On Rationality and Nonsense

Nonsense poetry reveals irrationality in reason.

Among other things, rationality is the ability to make distinctions, to tell one thing from another, to know that x is not y. But, if rationality is categorical, sometimes it feels as though categories may be a category error. Faced by the perfectly rational idea that one knows the difference between “successful” and “unsuccessful” enterprises, Anton Chekhov once wrote to a friend: “Are you successful or aren’t you? What about me? What about Napoleon? One would need to be a god to distinguish successful from unsuccessful people without making mistakes. I’m going to a dance.” One feels that it wasn’t a mistake to go to that dance—not least because dancing isn’t entirely rational. On Sign o’ the Times, Prince ends that ridiculously danceable track, “It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night”, with the words “Everybody, groove,” pauses a second, and then closes by elongating one word more: “Confuuuuuuuuuusion.” To groove is to get confused, to know that knowledge isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, to long for an art (and a life) that can give us respite from reason.

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Matt Baum 22 June 2021

Having found a certain number of participants for my research, I decided to add a couple of modern poems to a presentation. Some of my students did their literary reports for a college course online buying editor's help from writemyessayfast.ca if they were late with their homework submissions. Now, I'm asking them to write about modern poetry and show how it interprets success as a phenomenon in the digital world.

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