malaise*lithium

I am Peter Stillman. That is not my real name. My real name is Peter Rabbit. In the winter I am Mr. White, in the summer I am Mr. Green. Think what you like of this. I say it of my own free will. Wimble click crumblechaw beloo. It is beautiful, is it not? I make up words like this all the time. That can’t be helped. They just come out of my mouth by themselves. They cannot be translated.– Paul Auster, City of Glass.

Sentences are analogous to mathematical equations. They have parts of speech just as equations have numbers. They have punctuation just as the equation has operators. There are correct and incorrect ways to read each. And, if the reader and mathematician know how to interpret them, each has a specific intended meaning. But, just as if a drawing of a flower were inserted into an equation, if a bit on nonsense finds its way into a sentence, we will likely find that the sentence becomes unsolvable.

Before I continue, I’d like to clarify that, as I see it, there are several different kinds of nonsense. There are nonsense words, logically-bankrupt sentences, and nonsensical conclusions (which may even be reached by legitimate means), and several forms of quasi-nonsense. The above Paul Auster quotation is an example of nonsense of the first and second types. Stillman’s dialogue is incoherent, but I can’t take the position that there is nothing communicated by it. Nonsense certainly has power that is not always evident. An example of that was relayed in my earlier essay on the same subject.

Auster’s character speaks this way because his father attempted to drive all learned language from him and force him to speak the innate language he believed each of us know: God’s language. The experiment failed, of course, but the elder Stillman hasn’t been the only person to stumble across this idea. An interesting phenomenon occurs in Pentecostal, Quaker and some Methodist churches where, under paroxysms of divine influence, believers speak gibberish. Technically called Glossolalia, the practice is commonly known as speaking in “Tongues,” the higher, uber-language of God. Whether or not this is a provable notion is beside the point that this nonsense (for it is nonsense to the listener) is effective and inspiring to many people.

Consider also Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” a nonsense poem powerful enough to have forced some of his invented words into the mainstream language. You may chortle at this notion, but before you do you should know that chortle was coined by Carroll in “Jabberwocky.” It made the transition to standard speech very quickly. The Oxford English Dictionary first notes it in popular usage in 1876, just four years after the publication of Through the Looking Glass, And What Alice Found There, a testament to both the popularity of Carroll’s book and the power of gibberish.

But the trouble I have with this subject, and that of literary criticism in a larger sense, it that dividing something such as nonsense into groups and attempting to classify every bit of nonsense that comes along — as I have done in this essay — is an example of another, more insidious sort of nonsense, scientism.

Ideas like the above analogy between sentences and equations may seem cogent on the surface, they may even be interesting to a degree, but in the end they are obstacles to clear thinking. Phrases like those I’ve used here, logically-bankrupt sentence, nonsense of the first and second types, and forms of quasi-nonsense, sound credible but are actually an attempt to apply the principles and to leech some of the cachet and authority from science and apply in a place where it does not belong. Science is largely useless in the humanities. But while scientific terms and thinking seem indisputable and reputable, the result of this fusion is scientism, which is neither. Names for things such as “Post-Impressionism Surfacists” have the ring of science, but not the objectivity. I cannot determine the real difference between fatalism and determinism, though they clearly have different usages. In contrast, the chemical difference between something being in solution and in suspension are quite distinct.

Acronyms are another popular way that scientism insinuates itself where it should not be welcome. To the uninitiated observer, a molecular formula such as H2C:CH2 is practically indistinguishable from WiTTDJR, an insensible acronym for What it Takes To Do The Job Right used by my employer to make their methods seem more exclusive than they really are (I cannot tell you why the i is not capitalized in the acronym, but that is their convention). It is becoming increasingly popular to label psychological predispositions — not conditions — with acronyms such as ADHD, which leads one to believe that they are the kind of thing which might be tested for with litmus paper. This is, of course, not the case, and often one doctor will diagnose such a “condition” while another will not. What used to be called shyness is now called Social Anxiety Disorder, or SAD. How depressing, because this is also the acronym for Seasonal Affective Disorder, which is the “condition” of preferring summer to winter. Identical acronyms for different phrases within the same field of study cause me to consider if the acronym creators were not so much in much interested in concision and clarity of thought as they were in creating a sense of exclusiveness and authority.

Another of the most obvious examples of this practice is advertisements. I’ve seen chips advertised as having “twice the taste,” and hair conditioners as containing “rejuvinix,” which they claim produces such-and-such percent “more bounce.” How in the world they measured these things I can’t imagine, and the reason I can’t imagine it is that these things are immeasurable. Chewing gum advertised to have “Patented Fresh-Burst Crystals” is another example of this pretending. It is simply and strictly marketing designed to capitalize on the public’s unthinking respect for figures and jargon.

Scientism is the most damaging kind of nonsense because it arrives under the banner of usefulness and thoughtfulness, but is actually a barrier to both. When nonsense comes in the forms of gibberish and meaningless sentences it is at least made less bothersome by its identifiability, but when it arrives in scientism, in that Trojan horse bearing every semblance of reason, it becomes more than bothersome; it becomes dangerous.

I know of a little acronym for a phrase that comes in quite handy when attempting to describe scientism in action. It’s just two letters. The first is B; the second is S. I’ll withhold further explanation as I believe this will best protect my credibility.