![]() ![]() That said, Cynthia Rose (or Prince) adds a proviso: you’ll understand, maybe. Lear would have enjoyed this food for thought-not least the idea that understanding can come from setting your mind free, not simply setting it to work. It’s not the only occasion in Sign o’ the Times that things turn irrational in “Starfish and Coffee,” when Cynthia Rose is asked what she’s had for breakfast, back comes the reply: Lear’s poem starts up as Table announces his wish to go for a stroll Chair exclaims, “How foolishly you talk, When you know we cannot walk!” but Table explains that they both have legs, so off for a walk they go, before returning home to celebrate (they “danced upon their heads / Till they toddled to their beds”). rap Edward Lear’s poem “The Table and the Chair” in time to the music. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, nonsense signals “absence of rationality or meaning.” In the middle of “It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night,” though, Prince makes it very clear that he’s really into nonsense suddenly, out of nowhere, he has Sheila E. It might be ventured that Prince is talking nonsense. On Sign o’ the Times, Prince ends that ridiculously danceable track, “It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night”, with the words “Everybody, groove,” pauses a second, and then closes by elongating one word more: “Confuuuuuuuuuusion.” To groove is to get confused, to know that knowledge isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, to long for an art (and a life) that can give us respite from reason. ![]() I’m going to a dance.” One feels that it wasn’t a mistake to go to that dance-not least because dancing isn’t entirely rational. Faced by the perfectly rational idea that one knows the difference between “successful” and “unsuccessful” enterprises, Anton Chekhov once wrote to a friend: “Are you successful or aren’t you? What about me? What about Napoleon? One would need to be a god to distinguish successful from unsuccessful people without making mistakes. But, if rationality is categorical, sometimes it feels as though categories may be a category error. Among other things, rationality is the ability to make distinctions, to tell one thing from another, to know that x is not y.
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