This is a postscript of sorts to the last piece I submitted to NVS, entitled Sartor Resartus: Our Rulers Must Rebrand With Suit-wearing. The title itself should have shown the article for what it is. Arrant nonsense. So I was a bit surprised when I saw someone comment that it was ‘Absolute Nonsense,’ finishing the three repeated sentences off with several exclamation marks, like someone writing a kind of expletory Nonsense Rhyme.

Now then if I knew it was nonsense, why must I be surprised? I was surprised because I thought it was self-evident it was pure nonsense, so it should not have been worthy of being repeated that it was nonsense by anyone. Am I making any sense?

I would not attempt to parse an article I had written. Why do that? NVS has a good many readers who would see the sense of the nonsense. Now ask yourself: Is it worth anyone’s time writing an article about why the leaders of a country should change their style of dressing, and change it to something foreign? Most answers to this question would be in the negative. And that is the point of writing it. Pointlessness.

To turn clothes into a metaphor for the ridiculousness of the rebranding distraction: Those intending to put new clothes on Nigeria and Nigerians should be remade and reclothed first. To act stupid while pointing out some salient stupidities. To go off, completely, at a tangent, and never allowing the loop of sweet reasonableness to meet.

Some might describe the device I used as satire. But it was subtle deadpan satire, satire that hopes not to bring attention to itself as satire - as it were, nonsense, self-deprecating satire. What I did was to allow the reader to teeter between questioning my intentions, whether I had gone plain barmy for writing such a thing, or whether I might only just have done a measure of justice to my subject matter. A more perceptive reader would know there was something going on in the piece.

I had a baptismal brush with nonsense when I was a primary school boy, when a couple of female classmates triangulating my seat would lapse into a kind of patter not intended for me to understand, turning our Yoruba language into something totally hard to for me to grasp. For all I knew they might be talking about me, but I couldn’t get it. After some time I shrugged and gave up trying to understand. To me what they were saying was nonsense, but I guess it made a lot of sense to them.

I still occasionally read nonsense verse, something to relieve the self-importance and the sublimity of soberer poetry. I occasional write nonsense verse too. Since I began to think in the Cartesian sense, I have always tried not to take myself too serious. I recall the sophomoric motto I came up with even before I entered university: Do not be too serious about life; do not be too unserious, either.

I remember when I offered to lend Stephen King’s IT to a friend who preferred Dostoevsky or Soyinka. He was surprised that I found such a ‘trashy’ fat novel as IT so enjoyable that I would urge him to read it. He preferred to spend precious time poring over our common taste in ‘serious literature.’

Let us say that the article I had written was satire, or at least satiresque. This kind of literary device is one of the most difficult to navigate, both for the writer and the reader. While the writer’s intention is often not to make people laugh, she does wish that what she is getting at is not lost on readers. And the reader, too, needs a bit of time and possible knowledge of how satire works to cotton on – or everything would come across as pretty woolly. Or portentously unfunny. In its time, the Carlyle book, Sartor Resartus, was a sleeper because it took years before the public began to see the point of it. 

Everyone knows the Gulliver’s Travels story: Lilliputians, Brobdingnagians, Yahoos, and Hoummounyms. But there is a sketch written by Jonathan Swift, even almost as popular as Gulliver’s, entitled A Modest Proposal. The skit recommends that Irish babies should be slaughtered, stewed, roasted, baked and boiled, and served up as fare. Swift imagines a baby being tossed into large boiling pots, cooking.

At the time a lot of readers would have dismissed Dean Swift as being off his head for recommending cannibalism, and worse still the cooking and eating of innocent children. Some would have snarled ‘Absolute Nonsense,’ they would easily have ignored the fact that Swift made the proposal so as to prevent ‘the children of the poor in Ireland from being burdens to their parents and the public.’

For in what may be described as the fitness of things in that long-ago world, as now, what Swift had written made no sense at all. People were still very religious in the then England as we are in today’s Nigeria, and one of the things religion does is to scotch one’s sense of irony, and the ability to take nonsensical exaggeration and bullshitry for what they are. Which is not surprising, considering religion’s eminently serious talk about Heaven, God, Sin and so on. But then again, the irony is that Swift was a clergyman of sorts. I have tried to imagine a Nigerian pastor in the wake of the Child Witches national disgrace, suggesting that the children are truly witches, that they should all be trussed up, taken to the stake and burnt. What would readers make of such a pastor?

The funny thing is that if anyone reads the Bible closely, even if the reader puts aside the many exaggerations and other contextual non-sequiturs, it is a book that packs non-sense in spadefuls. Even, over the ages, the best of theologians have found it hard to make any sense of the Book of Revelation. Playwright George Bernard Shaw, who was not often as dismissive of religion as his philosopher contemporary, Bertrand Russell, described the Book of Revelation as worse than nonsense, that it is simply the wild wanderings of a mad man. 

I would not be surprised if some shouted Blasphemy at the above observation. And although we have our brilliant comedians and sketch writers, something I have come to notice is that we take ourselves far too seriously. We want to be seen as grandiosely thoughtful. At the expense of levity, the balance is tilted steeply on the side of gravity.

What satirists do is to bend the truth as it is believed to be, or rather twist the truth, make a cold uneasy torsion of what a lot see as solid steely verities. Satirists try to say the unsayable, seriously challenging Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Wittgenstein himself, regarded as the finest philosopher of the last century, considered his book Tractatus as wholly nonsense. But there are marked differences between philosophical, literary and mathematical nonsense. For instance, in maths 2+2 = 4 may be considered hypothetical nonsense.  

Nonsense is part of human existence, one of the constituents of human essence. Philosophers have written tomes about nonsense, or nonsensicalism, as they might call it. Now if I had enlisted the help of philosophers to analyse what Absolute Nonsense means, you might hear such questions as, What is Absolute? When is Absolute absolute? Is nonsense qualifiable, or quantifiable? To most people, that is what all philosophers talk: Nonsense, lengthy prolix nonsense. And even philosophers themselves have accused one another of nonsense-speak.

Ian Dearden had written an article about nonsense in the last but two Philosophy Now magazine. He’d asked Do Philosophers Talk Nonsense? Ian Dearden tries to anatomize Nonsense. What is nonsense? What nonsense is. Are you always conscious that you are spouting nonsense? The ambivalence of nonsense. The coefficient of nonsense. The article is a potted version of his book of the same title, a book in which he appeals to philosophers not to accuse each other of writing nonsense.  

I left the magazine on a train seat late one evening. Although Philosophy Now tries to make itself as jargon-free and as readable as possible, many of its articles would only be readable by professional philosophers or anyone who has more than superficial interest in philosophy. I can imagine someone picking up Philosophy Now and concluding that every article in it is nonsense, no less so the one entitled Do Philosophers talk Nonsense, which does not entirely do away with philosophese. 

Robot  # 1 | 08.05.2009 06:45

This is a postscript of sorts to the last piece I submitted to NVS, entitled Sartor Resartus: Our Rulers Must Rebrand With Suit-wearing. The title itself should have shown the article for what it is. Arrant nonsense. So I was a bit surprised when I saw someone commented that it was ‘Absolute Nonsense,’ finishing the three repeated sentences off with several exclamation marks, like someone writing a kind of expletory Nonsense Rhyme. ...Read the full article.