by Geoff Olson

These are serious times. In a world of worry and woe, it takes some creativity to find ways to forget ourselves. Across the world, people are finding new means to “lose it.” From India to China to East Vancouver, participants gather at “laughter clubs,” with the sole purpose of laughing at nothing for extended periods of time.

I tried a variation of this myself. Last summer, I lay in a group of a dozen people in a field on Salt Spring Island, with the back of my head resting against the stomach of a stranger, who leaned her head against someone else’s stomach, and so on, in a herringbone line-up of participants. The instructor stood and instructed the first person in the line-up to not laugh – not an easy thing to do given the absurdity of the situation. As his belly jiggled, the head of the next person bobbed up and down and she began to laugh in response. Laughter exploded along the reclining participants like a line of firecrackers. How could you not crack up when your head is leaning against someone who was convulsing with laughter?
The purpose of this seriously-silly exercise, during a seminar on humour, was to get the participants to experience the force of unrestrained laughter. Health experts know plenty about how laughter benefits the immune system. Yet laughter clubs and other organized efforts at spontaneous fun may seem a bit strange to westerners. They run counter to the persistent notion among WASPS that self-improvement shouldn’t be all that easy or even enjoyable. They could also be seen to mock our more serious efforts in this department, whether through yoga, meditation, exercise, education, work or religious instruction.
Perhaps our ideas of happiness-as-birthright and our sombre efforts to get there are part of the problem. There’s no shortage of advice from the media about what we need to be happy and how to get it, yet this always seems to involve a heap of credit. Lifestyle advertisers tempt us with amazing possibilities, but few of us will become bodhisattvas with washboard stomachs and water views.
The end result is that a satisfying and complete life is always receding into some imagined future. It sometimes feels like a rigged game, with the pot of gold as vaporous as the registered retirement rainbow leading to it. As Tom Robbins wrote in an essay in 2003, it may seem a tall order cultivating a rich inner life in a culture “… whose institutions – academic, governmental, religious and otherwise – seem determined to suffocate it with a polyester pillow from Wal-Mart.”
Robbins, however, had a way out in mind: “Unbeknownst to most western intellectuals, there happens to be a fairly thin line between the silly and the profound, between the clear light and the joke, and it seems to me that on that frontier is the single most risky and significant place artists or philosophers can station themselves.”
And not just artists or philosophers; it’s a risky business for anyone to wear the fool’s coxcomb into a respectable setting. But membership has its rewards, starting with the fact that there are no monthly dues in the fools’ borderless club.
Robbins himself is a practitioner of a kind of foolish literature that never fit well in the literary canon. The Toronto-New York lit-crit establishment favours writers who traffic in tragedy, through either fiction or memoir. Serious books endorsing the idea of an unfriendly, random universe are usually the ones deemed timeless. Describing a book as “difficult” is considered a recommendation rather than a red flag. This holds true for the rest of the “serious” arts as well. If you are an artist in search of an arts grant, obscurity helps. If you must have humour, it better be of the gallows variety. If you go for absurdity, make it in the spirit of Kafka rather than Cleese.

Back in 1909, UK writer G.K. Chesterton praised a different sort of foolishness in the writings of Lewis Carroll in his essay A Defence of Nonsense:
“We know what Lewis Carroll was in daily life: he was a singularly serious and conventional don, universally respected, but very much of a pedant and something of a Philistine. Thus his strange double life on earth and in dreamland emphasizes the idea that lies at the back of nonsense – the idea of ‘escape’… into a world where things are not fixed horribly in an eternal appropriateness, where apples grow on pear trees and any odd man you meet may have three legs.
“Lewis Carroll, living one life in which he would have thundered morally against anyone who walked on the wrong plot of grass, and another life in which he would cheerfully call the sun green and the moon blue, was, by his very divided nature – his one foot on both worlds – a perfect type of the position of modern nonsense. His Wonderland is a country populated by insane mathematicians. We feel the whole is an escape into a world of masquerade; we feel that if we could pierce their disguises, we might discover that Humpty Dumpty and the March Hare were professors and Doctors of Divinity enjoying a mental holiday.”
Of course, ever since Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, we get the idea of an absurd world all too well. Outside the arts, we now have two extremes of officially-endorsed meaninglessness. The first is the “scientific” idea of a random universe ruled by inhuman forces to no particular purpose. The second is the religious fundamentalists’ take on ancient myths. In the latter world view, metaphors are misread as literal truths, leaving a temperamental God (or Gods) as the only option, as unpredictable as electrons and as arbitrary as Alice’s Red Queen.

It would seem there are few options between the two extremes of faith and faithlessness. One recent offering promotes a popular misinterpretation of quantum theory, in which the observer “creates” his or her reality, a half-truth that can only inflate the ego. It isn’t that the solipsistic vision of pop science entertainment like What the Bleep Do We Know? is crazy, it’s that it’s not quite crazy enough. As Sir James Jeans wrote prophetically in 1933, “The universe may not only turn out to be queerer than we imagine, but queerer than we can imagine.” So where does that leave us? In 1960, Zen philosopher and writer Alan Watts offered a unique perspective on meaning and meaninglessness. In his lecture The Sense of Non-Sense, he addressed the persistent human search for meaning, which has driven not only some of the highest productions of the arts and sciences, but some of the worst excesses of religion and politics as well.
Watts reasonably argued that the universe has no meaning, at least not in the semantic sense, because only words have meaning, signifying things beyond themselves. The set of letters that spells “fork” is not, itself, a fork. How could the universe – all that there is and ever will be – signify anything beyond itself? The cosmos, Watts insisted, is a system of patterns at play, a loom of electromagnetic waves weaving a tapestry of ever-changing themes. The whole shebang has a great resemblance to music and dancing, which, in themselves, make no sense because they’re not intended to mean anything other than what they are. The meaning and the activity are one and the same.
Watts asked us to consider baroque music, which obviously doesn’t signify any abstract idea, but neither does it express some concretely expressible emotion. “It is felt to be significant not because it means something other than itself, but because it is so satisfying as it is.” Watts pointed out that the feeling of meaninglessness is often equated with the existence of neurosis. “So many activities into which one is encouraged to enter, philosophies one is encouraged to believe in, religions one is encouraged to join, are commended on the basis of the fact they give life a meaning.”
They offer an escape hatch from the sinking ship of nihilism, the dead end that often results from believing in a purposeless universe. But what, Watts asked, does it mean that life has to have a purpose? “We feel life ought to have significance and be a symbol in at least that sense or at least not as arid a symbol as a mere sign.”
Fair enough. A person feels he or she should have some plan behind their life and that they should fit into some group enterprise that offers fellowship. Beyond this, there is the more immediate sense of meaning when you can satisfy all your biological urges. But given the uncertainty of life, even reaching these goals is often not enough. Hence the appeal to ultimate answers, notes Watts, a former Episcopalian priest who ended up rejecting the Church. “In all theistic religions, the meaning of life is God himself in the world. It means a person. It means a heart, it means intelligence. The relationship of love between God and man is the meaning of the world, and the sight of God is the glory of God.”
Watts then asked what, exactly, this glory is supposed to mean. What are the angels in heaven doing, he mused, when they fly around God in Heaven in Judeo-Christian iconography? Supposedly, they’re singing “hallelujah.” And what is the significance of this semi-musical expression of discarnate beings? None. It is an expression of pure joy. The angels might as well be saying, “O-bla-di, O-bla-da,” or “Hey ho, let’s go.” So even in the sober, otherworldly images of Christianity, there is an implicit appreciation of the virtues of non-sense.
Saying the universe is without meaning is not the same as saying it is all a random affair in which sentient beings emerge by accident. It’s not insisting the whole production is Godless, either. It’s simply saying that meaning is a verbal notion we map unto something ultimately unknowable and that it is beyond categories. But there is another kind of meaning: the meaning that is not puzzled over, but deeply felt.
In certain quiet, composed states of mind, free from the busy mental games of judgement and analysis, we may suddenly find significance in odd things. Watts points to the talent of certain photographers who can capture a wall with peeling paint or some other mundane scene and turn it into something close to transcendent. The deep significance of life collapses to what sits nakedly before you. Meaning is contained in the moment. This is reminiscent of Aldous Huxley’s chemically-altered discovery in The Doors of Perception, when he found, quite to his surprise, an inexplicable sense of clarity gazing at the folds of his own trousers. A more common example is when you find yourself absorbed by a particularly beautiful sunset.
These states of mind, which can sometimes emerge naturally, without drugs, fasting or some obscure mind-body discipline, are far removed from our usual problem-solving modes of thought. They’re related to the inverted wisdom of that champion navel-gazer, the “Fool.” The fool is the person who isn’t going anywhere. He has no ambition; he doesn’t even fight for himself. From the stories of Taoism to Shakespeare to Hollywood, the fool has always been used as a kind of analogue of the sage. He is the one who is allowed to utter uncomfortable truths because no one takes him seriously anyway.
The fool of tradition is connected more closely to immediate things. He knows something the rest of us don’t. In the sense of the expression from the Tao Te Ching, “He who knows doesn’t speak. He who speaks hardly knows.” The fool is also closely related to the Trickster, a figure universal to world mythology as a deceptive animal spirit. The Trickster’s gig is to introduce chaos to human affairs, breaking taboos and making a mockery of our mental and social divisions. Frequently encountered at crossroads and borderlands, the Trickster is often the victim of his own pranks. Echoes of the archetype live on today in carnivals, circuses and TV sitcoms.

Watts, who was never afraid of sounding foolish himself by talking a topic to death, believed that the universe exists “... because the flame is worth the candle.” The manifest realm of all beings, subject to every conceivable experience, from heavenly to hellish, is an adventure that must somehow be worth having for it to have come about at all. Of course, the author had no proof for this metaphysical claim. It’s his own unsatisfactory response to that unanswerable question: “Why is there something instead of nothing?” It’s an unsolvable riddle we can better approach through myth rather than science. In interpreting eastern philosophy, westerners tend to focus on the idea of Maya, the realm of illusion resulting from the ignorance of our true being. The word has mostly negative connotations of trickery, deceit and forgetfulness. What gets relatively less attention is the flip side of Maya, which is Lila, the divine play or game of life.
In the Vedic system of thought, the sleeping “Cosmic Self” dreams up the entire play and all the actors in it, taking on their roles simultaneously and forgetting itself in the process. Lila is the tricksterish, gamelike part of this cosmic self-deception. The word Lila means the play of the Divine, creating freely. Lila creates for the joy of it, out of spontaneous creativity, rather than through any need, lack or desire.
There is a seductive kind of poetry in this concept from the East, if only because we find it echoed in our personal experience. We commonly speak of “losing ourselves” when we’re fully engaged in a game, athletic performance or a sensual or artistic experience. And given our fear of death, it’s ironic that a subtle form of passing occurs when we are happily “absorbed” in the world of imagination, laughter or the delights of the senses. The ego simply evaporates. We are at our best, or at least feel our best, when we disappear into the moment. (It is not for nothing that orgasm is referred to in French as le petit mort or the little death.)
This is what makes non-sense, in the spirit Chesterton, Robbins and Watts intended, such a necessary antidote to the toxic varieties of nonsense we’re subjected to daily. Free-spirited fun enables us to drop our socially-constructed selves and partake in a kind of exalted foolishness that can’t be pegged as either sacred or profane. It’s more than just colouring outside the lines; it’s taking the crayon straight up the wall and across the ceiling.
Premium-grade non-sense helps us banish the fretful, worrying self we sometimes mistake as our true nature. And when the ego goes missing, in sneaks that slippery other self, the Trickster, who enjoys the game immensely. As Alan Watts wrote in his book Does it Matter? it’s all about “... the universe thinking itself a tragedy and then surprising itself when it turns out to be a ball.”

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