The World is Absurd

Make like monkeys and throw shit

Last autumn I was having dinner with a wonderful collection of people, many of whom were artists, and we got onto the topic of Guy Fawkes night in the UK. For those of you who don’t know, November 5th is one of the few remaining carnivals in the United Kingdom, celebrating the spoiled Gunpowder plot of 1605 to blow up the houses of parliament. Britons spill out into the evening, light fireworks, and gather around huge bonfires, upon which the body of Guy Fawkes burns. 

Remember, remember 
The 5th of November,
Gun powder, treason and plot.

I remember doing it as a child and finding the process quite frightening. I wasn’t timorous, and enjoyed both fireworks and fire, but there was something about the crowd, the homogeneity, the repetitiveness of the ritual, that upset me. Some of that is just my own idiosyncratic suspicion of tradition. Yet, as I get older, it is ever-more obvious and saddening why the one British carnival promoted in British culture is the one which mocks and kills the rebels. Don’t get me wrong, good old Guy and his merry band of Catholic insurgents aren’t to my political taste – their endgame was to restore a Catholic to the throne. Nonetheless, carnivals are meant to be an exercise in imagination in which we envision new possibilities, a break in the status quo, an evening or a week when we throw out the rules and make believe the world anew. How sad that the one national carnival we have left in the UK is the one in which the ultimate power of the authority is celebrated as uninterrupted, unquestionable, and unstoppable.

We had a fascinating conversation that night about carnivals and their history in British tradition as spaces of creativity, political reorganisation, comedy and transgression. I learned that carnival is where new ideas are often tried out, and, importantly, a stage upon which the people can take stock of and mock power. Comedy is a key political tool, and a critical component of life itself, as Jay Griffiths writes in her book, Wild. Is not life some big cosmic joke? Consciousness: oops. Comedy is the path to subverting and playing and deconstructing and connecting. Levity is the grace by which we change the world collectively. Political power pools in bellies of laughter where the strongman’s grip cannot reach. 

I think a lot about the power of absurdity, of the wink, of giggling in situations you’re not meant to laugh in, of admitting you don’t know a thing you’re meant to know, of laughing with such force that the foundations of our serious institutions shake. We grant authority by taking things seriously. We disempower them with laughter. Carnival was a way to bring power back to the land and the people, an absurd subversion of the norm to show that the way things can always be otherwise, and so we shouldn’t take the status quo too seriously, for nothing that is temporary is truly serious, and is not that the great joke we can all be in on together? 

Ah, but gravity, its seductive pull. Our leaders speak with gravitas, they hold the floor, with ideas that hold weight. That’s all very well—but what if they’re wrong? And how do we test these things that may be wrong? And how do we wiggle out of the grip of what might be wrong? What keeps us safe in such a grave world? Levity.

I started thinking about all of this when an ex-boyfriend said: “Imagine if someone just got a drone, hung an empty cardboard box off of it with the word BOMB written on the box. Imagine they flew that drone into an oil rig. They wouldn’t damage a thing, nobody would be harmed, but they would trigger the security protocols of the oil rig and likely shut production down for a day. Imagine doing that over and over again.”

So I did. And I tried to imagine other little absurdist acts—punctuations of levity—that the system cannot cope with because they’re not playing by the rules, that the system then mobilises to destroy, because it is the system that is easily threatened, because it is the system that is truly absurd, not the imaginations of the people. I imagined (and tried to pitch) creating an enormous private wealth fund to buy key assets in the fossil fuel industry and take them offline, throwing the system into chaos. We see other little acts of absurdity every day: people using laser pointers, which normally entertain cats, to confuse attack drones, or climbing up trees so they can’t be cut down. These acts are so often communal. Remember when a community in Glasgow surrounded a police van that was deporting their neighbour until they let him go? These self-organised anti-raid groups are now stopping the British governments plans to deport people to Rwanda. 

It’s fascinating to see just how easily the system is threatened. Taylor Swift is suing the teen who programmed a bot to tweet out every time her private jet flies. Elon Musk is banning accounts that criticise him. Putin is killing his opponents. Power rigs the game – so what’s the point in rules?

There’s another Twitter bot that tweets every time Nancy Pelosi makes a trade because she earns tens of millions on the stock market thanks to her inside knowledge. Its followers make the same trades she does and earn a fortune. It’s absurd and I love it—a code carnival causing chaos. Good.

There are so many things to be serious about, that we need to fight against. There is justice to prevail. But there are others that we should mock rather than engage in. I’m always amazed when I hear of someone becoming a first-time buyer in the UK’s house market because, to me, the house prices don’t make sense. A bunch of bricks, wood, glass and wiring is simply not worth 500k, I don’t care where it is. It’s absurd! But enough people take it seriously that the financialisation trend continues. In a kind of personal carnival, I survived 2023 in the gift economy, going between homes that were graciously offered to me on a temporary basis. It was absurd and I loved it. 

I find my work to be pretty absurd. I am thoroughly de-institutionalised and under-qualified, yet share stages with experts because increasingly I’m classed as one. On what? Hard to say: Journalism? The intersection of ecology-economy-energy? Narrative? Framing? No, I’m not an expert on any one of those things, but I’m good at finding the seams where things meet and tracing those lines to get a feel for the big picture. I’m all gut instinct in a world of details; like a fool in a room full of adults asking “but why?” except this fool is in on the joke and is inviting you to carnival. 

That was the role of the fool: to be the absurd mirror, the slippery other, the levity in a world of gravity. And I think we need more of it. More of it would look like admitting when we’re wrong, or asking obvious questions (which so often reveal non-obvious answers!), or challenging the famous person because you don’t know they’re famous, you just know they’re talking shit. Absurdity is about asking why we’re doing what we’re doing whilst doing something differently. It’s about dancing in the streets and wearing masks and writing songs and getting drunk and mocking the King and shagging the Duke and undermining the Law and howling at the moon. That’s the greatest absurdity in today’s world; acting like we all have a place, and that none of us is better than the other. So really, carnival is not absurd at all. It’s as natural as laughter.

It’s this other world that’s really absurd, and reacting to it normally has people labelled crazy—really! Just look at modernity’s “mental health crisis”! All these poor people, especially our youth, are getting diagnosed with anxiety and depression as if there’s something wrong with them, when the reality is anxiety and depression are rational reactions to the state of the world. I mean, just think about depression, to be depressed: it’s having the full weight of gravity on your back, pulling you down.

This world is so absurd that we’re meant to take the people who take it seriously, seriously. And that’s such an impossible task, because we all know it’s not true, that we’re making ourselves sick trying to make it make sense. Well, I suggest we make like monkeys and throw shit at it because that’s what it deserves, not our serious considerations. Here’s some laughter, choke on it if you want. 

When was the last time you laughed til you wept, alone? Never. You can tell a joke with one tongue but there’s a reason we have two ears. We can only do this together because we can only laugh together, and we must learn to laugh because we can’t disempower an authority we take seriously. Laughter transforms a crowd into a “we”, a street into a stage, a village into a parliament. Laughter fills our bellies when power raids our homes; laughter makes light so we can face our graves; laughter thanks the jester who winks with the cosmos.

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