On Irrelevance: Part III

Relevant writers have their place, to be sure. But relevance seems to hold a despotic ascendancy these days—everybody wants to be relevant; everybody wants everybody else to be relevant. Relevance is not the only virtue! Irrelevance is also a virtue! The sun is not only a vector of cancer and vitamin D; the sun also makes my Pomeranian twirl. Here is a list of a few of my favorite irrelevant writers:

Hafiz. There were probably current issues in fourteenth century Persia. A writer could have been relevant even then. However, Hafiz wrote poems about swapping jokes with the sun, the universe being a tambourine, rabbits playing cymbals, planets going crazy. Because of his profoundly absurd topics, Hafiz is now as irrelevant as ever. Hafiz is timelessly irrelevant. Here is part of a Hafiz poem,which appears to describe his own writing process:

The mule I sit on while I recite

Starts off in one direction

But then gets drunk

And lost in 

Heaven.

Ovid. A charming girl turns into a charming cow; her miserably immortal father laments: “For me death cannot end my woes. Sad bane to be a god! The gates of death are shut; my grief endures for evermore.” (A.D Melville translation); All the cow can do is moo. Someone turns into an owl; someone turns into a mint plant. The real world is not this volatile. As for the origin of the sirens: they had been regular people but were granted feathers and feet of birds after they prayed for wings with which to go questing for Proserpine. Sirens are considered irrelevant today except as employed by Emergency Management Agencies to disseminate weather awareness.

God. Although for thirty-five chapters Job and his friends maintain a conversation relevant to the situation at hand—do humans or do humans not deserve the pain they suffer?—the last four chapters of the discussion are given over to an irrelevant speaker. God does not address the problem of suffering but rattles off references to “the treasures of the snow” and “the springs of the sea,” and “the sweet influences of Pleiades” and the thunder and lightning and hawks and ostriches and wild donkeys and the behemoth (perhaps a hippopotamus)—“Look at the behemoth, which I made along with you.” And unicorns (in the King James Version): “Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee, or abide by thy crib? Canst thou bind the unicorn with his band in the furrow? Or will he harrow the valleys after thee?” How enchantingly irrelevant, for God to ask serious theologians if they have unicorns plowing their fields.

The Anonymous Author of The Cloud of Unknowing. First of all, is there anything more irrelevant than anonymity? Furthermore, this fourteenth-century mystical Englishperson directs you, the reader, to pursue the absence of knowledge, to “concern yourself with no creature whether material or spiritual nor with their situation and doings whether good or ill,” to pitch all of your concerns into the Cloud of Forgetting and to pitch yourself into the Cloud of Unknowing and to make your home there. Irrelevant writers beget irrelevant readers.

Lewis Carroll. Relevance is relative. What is relevant to a little English girl (schoolroom society, impressive vocabulary, simple rules to avoid getting poisoned, being smarter than Mabel) may not be relevant to a crab or a walrus or an insane duchess. The atmosphere of Wonderland starts to scramble Alice’s relevant mind, turning her useful, didactic poems into nonsense: “How doth the little crocodile / Improve his shining tail.” Alice in Wonderland can show you, too, how to live so as to free yourself from the tyrannical hold of relevance. If you find yourself obsessively preoccupied with identity, technology, body politics, purchasing power, things like that, start a conversation with an eaglet, a duck, and a lory; attend a tea party with a dormouse, a hare, and a mad person; go croqueting with an unmanageable flamingo as your mallet. This will make a hash of your relevance, for it will not even register with your interlocutors. Or if it does they will violently misinterpret it.

“If everybody minded their own business,” the Duchess said in a hoarse growl, “the world would go round a deal faster than it does.”

“Which would not be an advantage,” said Alice, who felt very glad to get an opportunity of showing off a little of her knowledge. “Just think of what work it would make with the day and night! You see the earth takes twenty-four hours to turn round on its axis—”

“Talking of axes,” said the Duchess, “chop off her head!”