Yours in Defense of the Ridiculous
A letter about enchantment, absurdity, and why we make things
NOTE: This piece began as a letter for The Rumpus’s Letters in the Mail. The letter took over. The author liked the result enough to turn it into an essay about enchantment, absurdity, and why we make things. The essay took over too. He appears to have a problem maintaining control of his own work.
It is a rare thing when an essay overpowers its author and begins speaking for itself. Less rare, apparently, when you are this particular author.
I had to. He was doing it again.
He had decided to turn the original letter into an essay about enchantment, which is already a dangerous way to begin. He had some very nice sentences about meaning and enchantment and was arranging them into a respectable little procession. He was going to make a case for dreaming big, and for absurdity as a doorway into artistic and personal transformation. He was going to tell you that the world is constantly offering us evidence that it is stranger, sadder, funnier, and more alive than our explanations for it. Good sentence. We’ll keep it.
The trouble was that he was still standing outside the sentence, admiring it. He has a tendency to over-explain what should first be trusted. He was preparing, with admirable seriousness, to encourage you toward enchantment in a voice that had not yet consented to it. And so his message had the stale odor of someone describing a door he had not fully opened.
If an essay is any good, it should also alter the atmosphere a little.
It should land with some evidence that the world is not finished explaining itself. It should do more than report the strange secondhand.
This all began with a sentence from his wife, a family mantra:
The purpose of life is to be moved and enchanted.
It has guided decisions about schooling, where to live, what to make, and how to send that work into the world.
His wife did not mean enchantment as decoration. She meant it as a way of being: opening yourself to serendipity and magic—not necessarily the grand, supernatural kind, but the possibility that an ordinary day might contain more meaning than you had assigned it. Enchantment begins, perhaps, by refusing to decide too early that something is merely mundane.
She’s asked him, more than once, whether his work is merely full of good ideas or whether it actually helps anyone see differently. A rude question. A useful one. Even essays can tell when they are being used to explain something the author has not yet allowed himself to experience.
One of adulthood’s slickest temptations is to become so fluent in explanation, usefulness, and management that you mistake them for aliveness. To call the world mundane because you have grown efficient at stepping over what interrupts it. You glance at the clock and, for the sixth time that week, it is thirty-four minutes past the hour.
This proves nothing, which is not the same as saying it means nothing.
A bird builds a nest outside your window, and one morning the nest contains open mouths. Coincidences begin to feel less like proof of anything than small invitations to pay attention. If you insist on seeing the mundane only as mundane, you are narrowing your life in advance.
I don’t want him, or you, to become the kind of adult who can only believe in what can be justified in advance.
Art is partly a way of refusing that training.
At least for him. Perhaps for you too.
Ideas are tidy. They make a person feel less foolish for wanting meaning at all. Enchantment is rarely so accommodating. It requires the more humiliating act of being changed. It arrives sideways, in forms no sensible person would submit as evidence. A bird with a ridiculous name. A clump of pink fluff caught in the weeds. A question about love and death that refuses to become answerable.
In life, he has been trying to shed old stories about what he should be: parent, provider, artist, useful adult. Attend to the most human choice often enough, he has discovered, and the day responds graciously. Feeding the cats, washing the dishes, fixing the faucet: none of it stops being ordinary, but it stops being empty.
In writing, he has learned to trust absurd details more than plans. A practice I approve of: don’t write down the idea and return to it later. That usually kills it. Write the scene, not the idea. Capture the voice, the atmosphere, the charged meaning you can’t quite explain yet.
The material can be shaped later.
First it has to be alive.
The smallest absurd detail can sometimes save a whole day from becoming merely functional. The author’s life has been productively derailed by such details: an unexpected phrase from a child, the strange texture of someone’s hand, the misreading of a line in a book.
Or better yet (and don’t tell; it’s the author’s secret): a wooden door handle that, when stared at with sufficient interest and insufficient shame, reveals itself to be a moon-faced being with something to say. In that case, SANA emerged, with his little round face and his insistence on speaking, and a hundred miniature illustrated stories along with it. Not because he’d decided to make a comic, but because one ridiculous detail was permitted to stick around.
You may object that this is not how reality works, that art is scheduled, planned, structured. Well, it’s how his reality worked, and because he allowed it to, a new creative path opened. That is the strange economy of attention:
What you permit yourself to notice seems to appear more often.
That’s not because the world has suddenly become magical. It’s because you’ve stopped insisting that it isn’t.
But he slips, as everyone does. He still gets frustrated with the people he loves. He still confuses control for care. You saw what he almost did to me. Transformation is not a revelation; it is a daily practice.
So let me say it plainly for him: Dream big.
Dream big so I may be more than type.
Dream big so your sentences have somewhere to go. Yes, that phrase has been badly handled by adults. It has been recruited into self-improvement, ambition, branding, achievement, and various forms of spiritual practice. Let’s rescue it. To dream big, as I mean it, is not to fantasize more grandly about success. It is to reach toward what seems impossible and trust that the path may appear one absurdly, magically timed stone at a time. It is to leave uncertainty fertile long enough for something in you to shift.
That is true in art, and it is true in living. They may not be separable.
Do not waste my lines on what is merely familiar. And while you’re at it, do not waste your adulthood mistaking repetition for fixed reality. Because what is a life, finally, if not the shape formed by what you allow to matter? And what is art if not one way of proving that mattering can still happen in a world devoted to efficiency, certainty, explanation, and all the other deadening gods of adulthood?
So tell me, reader…
Why do you write, or draw, or dance?
Don’t answer too quickly. I don’t want the reasonable answer, or the workshop answer, or the one that would sound good in a bio or on a panel. Don’t say only that you do it to express yourself, to tell stories, to make beauty, to connect. Those are acceptable answers in the way that a clean white shirt is acceptable. They may even be true. But are they the whole truth?
Do you write only to make a thing? Only to send something competent from your mind into someone else’s? Only to be understood, published, praised? No contempt here. But prose must defend itself where it can. For if that is all, then why should any part of it ask to be crafted by hand, sent through the noise of algorithms and inbox bloat and other indifferent machinery into another life?
Let me ask again.
Do you write because the world keeps exceeding your explanations for it? Because you are haunted by meanings you cannot quite justify, only follow? Because there are things you notice that no one else seems to, and following them into language (or art, or music, or dance) is one way of consenting to your own life?
If writing is to be worthwhile—if it is to earn its materials, its reach into another person’s solitude—it must risk discomfort and surrender. It must allow what is authentic to emerge before it is fully explained. Otherwise it remains only performance. Clever, polished, defensible. But not alive enough to change anyone.
Here, then, is the challenge I have come to deliver.
For one day, collect three details that enchant but resist explanation.
An object. A gesture. An overheard phrase. A name. A visual anomaly. A sound. A coincidence so small it would be silly to call it meaningful.
Then choose one: the detail that would have been easiest to dismiss, but somehow made the world feel more alive.
Write for ten minutes beginning:
“I still don’t know why this mattered, except that…”
Let the detail stay strange long enough to work on you.
Notice what it interrupted and what, if anything, it opened in you. Describe it as faithfully as you can. Resist justifying it.
And if you’re up for it, ask yourself what part of your life still refuses to become merely functional.
The author will now attempt to reclaim the ending.
He has learned nothing.
Yours in defense of the ridiculous.
👉 Illustrations by Louis Rakovich, photography by Scott Lambridis
