zen koans and the midnight gospel
I am a fan of the absurd. Always have been. As a kid, I loved weird, irreverent children’s shows. Adult Swim cartoons made me giggle well into my 20s. To this day, I rarely get tired of watching Eric Andre smash his desk, let alone wear a dog cone around his neck and pour fruit loops on his head.
My latest absurd joy came from Pendleton Ward: the creator of Adventure Time, a beautiful cult classic in its own right. Apparently Pendleton is a fan of comedian Duncan Trussell, and the two of them decided to create something at a whole new level of wacky brilliance: The Midnight Gospel.
It’s one part cartoon series, one part podcast, one part spiritual discourse, and it’s completely overwhelming. It’s almost as impossible to watch as it is impossible not to watch. Every time you pick up a thread of an idea, the show drops it. Yet somehow, deeper truths emerge gradually.
The characters in the show exist in a meta-dimension while their voices alternate from being in character to breaking the fourth wall. You think you’re watching a narrative when all of a sudden, you’re listening to the voice actors in casual conversation while the characters continue to mouth along.
This all happens in the midst of a completely hypothetical world within another hypothetical world. Yet through those layers, the dialogue connects to our world, covering personal issues, philosophy, psychedelics, and meditation. At the same time, playful, raw animation unfolds at a pace that feels one step too quick to process. Feelings and ideas somehow emerge from the chaos in a beautiful, nonlinear way.
The Midnight Gospel connected with me so deeply that I found myself reflecting: Why do I love absurdity? I jokingly tell my wife that it’s one of the best ways to ‘turn my brain off’, but there’s something deeper going on.
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In 2018, I spent time working intensively on a zen koan practice. Koans are familiar in the popular culture (“if a tree falls in the forest…”), but only in a superficial way. They are known far and wide as a mysterious, esoteric practice, even among meditators.
Maybe the concept isn’t as foreign as you’d think. I’ve come to realize that, in many ways, the work of absurd creators like Eric Andre, Pendleton Ward, and Duncan Trussell is quite similar to the work of zen masters.
The hallmark of a powerful koan practice is that it short circuits your rational mind. As you try to sit with the question for days and weeks, your mind frantically tries to conceptualize and rationalize a correct answer.
Until it gives up.
For me, a whole new world began to emerge as my teacher lovingly rejected every answer I thought I had, forcing me to confront why I was even trying to answer in the first place. It gradually had the effect of loosening my grip on experience. I found it absolutely liberating to apply this lesson to life: to enjoy all the mysterious questions instead of desperately grilling them for answers.
The Midnight Gospel manages to strike a similar chord. You watch with the expectations of a typical TV series, so your mind starts by trying to figure out exactly what’s happening. But at some point, you realize it’s an impossible task. The plot goes all over the place, and your efforts to understand it feel in vain. There’s a lot to take in and nowhere to grab on.
If you drop that effort and give up the chase, but keep watching, something wonderful happens. You find yourself totally free of the need for explanation and plot, and you realize the absurdity isn’t random. Powerful feelings get through, especially as the last few episodes get surprisingly heartfelt.
It’s hard to describe the experience in prose, because it doesn’t make sense in any traditional way. Language is limited; no wonder zen masters write cryptic poetry about oxen and trees and seasons and moons. For the same reason, animation is the perfect medium for a metamodern video-koan like The Midnight Gospel.
As it turns out, concepts can point beyond concepts in animation just as well as they can in haiku. And it’s just as liberating. To let go of the rational mind, or in the words of another infamous absurdist, to “stop making sense”, is to acknowledge something profound: the world itself doesn’t make sense. And that’s more than okay; it’s beautiful.
Right now you are reading tiny lights arranged to form letters that correspond to the sequence of buttons I pressed on my keyboard far away. Yet you hear a voice in your head that maps on to the voice in mine as I type this. You are literally reading my mind right now. What could be more absurd? And if that’s not enough for you, did you know the Sahara desert has 3.9 stars on Google?
Keep asking why, and you’ll realize there’s absurdity all around you. You might as well get used to it.