In class, I once saw a dark mood come over a bright student the first time I mentioned nonsense. When I asked why, she explained that nonsense made her think of madness, psychosis, and severe mental illness. She related a scary childhood memory of an elderly aunt who talked incoherent nonsense during a psychotic breakdown.
Nonsense is sometimes a manifestation of mental illness. Chapter 4 will survey the role of nonsense in the life of the mind, including various psychological abnormalities. Even so, on balance, it seems that nonsense is more closely affiliated with mental health than it is with mental illness.
Most people erroneously associate nonsense with repugnance, nothingness, and falsehood, and some associate nonsense with madness. Therefore, they assume that nonsense is inherently unknowable, irrational, unfathomable, and beyond logic and reason. In other words, they think that nonsense presents an impenetrable barrier to rational thought.
A rational study of nonsense sounds like a contradiction in terms. How could there be rational knowledge about something that is meaningless and unintelligible? Discovering that an idea is unintelligible nonsense is supposedly a dead end, insofar as rational inquiry is concerned. Nothing more can or should be investigated by rational means if an idea is found to be meaningless, unintelligible, and nonsensical. As H. H. Price said, “There cannot be evidence for something which is completely unintelligible to us.”
A swirl of misconceptions, mistakes, faulty assumptions, and half-truths surrounds the important concept of nonsense. Those errors are so pervasive that people regard them as common sense. Hence, because of that, those ingrained misconceptions about nonsense constitute a hidden, collective cognitive impairment. Unexamined misconceptions about nonsense can sometimes throw off the mind, even when someone is trying hard to think logically, and that is especially so in certain frontier areas of rational inquiry. For instance, we will see later that common misconceptions about nonsense create a formidable obstacle to the rational understanding of life’s spiritual dimension.
Let us, then, give Nonsense its place among the divisions of Humor, and though we cannot reduce it to an exact science, let us acknowledge it as a fine art.
—Carolyn Wells7
It takes a heap of sense to write good nonsense.
—Mark Twain8
Nonsense is a creative faculty of certain writers and artists. Normally, it goes without saying that authors want to make sense and convey a meaning to readers’ minds. That writers try to say something that is intelligible and meaningful ordinarily is so obvious that there is no reason even to state it. Therefore, writing nonsense deliberately is an art that goes against the grain; it deviates from the norm.
The writings of authors who specialized in the genre of nonsense writing are a logical place to find examples of avowed nonsense. To begin, we will consider five authors who are famous for their nonsense books, and then introduce other authors in subsequent chapters. At this point it would be nice to describe some striking characteristic or personality trait that these nonsense writers had in common. Unfortunately, there was no such common characteristic, other than that they were all males who wrote nonsense and that all of them were humorists.
John Taylor (1578–1653) ferried passengers on the Thames and also wrote volumes of nonsense poetry that he published and sold himself. Taylor, known as “The Water Poet,” was a showman and promoter of public spectacles. He once transported a huge man with a prodigious appetite from Kent to London. There, Taylor put the man on display as “The Great Eater of Kent” and charged admission to audiences who flocked to see him.
John Taylor said that “Nonsense is Rebellion.”9 Taylor had little formal education, but he was an intelligent man who saw through intellectual pretense. He realized that nonsense could be used to create an illusion of profundity and scholarship. He wrote:
Yet I with nonsense could contingerate,
With catophiscoes terragrophicate,
And make my selfe admir’d immediately
By such as understand no more then I.10
Taylor made up meaningless nonsense words for that particular verse. “Contingerate,” “catophiscoes” and “terragrophicate” are invented nonsense words that sound like those that professors or doctors might use. In other nonsense verses, Taylor used only meaningful words put together into unintelligible sentences. Here is a sample:
Oh that my Lungs could bleat like butter’d pease;
But bleating of my lungs hath caught the itch,
And are as mangy as the Irish Seas,
That doth ingender windmills on a Bitch.
I grant that Rainbowes being lull’d asleep,
Snort like a woodknife in a Ladies eyes;
Which maks her grieve to see a pudding creep
For creeping puddings only please the wise.11
Edward Lear (1812–1888) was a genial English eccentric who gained fame for his nonsense books for children. Lear’s books are selections of nonsense stories, poems, and songs. Lear was a traveling landscape artist, and he illustrated his own books with cartoons and drawings.
Lear made up funny-sounding, meaningless words like “ombliferous,” “borascible,” “mumbian,” “scroobious” and “meloobius” for his nonsense poems. Lear also often put nonsense words into otherwise intelligible letters that he wrote to his friends. Writing from Rome, for instance, he complained to a friend that
a vile beastly rottenheaded foolbegotten pernicious priggish screaming, tearing, roaring, perplexing, splitmecrackle, crachimecriggle insane ass of a woman is practicing howling below-stairs with a brute of a singing master so horribly, that my head is nearly off!12
Lear once wrote nonsense that was formatted to look like a letter. He mailed the letter to his friend Evelyn Baring as a joke. Lear wrote:
Thrippsy pillivinx,
Inky tinky pobblebockle abblesquabs?—Flosky! Beebul trimble flosky!—Okul scratchabibblebongibo, viddle squibble tog-a-tog, ferrymoyassity amsky flamsky ramsky damsky crocklefether squiggs.
Flinkywisty pomm,
Slushypipp13
Charles Dodgson (1832–1889) taught logic and mathematics at Oxford. Dodgson was shy, but as his alter ego, Lewis Carroll, he was the renowned author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. Both books combine multiple forms of nonsense to bring strange, alternate worlds alive in readers’ minds. In fact, the books reflect two common English phrases that have to do with nonsense, for both “went down the rabbit hole” and “stepped through the looking-glass” denote the experience of finding oneself in nonsensical circumstances.
Much of Carroll’s nonsense is based on tricks of logic and plays on words. Carroll also incorporated ideas about certain alternate states of consciousness into his nonsense works. For instance, the Alice books feature dreams, mirror visions, and, possibly, perceptual distortions associated with hallucinogenic mushrooms. Carroll was very interested in paranormal phenomena, too.