Television cable companies compete with operators of television communications satellites. Satellites formerly did not transmit local television news programs, and cable operators saw this as a selling point for their companies. One cable company drove the point home with an ad featuring nonsense in the form of an alien mock language. In the ad, an extraterrestrial sat behind a news desk in a television studio on a distant planet. He delivered the news by chirping away in a nonsense mock language. The ad implied, “If you want to watch the local news, get cable.”
The Partnership for a Drug-Free America urges parents to learn about drug abuse to protect their children. The organization spread their message with a television ad that featured a meaningless string of words. In the ad, a concerned mother tries to discuss the drug problem with her teenage daughter, saying, “Hypnosis completely tailwind sowing elephants plant before cartoon paper cups. So numbers renovate. Afterwards lightly fish scale doorbell.” Her teenage daughter’s facial expression was one of dazed incomprehension, and that drove home the ad’s point: namely, get educated on the drug problem before you talk to your children about it. Otherwise, what you say may sound like nonsense to them.
Nonsense irresistibly compels some people to search for a supposed hidden meaning. Nonsense drives some people to try to interpret it out of existence. That is, its meaningless, unintelligible quality is beckoning. Nonsense makes us feel that although we cannot discern a meaning, one is somehow just out of reach. We seem to sense a meaning just around the corner or over the horizon. We feel that if we only put in more effort, we may discover this tantalizing meaning, so we turn nonsense over and over in our minds. We try hard to find a position in which the nonsense will snap into place and make sense. Some people go on and on, obsessively working on nonsense, trying to shear as much of the “non” away from it as they can.
These people become fixated on the idea that nonsense is a code, something like pig Latin. If only one could discover its secret formula, nonsense would reveal a hidden message.
The centuries-old Voynich manuscript is a case in point. This bizarre document is kept in the rare books department of the library of Yale University. The two-hundred-plus pages of the manuscript are written in an unintelligible alphabet of twenty-two nonsense letters. The writing resembles no known alphabet.
The margins of the pages are adorned with sketches that resemble those found in medieval illuminated manuscripts. The drawings depict nude women, animals and plants of no known species, and an incomprehensible plumbing system. One commentator said that the “manuscript has the eerie quality of a perfectly sensible book from an alternate universe.”
A long parade of cryptographers tried to decipher the Voynich manuscript by assuming that it is in code. The problem is that each cryptographer’s solution diverges wildly from all the rest, for the Voynich manuscript is an ingenious hoax and a masterpiece of mock language. Sadly, however, the identity of the clever nonsense writer who dreamed it up is lost in the mists of time.
This is a good place to reflect and remember what nonsense is; namely, it is meaningless, unintelligible language. From the viewpoint of an author trying to write good nonsense poems or stories, accidentally meaning something is a failure of art. Nonsense writers have been bemused by determined enthusiasts who tried to interpret their literary nonsense out of existence by uncovering a concealed meaning in it.
Lewis Carroll was perplexed and amused by his many interpreters. He responded to those who asked him to reveal the supposed hidden meaning of his nonsense poem “The Hunting of the Snark.” He wrote:
I was walking on a hill-side, alone, one bright summer day, when suddenly there came into my head one line of verse—one solitary line—‘For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.’ I knew not what it meant, then: I know not what it means, now: but I wrote it down: and, some time afterwards, the rest of the stanza occurred to me, that being its last line: and so by degrees, at odd moments during the next year or two, the rest of the poem pieced itself together, that being its last stanza. And since then, periodically, I have received courteous letters from strangers, begging to know whether ‘the Hunting of the Snark’ is an allegory, or contains some hidden moral, or is a political satire: and for all such questions I have but one answer, “I don’t know!”52
We need to reemphasize that nonsense is not a coded message, for a coded message looks like meaningless, unintelligible nonsense, to be sure. Nevertheless, knowing the code used enables someone to decipher the message and understand its hidden meaning.
Transmitting meaningful, secret messages securely is the purpose of encryption. If the message were meaningless, there would be no need to conceal the meaning. However, by definition, nonsense is meaningless. Therefore, equating nonsense with coded messages destroys the meaning of the word “code” and the meaning of the word “nonsense.”
Senders sometimes insert nonsense words into a secret message before encoding it. The technique deceives code-breakers because they look for the meaning in a coded message, not for the nonsense in it. In other words, nonsense planted deliberately in coded messages can make the work of deciphering them harder.
Nonsense stimulates a flow of odd mental imagery, half-formed ideas, and fragmentary chains of thought. Nonsense is language that is meaningless and unintelligible by definition, yet something strange and hard to define emerges in the mind of someone who reads nonsense or listens to it being read or spoken aloud. Nonsense can register in the mind as a peculiar, surreal state of consciousness.
Reflecting on a nonsense poem that she heard, Alice said, “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t know exactly what they are!”53
My students described their introspective experiences of reading or hearing nonsense in similar terms. According to their descriptions, nonsense induces a stream of incoherent, dreamlike ideation. Nonsense evoked nebulous mentation that they found hard to describe. Nonsense called up garbled images or vague thoughts in their minds.
This off state of free-floating consciousness is the flip side of what happens in the hypnagogic state, dreams, psychosis, and delirium. Those conditions are alternate states of consciousness during which people talk nonsense, and apparently the same process works in the opposite direction. Talking nonsense to people makes them experience a curious, hard-to-describe alternate state of consciousness. In sum, nonsense is an alternate state of language that can induce an alternate state of consciousness.
Does nonsense of each different type induce a corresponding, different alternate state of consciousness? Could a typology of nonsense provide a vocabulary for talking more intelligibly and precisely about alternate states of consciousness? Might some particular type or combination of types of nonsense induce an alternate state of consciousness that would somehow be superior to ordinary consciousness? In other words, could nonsense be a doorway to a higher sense? The universal structural formula that abides in every type of nonsense may help us understand the language of transcendent consciousness.