In Nonsense We Trust

I have just decided that it’s time to introduce more nonsense into my life.

“Querd?” you say in response.

“Yes, exactly,” I say, as I puff on my seafoam and lavender pipe.

Here’s the deal.

I love nonsense.

Everything is nonsense before it makes sense. (So, technically, nonsense is everything at least once. But let’s not get into that.)

Learning a new language?

You listen to a phrase and it sounds like gibberish until you break it down and learn the individual words.

Listening to a fairy tale like Cinderella?

“No woman in her right mind would wear a glass slipper,” you think. “This story is absurd!”

And it is until you realize that the details of a story can be nonsensical as long as the emotions and issues behind it are not. Cinderella describes grief, loneliness, self-image, sibling rivalry, parenting problems, and classism, to name a few. Suddenly not as absurd, right?

Trying to increase corporate profits?

Your consultant tells you that switching to a four-day workweek will improve employee performance.

“That’s ridiculous,” you respond. “Do the math. We’d lose millions!”

And you scoff and argue until you see the numerical proof that the consultant is correct.

Everything is nonsense until it makes sense.

Also, some of the greatest ideas sound like nonsense.

The more absurd and ridiculous the idea, the greater its potential impact on a situation.

I mean, let’s just take the idea of breaks.

You’re working, you’re trying to get things done, but you can’t focus.

You should just keep working harder, right?

Nope! It’s completely nonsensical but it’s probably a better idea to take a break, go for a walk, and come back to work refreshed to start again. You’ll probably accomplish more!

Not only that, but nonsense is also a great way to remember that word choice is the least of your communication problems.

When my Editor and I play Mario-Kart together (a favorite pastime of ours) something in my logical, lexiconal brain turns off, and my words of frustration come out completely random. I shout nonsense when something bad happens.

But if you were there, and you saw me drive off the track, and heard me yell, “Oh, chicken cordon bleu!” at the television, it’s very unlikely that you could mistake my words for a suggestion on what we should have for dinner. Instead, you would understand from my tone, delivery, and context that I was frustrated with the game.

Nonsense still conveys meaning.

And, it allows the brain to work on possible solutions to puzzles!

Take this hypothetical newspaper headline, for instance:

Sensory Iceland Beltway Overwhelms Meridian Timekeepers

What would that article be about? Did your brain automatically start trying to make sense of it? Was the story positive or negative? Are the “Timekeepers” people or clocks? Where does this story take place? It’s like a mini riddle that you get to solve!

And then there’s my personal favorite thing about nonsense (because I am officially a word nerd):

Nonsense allows you to try to say things without saying them.

As a freshman in college, I accidentally skirted the system and got myself into an upper-class students only creative writing class. It was fantastic. I learned many, many things.

One of my favorite assignments we got all semester was to “write a meaningless poem.” It had to be three stanzas, and it had to be indecipherable.

Here is the first stanza of my poem:

Orange and juice have a frothy complexion
Like the bebop and bang of a pair of blue jeans
They hold the soft eye of a word’s stunning diction
And move a frog through a curve of sharp hugs
To swing past the rocks ‘round the edge of the tamarack
And ironically hug a new marshmallow’s throat.

2007

Isn’t nonsense delightful? It’s meaningless, except that words always have meaning. They bring up images and ideas in our heads. “Orange and juice have a frothy complexion” makes absolutely no sense, but you cannot tell me it means nothing!

(Also, I honestly think Levi’s should change their marketing slogan to “the bebop and bang of a pair of blue jeans” because that is marketing gold.)

Now, before I say that we should all go spreading more nonsense, I will admit: nonsense is not for everyone. In that same class, there was a girl who could not (and I mean COULD NOT) write something nonsensical. She tried and tried, and kept reading her attempts out loud, but every single poem she wrote eventually made sense.

So, it is with sadness that I must concede that some of us can embrace nonsense, and some of us might struggle with it.

But, my recommendation today is that, if you can, you embrace more nonsense in your life.

Because Bard the rock cormorant died from a sneeze.