One of my favorite games to play with the Internet is to take whole sentences or phrases from poems or random places and put them between quotation marks for my buddies over at Google. For instance, type in this line from an Ern Malley poem (I had often, cowled in the slumberous heavy air) and you get some articles about the poet, or rather, his non-existence, and one link to some lecture notes on Wittgenstein which include a reference to the Malley poem because it is a brilliant hoax—literal nonsense is encoded in something that nonetheless contains enough poetic sense to parse.

Of course, literal nonsense is abundant in a lot of modern poetry (what does ~~~ and swirled justly souls of flower strike the air in utterable coolness deeds of green thrilling light with thinning newfragile yellows ~~~ mean aside from the tonality it evokes?), which is probably precisely the attitude that McAuley and Stewart were hoping to lampoon.

If cultures indeed go through necessary movements, a mark of that necessity is that the satires of reactionaries are eventually seen without irony. And this is the movement: we can no longer escape the fact that ever-increasing amounts of agency are necessary for us to assemble meaning out of experience, and thus our ordinary experiences are no longer of the effects of meaning, nor of meaning in the abstract, but of the great labor itself—how one culls the sound of rain from ‘swirled justly souls’, or remembers the reasons for an absent love day after day.

Perhaps, Mr Wittgenstein, there is no activity which is not associated with the sensation of meaning, or at least the nearness of its touch.