POETICKS

One of the “tiny special stories” in Al Ackerman’s recent collection, Misto Peas, is called “The Pendulum of Truth”:

“I put my face in a cat and it coffed up sucked-in hairs.  So that was some of it.  And out on the lawn something was peering through the swami who’d been posing dead so lmany weeks that his body was beginning to develop rips.  The thing peering through the rips was mimicking Jerry’s Drive-in.  A kid pulled in who’d had too much wine and at first from the awful shade of his nearly purple face we thought he was going to throw up on his date.  But then he began to swing back and forth on the gear shift and we saw it was the pendulum of truth.”

Why is this so funny to me, and not to many others?  I think partly because I instantly recognize it as a parody of the thought processes of “normals”– matter-of-factly explaining their religion, for instance, taking it for granted they are making sense, never considering the possibility of alternative explanations–and getting away with it!  We connoisseurs of irrationality can make the connections, sparse and frail though they be, to the surreal and/or emotional sense they make.  It’s nonsense of the highest level, but different from Carroll’s in that its speaker doesn’t realize it, which makes it all the funnier.

Okay, my explanation is lousy.  Just groping for an explanation that works, and confident I can find one.

Ackerman’s book is avaliable from Luna Bisonte Prods, 137 Leland Avenue, Columbus OH 43214.  ISBN 1-892280-78-7.  Price: $9, ppd.