Realms Frequented By The Muses

WHEN A SMILE IS NOT A SMILE

You may think that the SMILE came first into existence as the angiosperms, the singing-birds and the humans burst over the evolutionary scene (after mother earth at the end of Paläogen and the beginning of Neogen in Tertiär, had finished off almost all archaic forms of existence on this planet) and moreover be fully convinced that it certainly was not present on earth as the reptiles, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of humans today,"ruled" over the skies, the oceans and the lands of our global village.

But that would be doing injustice to Plato, to assume that that the idea of the smile was not already there and that it had really to wait so long to manifest itself on our planet. But it's primordial attempts to seek a bodily expression in living creatures may have already been evident in corals, molluscs and the first vetebrates in Kambrium or the gymnosperms in & insects in Devon, creatures whose language we don't know, let alone understand, just as fatherhood or motherhood is no invention of the mammals, the fish and the insects know it too. And certainly in Cretaceous, as the reptilian heavy-metal rock-stars on stage and in the classroom and laboratory were being bombarded with toxic-tomatoes and all the cretaceous chalk that mother nature could salvage from the chalk-board depicting a code guilty of hybris and gone berserk, other creatures like insectivores, who incidentally had developed a taste for reptile eggs, while playing in the background could not help secretly smiling. But well aware of the punishment that awaits those, who commit hybris, they were afraid to give themselves away, knowing too well that, despite their still relatively immobile facial expressions, mother nature could read their thoughts. They therefore were hell bent on trying to hide their smile, more so as their facial window to the world became increasingly expressive and consequently the potential for betraying one’s own self proportionally higher. In due time they accomplished this task, with the acquisition of opposable thumbs to the other digits on their hands and of course through increased cerebral control over their expressions. And for sure, as the laughter less titanic reptiles disappeared they grinned, presciently predating the giggle of the lemur and those almost unearthly blank expressions of Laurel & Hardy and Chaplin, that made thousands of us swing back to our grass-root arboreal squeaks and shrieks and transformed our for-theatre-attired primate bodies into shaking old-time washing machines!

However this did not mean that these specific laughter less and completely bereft of smiles realms disappeared with the demise of the old & the new saurian reptiles and the radiation of the angiosperms and the subsequent disappearance of archaic forms in Tertiär. No, being a Platonian idea, it is recurrent in evolution. You need only to look at some of the totalitarian, despotic and fascistic regimes of this and last century and you will give Plato the due respect he deserves. Big Brother & Sargon and Stalin & Saddam, ideas and expressions. In extremely ascetic religious and fundamentalist social organizations, smile can become a rare commodity too. Rare or forbidden and yet ubiquitous in its varied fake incarnations! So you get a lot of it, as a politburo smile, a party smile, even a fake matrimonial and family smile! The leader-with-the-kids smile. The love-them-all holy sectarian smile. The T.V. Suppression-Of-Disbelief Smile! The Glossy-Magazine, the High-Profile and the Good-Looks Smile. Smiles that even healthy people living in semi-natural paradise mistakenly associate with happiness, unaware of the drug abuse or the grim horse trading hidden behind those scenes & smiles (the Marshal McLuhan Smile!)

And even in the modern market economies, at the first indication of a brewing trouble, the world needs the likes of an Alan Greenspan to make them smile (the wall street smile) and to hold these gigantic Titons of producing and consuming Nations from drawing their knives, too willing and too quick to assume, like the silver back gorilla in 100sq. meter forest reserve that it is once again eat or be eaten! And since everyone wants to eat, and no Nation is willing to share it's riches like home made food enjoyed at best in good company, and everyone panics at the thought of being eaten, the smile may momentarily be invisible.

And if Alan's optimistic predictions fail and we land back in a 'cutthroat' competition, the smile may disappear like the Cheshire cat even from within the corporate culture, including those, where it was a corporate policy recommended by the 'smiling' consulting agency. Suddenly your colleague has metamorphosed to Mr. Hyde, and is certainly in league with the speculators and the market Mephistopheles or the Mammon and although smiling (the trade union smile or the old corporate smile) at you, is actually streamlining you secretly away. This distrust can spread like a virus and chase away the smile from the faces of the employees just as the posters of the corporation depicting a smile become larger and larger in size and more and more glossy (the market-strategy smile).

So remember not to postpone your smile for tomorrow, when there is maybe no company, no nation and no one to share it with, except a completely new strain of some particularly successful virus or bacteria smiling all alone amidst volcanic ashes of deserted beaches.....

And don't ever try to imagine a world without a smile....

If it is not yours, it will be of the moody mother nature or of any other of her other myriad children...