On Love and Nonsense: My Observations Over The Years

My earliest memory of childhood is the memory of an imagination. Looking up at the ceiling, I forever expected to see my mother sitting cross-legged on the ceiling fan, waving excitedly to me from its broad, burnished blades. This hilarious but compelling image was not my unformed mind's own conjuring. Rather, it was built word by word, playfully and assiduously, by my father who, ever since I was born, incessantly wooed me into this world with nonsense.

Sitting on our rooftop on some evening, for instance, he would enthusiastically assert that I wasn't half a good daughter as that little mosquito over there for wasn't I pardoning that mosquito that bit him and would that same mosquito have pardoned me had I bit her father? On summer afternoons, pretending to be overcome by the heat, he would call for a glass of 'elbow' or for a 'khaepa' (Bengali for ‘lunatic’) to fan himself with. I was five or six, the age in which the body and being are ceaselessly arched towards mirth. Fetching him water or the palm fan, I would question his errors with a school teacher-like sternness. He would merrily insist that he had said everything right for how, otherwise, would I have understood?

A considerable part of love’s language, as I have come to fathom over the years, is constituted by nonsense. Nonsense exactly in the light of what the word etymologically declares: that which admits of no sense. Little rationality or logic has ever been able to penetrate through the nonsense of love. Chaucer may have been the first to write that love is blind but even before him, in the world’s steady discourse, love was looked upon as unreliable, naïve, impetuous, and vulnerable to errors of judgment. And yet, there is no doubt that in love's blindness (to order, convention, and reason, among other things) there rests formidable power.

There is a clarity in love that would be hard to come by in other walks of life. It’s a clarity that makes us, perhaps for the first time, see and know ourselves with some degree of conviction. Love, we tend to believe, illumines the other in our consciousness but not more than it illumines our clumsy, fluttering selves. In love, we discover our own depth, expand into spaces that we never suspected had existed within us, transmute into versions of us that feel awakened and ambitious to embrace the cosmos.

In this, almost, celestial clarity of love, nonsense occupies an essential part. Mothers indulge in baby talk with infants, make up inane songs, and outdo themselves each day in coming up with the most bizarre endearments for their babies. Lovers follow suit. In all ages, stages, and in every relationship of love, we come up with our own special variety of nonsense, our exceptional prattle that defies all understanding except in the case of the speaker and its one chosen listener.

The greater the surge of love, the greater and more fevered the flow of nonsense, for love cannot be content merely repeating that it loves. It must perform itself over and over again, outdoing itself with wit, consistency and creative fervour. The rituals of love, thus, keep expanding, shifting and growing more vigorous in love. With my first-born, I distinctly remember how my father’s lovable nonsense proved greatly handy and as a smitten first-time mother, I began with his ready-to-use stuff till I was confident enough to generate nonsense on my own. My second-born received all that nonsense as hand-me-downs from his elder sibling along with new narratives made up especially for him. Lately, my dog has officially stepped in as the protagonist of all those inane songs whose repertoire keeps growing.

My younger one being prematurely born, I remember how we fell in love with his littleness and couldn’t help comparing him to a bird. I would call him bird names each day, weaving them into a fine rhythm, till one afternoon, I heard his elder sibling affectionately address him in private as a baby crow. The sweet absurdity of that comparison made me laugh although I hadn't found an iota of absurdity in my own (very same) performances of love. 

This is the particular characteristic of nonsense: that it makes profound sense only to a chosen few. Bypassing conventional modes of reason and causality, nonsense builds a rare world of intimacy that is meant to strictly withhold access to anyone who is not intimate. In its relentless ploughing of sense, nonsense makes a desperate effort to mine wisdom by venturing into the realm of the preter-verbal—a realm that leads to the grand golden gateway of silence.

Love and speech are, in essence, enemies. Speech is restless to encode, measure and judge all it sees by expression's yardstick. It is eager to arbitrate in love’s reign, to define, encode, and quantify. Love struggles to remain sovereign, to resist definition and to morph into ever unimagined shapes. Where love runs deep, it is seized by the desire to transcend speech; the one entity that keeps challenging its being and validity. 

Love’s best friend is silence, a state that reciprocates its vastness and amplitude. In silence, love secures safety and permanence. Beyond speech, it defies time and embraces the bliss of eternity. But true silence being a language few humans are versed in, in the absence of speech, love fears oblivion and risks abandonment. Hence, the functionality of nonsense in love.

Nonsense while giving in to speech, also transcends it by disrupting conventional structures of meaning, making speech a vessel of randomness, circumlocution, surprise and perpetual novelty. Thus, the inane puns, innuendoes, paradoxes and oxymorons of love help build, word by word, a church of meaning that only the initiated can find their way into (not necessarily through).

I have scripted entire encyclopaedias of nonsense in love and in shifting registers. In love, I am sage and jester, empress and slave, beloved and spurned. I am ornithologist, anthropologist, entomologist and dragonologist all at once, ever enough and never final. I shape-shift in love, become by turns giant and dwarf, hopeful and forlorn, flower and bee. Magic and faith, too, are a kind of nonsense and so, in love, are we.

(Basudhara Roy teaches English at Karim City College, Jamshedpur, and is the author of four collections of poems, the latest being A Blur of a Woman)