“In literature it is only necessary to outline the steps. Let the people dance!” (Anthony Kerrigan, Introduction to Ficciones, 10).

Sometimes I feel as though people read way too much into things. I’ve always had the thought, “what if the authors really didn’t mean anything when they wrote it? What if they just wanted to watch everyone else interpret meaning into a meaningless story, poem, etc.?” This quote feels exactly like that to me…

The authors can make up whatever “steps” they want! Make it as ridiculous and impossible as they want! They don’t have to actually dance the dance. They get to watch us as we awkwardly try to follow in their written footsteps.

For example, I found this on-line:

A Meaningless Poem

Sounds
When they follow you like dogs
In the forest of silence,
Itch-afflicted, skeletal loneliness
When it litters
Offspring of dreams
In shallow ponds of evenings;
The crows perched
On branches of the sun
Then fly away. 

By Naseer Ahmed Nasir

As I started reading it I just thought of how ridiculous it was. It makes absolutely no sense! But then somewhere deep inside my humanities brain there is a voice that says that there has to be some sort of meaning in this. It can’t really be meaningless! That has meaning in and of itself, right? The fact that it’s supposed to have no meaning? But then my mind again goes to the little detail that the author just won by getting me to think that at all; he got to watch me dance his nonsense dance right in front of him! How embarrassing…

So can there truly be something that has no meaning? Are our minds so intent on putting a label on everything that we can never let something just be? And if so, why do we have to give it meaning? And can there ever be just one “right” meaning?