I spent several days ruminating on a quote: “The case for nonsense is not the same as the case against meaning.” This is Louise Glück, prefacing Peter Streckfus’s book The Cuckoo. And while it’s eloquent and quite wonderful, I’d like to tweak it a little, because I like the inexactness of exact opposites.

The case for nonsense is not the same as the case against sense.

Sense, you see, is just a synonym for reason, the process by which we make logical deductions about the causes and effects of what happens around us in the world. We expect things to work a certain way– if we throw a ball in the air, we expect it to come down; if we submerge the sack of puppies in water long enough, we expect them to drown. (Examples must be visceral in order to be fully understood.)

However, things continually happen that defy our expectations of sense. Despite the irreversible nature of death, people die on the operating table, and then come back to life. Chunks of ice fall from the sky without reasonable explanation. Heck, traffic accidents, which are eminently explicable, are so often labelled “senseless,” just because they’ve defied our expectations.

Within the realm of interpersonal relationships, sense is more often defied than not. For example, when I dated the harpy, I fully expected that by the time I broke up with her, she would be equally glad to rid herself of me. This was not the case. I once had a co-worker that would sit in a room full of people telling her that x=4, then march straight to the dean and tell her that the room full of people swore x=3. I used to be baffled by some peoples’ inability to act sensibly, until a good friend explained it to me in the terms I’d been waiting to hear all my life: “You’re trying to apply a rational model to an irrational behavior.”

And isn’t that what sense is all about? Rational models? And yet, at what point can any of us know with certainty that we represent the rational model, or rather, at what point can any of us be sure we don’t represent the irrational behavior? Who decides what’s rational when we, emotional creatures that we are, are running around trying to decide what’s best for our own lives?

There’s a certain lack of sense in what we do– in her essay in Poetry, Kay Ryan rightly notes that poetry “does not ‘find a need and fill it,’ as Henry Ford urged inventors to do.” And, of course, neither do we– at least not in any cosmically confirmable way. We simply order our existences in such a way that we make meaning out of our everyday lives. If the creation of poetry or the reading of poetry enters our daily lives, then there’s arguably a very well-constructed sense to it for those engaged in the endeavour, and very little sense for those not involved.

Yet, very few people who have no use for poetry will accuse poets of “nonsense,” they’ll merely accept that “it doesn’t make sense to me.”

There seems to be a commonly accepted belief that nonsense is not necessarily found in paradox or the inexplicable, not in the willful bending of sense so often found in poetry, fiction, and magic shows, but in the absolute snapping of sense to a subversive end. Glück rightly noted that nonsense is not divorced from meaning– it stands in direct opposition to meaning, and willfully so.

Would it not be fair to say that we can often find the “reason” for nonsense, or the logical explanation behind its creation? But those things which have no logical explanation, no obvious inherent motivation, are merely “senseless”? The aforementioned traffic accident defies our expectation of how lives are supposed to proceed, but does not willfully lack meaning. We simply cannot determine one aspect of the causality– why it has to happen to us.

Ryan’s argument for poetry as nonsense seems to me misguided in the same way that Alanis Morrisette (I know, I promised this days ago) incorrectly argues for irony when discussing events that are merely unfortunate. And where Morrissette’s examples lack a certain sophistication, a certain black humor, Ryan ascribes the black humor where perhaps there is none. Poems that play linguistic games of hide-and-go-seek, like those of Robert Frost, or which express comic impossibility, like those of Emily Dickinson, aren’t explicitly opposed to meaning, they’re merely open to a multiplicty of meanings. That’s hardly nonsense, to me.

But really, it’s senseless to argue about it.