A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.
— Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator
This post was inspired by a recent chat conversation with Fran. Apropos of nothing, she messaged me the following seven words.
Martin Camus cup straight out of HTLT
She’d found the entry in her calendar but couldn’t remember putting it there or what it signified. For several minutes, we tried to work it out. Fran thought the first three words might be a reminder to buy me a Albert Camus-related mug for my birthday. She knows I’m interested in the philosopher’s work, especially his doctrine of Absurdism. I have a Camus t-shirt and have blogged about him previously. Then again, Fran thinks of me as Marty not Martin, and why write cup instead of mug? HTLT refers to High Tide, Low Tide: The Caring Friend’s Guide to Bipolar Disorder but there’s no mention of Camus or philosophy in our book at all.
Something that is straight out of HTLT is the paradox of words and meaning. The following passage is excerpted from chapter 1 (“The Caring Friendship: Key Skills and Attitudes”).
When you think about it, it is amazing anyone manages to communicate anything meaningful at all. Each of us has our unique mix of thoughts and feelings, hopes, fears, joys, pains, plans, worries, and views about how the world works. We scarcely understand them ourselves, yet we hope to share them with someone who has their own mix to contend with. And the only tools we have are the sounds we can utter, and the marks we can make on paper or a computer screen. It is no wonder we struggle at times!
The question isn’t so much what do those seven words mean, but how do any of us convey meaning at all? Given the immensity of the challenge, the language we use matters. This is never more important than when discussing our lived experience. As a friend reminded me recently, certain words — for example survivor rather than victim in the case of people who have experienced rape, abuse, or trauma; or the appropriate diagnostic labels when discussing mental health — affect how we think about ourselves and relate to one another. There’s a great deal at stake. Communicating our experiences effectively can counter ignorance, stigma, and discrimination. The same friend shared with me a powerful quotation by Brené Brown: “One day you will tell your story of how you overcame what you went through, and it will be someone else’s survival guide.”
Fran and I were aware of this responsibility when writing our book. The Introduction includes a section on perspective and language. In it we described key terms and outlined our approach to the language of illness and wellness. It’s something I think about a lot when I’m blogging. But if it’s so important to use language carefully and clearly, what about nonsense? What’s the value of apparently contradictory, ridiculous, or paradoxical language? Why was I so excited at Fran’s cryptic calendar entry?
I’ve always loved puns and wordplay. I still recall my delight as a teenager when I discovered the poetry of American humourist Ogden Nash. This classic remains a favourite:
The Termite
Some primal termite knocked on wood
And tasted it, and found it good!
And that is why your Cousin May
Fell through the parlor floor today.
An even shorter pest-related poem sometimes incorrectly attributed to Nash, is “Lines on the Antiquity of Microbes” (also known as “Fleas”) by Strickland Gillilan. It’s undeniably silly but I love it.
Lines on the Antiquity of Microbes
Adam
Had ’em
In my teen years I wrote silly poems for and about my school friends, recounting our exploits, foibles, and love lives (or lack thereof). I wish I’d kept copies of them. I’m not a fan of all nonsense poetry, however. Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” from Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There leaves me cold. The opening lines will suffice.
Jabberwocky
‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
My distaste for Carroll’s wordplay is arguably because to me the poem is devoid of meaning. There’s no mystery, nothing to puzzle over or figure out. It’s not invitingly obscure, it’s a chaotic jumble of nonsense. More generally, I can’t abide what I’d describe as crass or contentless silliness. Slapstick comedy. Pantomime. A number of TV shows spring to mind, including Monty Python. Python’s humour might be “clever” but I could never engage.
In contrast, as a teenager I was greatly taken by the American poet and critic Ezra Pound. A collection of his poetry in the school library engaged me so much I neglected to return it when I left. As obscure — and arguably pretentious — as his writing can be, I felt there was profound wisdom and meaning there, if only it could be decoded.
Canto I
And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
Bore us out onward with bellying canvas,
Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.
As well as puns, intelligent silliness, and hidden meaning, I’ve always been fascinated by paradoxes and mind games. Amongst these I’d include Russell’s paradox (check out these videos by Up and Atom and Jeffrey Kaplan), infinite loop paradoxes (Tired Thinker), and Gödel’s incompleteness theorum (Veritassium and Numberphile). I’d also include Buddhist koans, although it’s not a topic I’m very familiar with. The following passage from 10 Buddhist koans, and why understanding them is pointless serves as a useful introduction.
Humans like to know what a sentence means. Sometimes we’ll go to great lengths to derive meaning from a group of words. More often than not, however, we’ll take the easiest possible route to understanding; the less neurologically taxing, the better. This opens the door to misunderstanding, yet it’s also how our brains are built. Spending time on sentences is the work of academics and poets, not commoners. Still, we all (hopefully) want to know what the other person is trying to convey. The koan is antithetical to such communication.
As in good politics and good philosophy, the koan was designed to inject “great doubt” into the adept’s mind. Koans are sometimes labelled “nonsensical,” though that misses the point. Logic is not the goal here. As renowned Sanbo Kyodan teacher, Philip Kapleau, writes, “the role of the koan is not to lead us to satori [enlightenment], but on the contrary to make us lose our way and drive us to despair.”
The article includes the familiar challenge, “Two hands clap and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand?” Of the rest, this one resonates with me:
Question: Without speaking, without silence, how can you express the truth?
Response: I always remember springtime in southern China. The birds sing among innumerable kinds of fragrant flowers.
As the article’s author points out, “Reading [these koans] on the screen is purely for curiosity’s sake. […] ‘sitting with them’ is the real utility, though thinking you’ve ‘got’ them defeats the purpose.”
There’s a similar crisis of contradiction in the Absurdism of French philosopher Albert Camus, whose name features in Fran’s calendar entry. To the extent that I understand his ideas they accord with my own. As I’ve written previously, “We have an innate need to find meaning and value in our lives, but according to Camus, the search is futile because the universe itself is purposeless, meaningless, irrational, and utterly indifferent to our existence. Camus describes this as the paradox of the Absurd.” The koan-like absurdity is expressed in the closing lines of The Myth of Sisyphus, in which Camus uses the ancient tale of Sisyphus to stand for the human condition. Fated for eternity to push a boulder up a mountain only to have it roll back down again, Sisyphus is nevertheless able to find peace.
The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
I have those words on a t-shirt. I wear it to remind myself of the paradox of searching for meaning in a universe devoid of any.
I’ll close with an account of the image I selected for this blog post. The sculpture of the word “what” on its low plinth works as a visual pun for the first three words of this post’s title, “What on earth?” That would have been enough, but a little investigation led me further. Created by KHBT, the sculpture was part of London’s Culture Mile trail in 2020. It’s the first of a series of sculptures which together form a quotation from Virginia Woolf’s novel Jacob’s Room: “What are you going to meet if you turn this corner?”
The idea of following the word trail through the city echoes the way Fran and I attempted to make sense of her calendar entry, considering it one word at a time. We remain uncertain and perplexed. Likewise, the tourist is led not to an answer but to a question. The final scupture in the trail — the question mark — stands alone as an invitation to further exploration and adventure. There are no answers, the trail suggests, only more questions. This is something I’ve explored previously in The Future Will Be Confusing.
At this stage, I hope Fran and I never solve the mystery of her calendar entry. As I told her at the time, “No matter what the truth of this is, the fact that neither of us know what it means is even more exciting!”
Photo by Rhys Kentish at Unsplash.
