![]() In this sense, the art of nonsense draws helpful attention to the process by which we make meaning-and to the idea that meaning is not mere discovery, but construction, invention, fabulation. Modern philosophers, from Wittgenstein to Deleuze and beyond, have made considerable time for nonsense for precisely this reason “my aim,” Wittgenstein wrote, “is to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense.” The journey from one to the other can clarify just how much of our rationality rests on half-hidden rules to which we have silently (perhaps irrationally and unconsciously) assented. It’s also a refusal to countenance everything that has gone into the making of a person-including that strange mixture of opportunity and imposition which is language itself. “One has to allow for a certain multiplicity of voices,” Freud noted, “even an alloy with such-and-such per cent nonsense.” The exact figure is no doubt tricky to calculate, but the implication is clear: an unwillingness to allow for nonsense is a refusal to allow for a person. "An unwillingness to allow for nonsense is a refusal to allow for a person"Īs one of the most pleasurable examples of art’s flirtation with the absurd, nonsense has something to tell us about the workings-and the limits-of rationality itself. That said, Cynthia Rose (or Prince) adds a proviso: you’ll understand, maybe. Lear would have enjoyed this food for thought-not least the idea that understanding can come from setting your mind free, not simply setting it to work. It’s not the only occasion in Sign o’ the Times that things turn irrational in “Starfish and Coffee,” when Cynthia Rose is asked what she’s had for breakfast, back comes the reply: Lear’s poem starts up as Table announces his wish to go for a stroll Chair exclaims, “How foolishly you talk, When you know we cannot walk!” but Table explains that they both have legs, so off for a walk they go, before returning home to celebrate (they “danced upon their heads / Till they toddled to their beds”). rap Edward Lear’s poem “The Table and the Chair” in time to the music. ![]() According to the Oxford English Dictionary, nonsense signals “absence of rationality or meaning.” In the middle of “It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night,” though, Prince makes it very clear that he’s really into nonsense suddenly, out of nowhere, he has Sheila E. It might be ventured that Prince is talking nonsense. On Sign o’ the Times, Prince ends that ridiculously danceable track, “It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night”, with the words “Everybody, groove,” pauses a second, and then closes by elongating one word more: “Confuuuuuuuuuusion.” To groove is to get confused, to know that knowledge isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, to long for an art (and a life) that can give us respite from reason. I’m going to a dance.” One feels that it wasn’t a mistake to go to that dance-not least because dancing isn’t entirely rational. ![]() Faced by the perfectly rational idea that one knows the difference between “successful” and “unsuccessful” enterprises, Anton Chekhov once wrote to a friend: “Are you successful or aren’t you? What about me? What about Napoleon? One would need to be a god to distinguish successful from unsuccessful people without making mistakes. But, if rationality is categorical, sometimes it feels as though categories may be a category error. Among other things, rationality is the ability to make distinctions, to tell one thing from another, to know that x is not y. ![]()
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