The body after dinner

Here's the full line about melancholy and humor that I quoted from Italo Calvino in part in my earlier post: "As melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness, humor is comedy that has lost its bodily weight." Not the kind of analogy you see on the LSAT, I imagine. I am sitting with this, trying to figure out what comedy losing its bodily weight might mean. Calvino (sort of) explains this as missing "a certain dimension of human carnality"--but which dimension? That of sex? Of shit? Of blood and hunger? Carnality, our carnal-ness, where carnal means
1. pertaining to or characterized by the flesh of the body, its passions and appetites; sensual: carnal pleasures.
2. not spiritual; merely human; temporal; worldly: a man of secular, rather carnal, leanings.

But I don't believe in the split between spirit, mind, and body. That split is part of what I'm writing to heal. Maybe what Calvino is talking about here is a humor more ironic than comedy, a humor in which the body isn't necessarily absent, but is instead present in such a way that it doesn't weigh us down. So we reach a humor that can resonate beyond comedy, in the way that melancholy sustains the effect of sadness.

It's duration, feeling, & incorporeality again, the lovely triune elements.

After a pënz poll determined that the three modalities of time were duration, feeling, and incorporeality, and I decided they are also the modalities of theater, I wrote those three words on a small post-it flag made of some very 21st century material and posted them on my laptop. The heel of my hand rubs at the bottom of the note when I type, so that the word "incorporeality" has begun to blur, ghosted lettering on a translucent blue slip of adhesive plastic.

How do we create experiences of incorporeality that rely on human bodies/the human body? We playwrights, we human beings?

Here's the quote in its entire entirety:

The weightless gravity I have spoken of with regard to Cavalcanti reappears in the age of Cervantes and Shakespeare: it is that special connection between melancholy and humor studied by Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl in Saturn and Melancholy (1964). As melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness, so humor is comedy that has lost its bodily weight (a dimension of human carnality that nonetheless constitutes the greatness of Boccaccio and Rabelais). It casts doubt on the self, the world, and on the whole network of relationships that are at stake. Melancholy and humor, inextricably intermingled, characterize the accents of the Prince of Denmark, accents we have learned to recognize in nearly all Shakespeare's plays on the lips of the many avatars of Hamlet. One of these, Jacques in As You Like It (IV.i.15-18), defines melancholy in these terms: 'but it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, which, by often rumination, wraps me in a most humorous sadness.' It is therefore not a dense, opaque melancholy, but a veil of minute particles of humours and sensations, a fine dust of atoms, like everything else that goes to make up the ultimate substance of the multiplicity of things.

How great is the phrase "weightless gravity"? I'll bind that as a sign before my eyes. Finally, my last Calvino quotes on lightness for today: "Lightness for me goes with precision and determination, not with vagueness and the haphazard. Paul Valéry said, 'One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.'"