to expand our awareness of the meaning of life, we are engaged in the process of healing. I think it is important to sing for both the laughter and the tear. You might even say that such laughter is a form of Crystal Blue Persuasion: