Entry 10 — Nonsense, Etc.
Okay, back to Geof Huth’s haiku and why I consider it a specimen of nearsense, and what that means:
. the car I didn’t notice isn’t there
This could be temporary nonsense, or a text that at first seems not to make sense but later does. Its speaker may simply have driven his car past another car without noticing the other car. At that point a companion’s remarking, “Hmmm, that car must be over fifty-years-old,” might cause the speaker to look in the direction where the old car should be and seeing no car–because it has moved. He never noticed the car but knows it was there although it has gone.
The problem with this is that no companion is mentioned. Moreover, the incident seems too minor to form the basis of a poem. So I take it to be a paradox: one can’t notice that one has failed to notice something. One can’t think there is a car somewhere that one did not notice since to do so indicates one noticed it. Or can one notice not noticing? It’s very confusing–coming close to making sense but never quite doing so. It’s not pure nonsense (as a form of literature meant simply to amuse) nor is it willfully and sadistically completely meaningless the way constersense is. There is thus something about it that gives pleasure–the way an optical illusion does, or the paradox, “This sentence is a lie.”
My tentative explanation for the pleasure is that we like reminders that existence is not wholly rational, wholly predictable. The paradox performs a variation on the theme of reason. It makes enough sense to prevent anger, but not enough to be fully satisfying in the long run–as a paradox. But Huth’s poem is more than a paradox: it captures a human feeling we all have of suddenly being discontinuous with Existence–lost. The universe has gone left while we were continuing right.
The difference between nearsense of this kind and constersense is that we share the feelings of the creator of nearsense but are the victims of the creator of constersense (unless we share his contempt for those who want existence to be reasonably reasonable and enjoy thinking of the pain he is inflicting on them).
Tags: haiku