Psychedelic Mr Claus

Years ago when I was a graduate student in Oriental Studies, I had a professor who was the epitome of academic eccentricity. E B was a philologist: he worked with words, a lot of them – Cherokee, old French, Hindi, Sanskrit and more. Word play was an obsession, and he often set his word games to music, composing such ditties as 'The Brain Behind the Face', 'Rig Veda X. 129' and 'On First Looking into Whitney's [Sanskrit] Grammar'. More importantly, one never knew what he would say or do next. His way of bringing a class to attention was to shout in a stentorian voice something so outrageous and irrelevant to what we were doing that we would gasp at first, but in the end almost always laugh. Instead of whisking us through a particular Sanskrit paradigm he would ask, for instance: Who watched the Johnny Carson show last night? Then there would ensue a long commentary not only on Mr Carson, but also a thorough examination of the state of American popular culture.

It was, I suppose, a kind of Zen that E B was practicing. He wanted to startle the student into some form of realisation that what we often do is absurd, and that too often we pursue the absurd as if it is intrinsically worthwhile. Far too often, E B let the details of philology overwhelm any consideration of theory and method; the reverse was also true in his case. But sometimes the juxtaposition of two seemingly unrelated things can lead to a new level of understanding. E B knew this well: put two unrelated things – say, Sanskrit grammar and a talk-show host – and no one can predict the result. Perhaps we can call this E B's proto-chaos theory.