Edward Lear May 12 1812–January 29 1888
Alok Bhalla
I
I
n Plato’s Symposium, a dialogue about love and comedy, virtue and duty, beauty and truth, Socrates provocatively declares at the end, as cups of wine overflow, that the genius of comedy is the same as the genius of tragedy. He adds that no one who has spoken before him has noticed that both the genres were inspired by the universal human desire to lead an honourable life that could be classified as ‘good’ Before this profoundly suggestive assertion can be challenged by the great comic playwright, Aristophanes and others, the informal symposium is disrupted by revelers from the street, and the discussants are so drunk that their speech becomes slurred and they fall asleep. But Socrates’s contention underlies the fact that human conduct in any society is always an ambiguous mix of good and evil, self-interest and fear, and is only seemingly conducted on firmly established ethical principles that are impervious to life’s contingencies. Plato’s report about the discussion on comedy remains sadly inconclusive and Aristophanes in a play suggests that the proper place for Socratic dialogues is in the clouds!
As always, Socratic ambiguities not only make our literary classifications unstable, but also destabilise the certainties of our inherited codes of conduct, social hierarchies and religious assumptions. It is uncanny that Socrates’ understanding of what causes panic or helps us to laugh, makes the ordinary world of words and gestures in daily life seem strange and unfamiliar.
We begin to see how quickly the comedy of love and sexuality, which is so crucial to replenish any society and helps us look to the future of peace with unselfconscious optimism, can in an instant turn into tragedies of jealous rage, moral obtuseness and war. We begin to wonder if our life is always lived at the edge of an abyss; that any moment of our ordinary day can turn into a nightmare; that our next step can result in a grievous fall into sorrow.
What then is the difference between the daily comedies of our survival and the frequent disasters of life that inevitably await us? The line of argument in the Symposium, which is frequently interrupted by hilarity and distracted by myths, suggests that, while tragedy provokes pity for those who suffer and fear for their survival, comedy offers consolation and a promise that life’s energies will be renewed and the human psyche healed. If tragedy forces us to look at our harsh and unrelenting world through a glass darkly, the Sophia of comedy leads us along a strange and wondrous adventure where we rediscover our reflective and empathetic imagination. Of course, as Socrates suggests, it is not as if the thrall of death is lifted over comedy, but it does enable us, however momentarily, to live as if our lives are suffused with caritas or compassion.
There is another reason why the Socratic assertion about the genius of comedy and of tragedy is compelling. The narrative structure of both is similar. Classical comedy and tragedy begin by asking why a social, ethical or political order is either corrupt or dangerously uncreative; why the king is physically deformed, the orchard is neglected, the parents see children as a threat, the truth-teller is a fool, the priest is a hypocritical idiot or sexual joy is damned as sin. What follows is a struggle (agon) in time to find a way out of political, ethical or social blankness and reestablish a less threatened or threatening order. Comedy ends well as it helps the repressed, the young and the good to break through the mind’s opacity and the heart’s hardness to lead a more joyous life; tragedy leaves the characters bewildered among the survivors of genocidal wars or moral carnage, wondering if anyone can ever build a home for the disenchanted mind or have the courage to love again.
Nonsense verse neither has the ambition of classical tragedy to challenge fate and the gods nor the urge to reach for transcendental truths. Unlike tragedy, it suggests that what is crucial and in need of intense effort for a tragic writer is precisely what leads to distortions in our lives and is the cause of devastation. And unlike classical comedy, nonsense verse does not possess the intellectual or moral heft to speak on behalf of responsible social, moral, religious or familial institutions. Comedy is based on the assumption that the self and its morality always need a stable moral and social order within which the human potential can be fully realised. Nonsense poetry, on the other hand, does not claim the need for any anchorage in absolute morality or metaphysical authority. Because nonsense poetry imagines that the every person is self-reliant and self-authorising, it is episodic. Its characters have no chronologically linked story. They emerge from no past and promise nothing; they have no traditions to uphold and no heaven to look for. Since the presence of such persons is a threat to existing proprieties, in many nonsense verses, they are ‘smashed’ by the upholders of law and order:
There was an Old Man of Whitehaven,
Who danced a quadrille with a raven;
But they said, “It’s absurd
To encourage this bird!”
So they smashed that Old Man of Whitehaven!
Since nonsense poetry is neither analytic nor critical, satiric or moral, it occupies the small ambiguous or liminal space that separates tragedy from comedy. It can, given the circumstances and the times, slide towards the darker tones of tragic irony and sound demented like the Fool in Shakespeare, the narrator in Lewis Carroll’s, The Hunting of the Snark and the lunatic in Manto’s “Toba Tek Singh”. Or, it can move in the contrary direction and accept all the contingencies of life as nothing more than comedies of errors where the labours of love and life are never finally lost. When nonsense verse just turns away with comic abandon from the great world’s hierarchies and ambitions, and makes no earnest effort to claim a place in its important obligations and moral traditions, it begins to sound like a secular Jubilat; a collection of small fragments of songs that celebrate, for no reason at all, the presence of all things that either already exist, are imagined or are yet to be imagined in our earthly universe.
By making the world less serious, the comedy of nonsense verse demystifies those who claim glory and glamour; but by inviting the entire creation to be part of its joyous carnival, it also makes the earth we live on livelier and less burdensome. Its words issue no threats, its women jive with ducks, its men drink tea with owls, its characters are called Nannicantipot, its philosophers hold discourses on Hogamy Hatomy, its cats are the Napoleons of crime, its rhyming lines evoke strange nomadic sounds, and its spaces are open to strangest species that cheerfully hum, “Chippetty flip! Flippetty chip!/ My only name is the Srooobious Pip”. In our world where people are willing to believe any hateful rumour, it is a relief to read Gelett Burgess, a poet of nonsense verse truthfully declare:
I never saw a purple cow,
I never hope to see one;
But I can tell you, anyhow,
I’d rather see one than be one!
II
Edward Lear, an English poet, illustrator, and musician, was born on May 12, 1812 and died on January 29, 1888. He has an honoured place in the great comic tradition of writers of nonsense verse (Shakespeare, William Blake, Gelett Burgess, Rudyard Kipling, Christian Morgenstern, T. S. Eliot, Ogden Nash, W. H. Auden, Pablo Neruda, Dr. Seuss and many others) and painters of incongruous figures in gloriously inappropriate colours (Paul Klee, Juan Miro, Pablo Picasso, Edward Gorey and a range of brilliant illustrators). Lear was deeply influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution and the way in which it not only democratised the relation between the human and the kingdom of all sentient beings, but also brought to popular attention a world of infinite abundance. He may have helped John and Elizabeth Gould with their illustrations of Darwin’s Voyage of HMS Beagle and his paintings of South American parrots and macaws have often been compared to those of the great naturalist, John Audubon.
It gives me great pleasure to pay my small tribute in the month of May as part of the birthday celebrations of a man whose work has never failed to give me delight. My nonsense poems, inspired by Lear’s nonsense images, are as fragmentary, improvisatory, arbitrary and written for no reason at all; they have no moral to preach, no religious dogma to uphold, no moral end to achieve. They are written, as children sometimes say, ‘Just because…’ or ‘Just so…’ But they are written to unburden myself of acquired habits; to ‘unlearn’ old ways of seeing and then ‘learn’ to see them again.
I felt that I had to assert my absolute right to think about what is ‘important’ and free from what my ego earnestly desires; to turn away from institutional constraint, to push back against crowds armed with slogans of hate and murder who roam our streets; and to stop participating in our uncritical celebrity culture. Maybe, my ‘nonsense’ will prove infectious and direct my attention back to a more tolerant, sympathetic and kinder world; maybe, I can still be surprised by joy and join a new carnival of words as it comes dancing in…!
**
A Personal Homage to Edward Lear’s Birds and Nonsense Verses
A Good Man at a Conference of Birds
Drawing by Edward Lear
Imagine his delight when his nose grew long
And he found a place for a bird from Shillong
As his nose blazed bright like the sharpest wit
There was space for the gossiping birds to sit
Imagine his glee when the birds gave him wings
With fine feathery songs he so charmingly sings
He sang his songs, tapped his feet; dervishly free
He danced his dance in the shadow of the Bodhi tree.
Two Wise Old Monks: On a Drawing by Edward Lear
On twittering twilight nights when the moon stands still
He sits on a silver stile singing rum-tum-rum-te-tum-tum,
And waits for the frumious owl from the old sugar mill.
They chatter like two old monks sipping glasses of rum
About this, that and the other and what was never begun
And everything else that has lived and died under the sun.
A Writer’s Responsibility
Each morning before reading his paper under a mango tree
He offered the birds some tea and toasted bread for free
‘No it is not my karma or dharma, it is only toast and tea.
With the birds all around, I can endure reading the news,
Which is aflutter with the absurdest and loudest of views.’
So he was astonished when the Parliament of Owls resolved
That his morning ritual must include them too or be dissolved.
Since he knew that their demands were constitutionally just
He now has tea and toasted bread with night-owls at dusk.
A Young Woman’s Questions to Enrico Fermi
Drawing by Edward Lear
She could name each bird nesting on her bonnet
But trembled when she saw the trail of a comet.
She spoke seriously to babblers, ravens and larks
About Dark Holes, Fractals, Lasers and Quarks.
She was free from any taint of hypocrisy
And asked endless questions out of curiosity.
Impulsively, one day, she emailed Enrico Fermi
To ask him why space was so dark and empty;
And since he had lived for years in Los Alamos
Could he not estimate the size of the cosmos?
She was not surprised when Fermi clearly replied
‘You could never count the stars even if you tried.
They are like grinning cats in the wind who roam
Across the distant Milky Way in search of a home.
Why not, instead, write a fourteen-line sonnet
For those winged birds sitting on your bonnet!’
[A Note: The reference is to Enrico Fermi’s paradox that says that while there are billions of habitable planets in the Milky Way there is no evidence of life. There is a well-known story that, during a lunch-time in the summer of 1950 in Los Alamos conversation about faster-than-light travel and UFOs between Edward Teller, Herbert York and Emile Konopinski, Teller suddenly asked, ‘But where is everybody?’ This story is used in Richard Power’s brilliant novel Bewilderment (2021). The other reference is to my personal favourites: Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire cat, T. S. Eliot’s ‘Macavity: The Mystery Cat’ and Schrödinger’s cat that is ‘alive and dead’]
A Debate Between an Owl and a Philosopher about Ontology and Mythology
The debate began well past half-past-ten
Between seven larks, two owls, and a hen
The philosopher was inspired to join in too
When he heard an owl say, ‘Tu-whit-tu-whoo!
What is sung and what is seen,
What is now, is what has been,
That’s all we know and need to know.
What you don’t know, you don’t know!’
The philosopher was at his wits end in despair.
His voice was muffled by his beard and his hair.
‘I don’t know why birds with no shadows disappear,
Why rivers have no source; rocks no reason to appear.
If you don’t know what you don’t know, go read ontology,
Do not confuse these birds with myths and mythology.’
The larks slept, the hen snoozed, the owl sat still and stared
But before the night passed and the blue sky appeared
The owl called, ‘Tu-whit-tu-whoo, tu-whit-tu-whoo!
I don’t know what, I don’t know where or who.
What you don’t know, you don’t know,
But what I know, is what I know.’
All poems and text © Alok Bhalla
*****
Alok Bhalla is a literary critic and essayist, poet, translator and editor based in New Delhi, India. He is also Chair, Council of Advisors, The Beacon
Alok Bhalla in The Beacon
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