Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously.
Wise words by Noam Chomsky? Maybe not exactly. But I wonder what has sparked before your eyes and inside your mind when you first bump into this sentence.
Can something be both colorless and green at the same time? Can something sleep, and do so furiously? Can all of these qualities possibly be attributed to “ideas”?
With this sentence, you have actually just encountered a flagship of the field of syntax in linguistics. Noam Chomsky used this phrase to demonstrate that a sentence can be perfectly correct in its grammar while making little or no logical sense at all. However, I have always found myself thinking about it beyond its syntactic purpose.
More or less, we expect everything we do or encounter to carry some degree of logical and structural coherence. We tend to look for things that fit together, make sense, and belong together. We tend to consider things that fit into our ready-made intellectual systems more legitimate, often without questioning them too much.
But perhaps coherence does not always have to mean similarity or consistency. As this sentence suggests, something can contain apparent ambiguity, opposition, or even contradiction, and still form a whole of its own.
Maybe this is what has always intrigued me about it. Colorless and green seem to cancel each other out. Sleep and furiously do not seem to belong to the same action. And yet, put them together, and we recognize a sentence. Not a traditionally sensible one, perhaps, but a sentence nonetheless. The contradictions do not prevent the words from forming something whole.
That made me think about how often we expect the things around us to be compatible before we allow them to belong together. We like our ideas to be coherent, our arguments to be well-structured, our choices to make sense. We polish them, arrange them, and make sure nothing seems out of place. Maybe because we carry the silent conscious fear of being undermined or criticized for our self-expression.
But does something really become more meaningful simply because all its pieces agree with one another?
And on the other hand, does something become less meaningful when they do not? Who, or what, decides the extent of meaningfulness? At what point does something become absolute nonsense?
An idea does not necessarily have to dress in haute couture, wear expensive perfume, and present itself impeccably to be valuable. It may arrive a little untidy. It may contradict itself somewhere along the way. It may not know exactly how to introduce itself, or fit neatly into the structure we were expecting. That does not necessarily make what it carries any less worth considering.
I find myself going back and forth between these two thoughts without knowing where one ends and the other begins.
We seem to have a strong preference for things that match. We call them coherent, consistent, logical. We often treat these qualities almost as proof that something belongs together.
But Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously does something rather odd with that expectation. Its elements contradict one another, and yet the contradiction does not destroy the whole. It is, in a way, precisely what makes the sentence what it is.
So, I start wondering whether we sometimes mistake agreement for coherence.
Whether things really need to resemble one another, support one another, or even make sense beside one another in order to form something meaningful.
I don’t know if they do.
The more I think about it, the more this starts to feel a little like asking whether the chicken came before the egg. If I insist on finding which one comes first, I am already assuming that there has to be a first one.
Perhaps I am doing something similar here, trying to decide what makes a whole coherent when the very things that make it up may not have much in common at all.
And maybe that is why I keep coming back to this sentence occasionally.
Not because it makes sense, or nonsense. Quite the opposite.
It doesn’t, and yet it holds together.
It reminds me, sometimes, that perhaps we can allow something to exist without putting too much pressure on ourselves to attribute some grand, almost biblical meaning to it. What seems to neutralize or diminish meaning when placed together may, in fact, create an unexpected harmony that jiggles a corner of our minds.
Sometimes a structure is enough. Sometimes an ambiguity is enough. Sometimes none of it is enough. Or sometimes everything is enough.
What decides what, anyway?
Maybe we sometimes feel unsatisfied because we do not dare to create our own colorless green ideas. We dismiss the possibility that it is up to us to decide that our ideas can sleep in a furious way.
I don’t know.
It seems to me that we are too invested in labeling everything, even our way of thinking. We want to know where something belongs before allowing ourselves to see what it might become. We keep trying to place things inside familiar structures, stuffing them with what we already recognize as consistent ideas.
But perhaps the interesting part is what happens when something does not quite fit.
It may be, for you, a serene uproar, dull neon yellow, a stupid genius idea, the silent conscious fear I mentioned above, or maybe sweet-chili sauce. The last one does not contradict itself in your mind because, in some cultures, people dared to put those things together and it worked out perfectly fine.
I think one way or another, everyone has a system, a structure of their own. But we may miss the plot twist by focusing too much on filling that structure with what we already know as consistent.
Maybe we just need to let our ideas flow without constantly considering whether they carry some universal meaning. And perhaps we should ask: meaning according to what, or whom?
At some point, especially when we are trying to know ourselves or create a space that reflects us, we may need to become our own first expert.
Whatever we do or intend to create does not necessarily have to produce a “universal for others” outcome. It may be applauded, but perhaps part of that applause comes simply from our senses becoming accustomed to it. We grow familiar with certain forms, certain structures, certain ways of making sense.
I think sometimes we should question the universe inside us, and the universality we keep trying to produce from it.
Maybe your universe wants to do something not out of the box, but in the corner of the box. Or even in front of the box.
There is something comforting in the idea that not everything has to become a universally recognizable shape before it is allowed to exist.
I believe it is important to let something exist just for our own sake. And colorless green ideas show that perhaps it can take only one sentence to achieve that.
We should allow ourselves to be, simply for the sake of being. To exist without immediately asking what that existence is supposed to mean.
There must be more than coherence, biblical meaning, and flawless construction in what we aim to give life to, utter, create, or simply let rest inside a corner of our mind.
Anything and everything is fine. What matters most, perhaps, is to pull up a chair for yourself without being too busy with universal expectations.
There must be more than outer universality.
We should not give up discovering the universe we carry simply by existing. Respecting that “self-universality” may eventually let us decorate the corners of that box. Maybe there will be no box in the future, but a circle, a hexagon, or something we have not named yet.
And perhaps it is not “who knows?” anymore, but “who decides to do that?”
There is something oddly satisfying about that contradiction. It makes me wonder how many things we might be trying too hard to make fit, simply because we have learned to associate harmony with agreement.
Maybe they can contradict each other and still belong to the same whole.
Maybe we do not always need to resolve the contradiction for the whole to remain intact.
Or maybe I am just giving a rather elaborate meaning to a sentence about colorless green ideas sleeping furiously.
I suppose I don’t mind either way.
Colorless green ideas can sleep furiously, or even furiously green ideas can sleep colorlessly.
So, what about your ideas? Would you bring green and colorless together? Would you let something sleep furiously?
Up to you.
Artwork: Aurora Borealis, Frederic Edwin Church
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