You know that new term, “ear worm?” I guess it’s a song that gets stuck on your mind. I get word worms – words that won’t go away. I’ve had Irony on my mind all day. It’s ironic that I’m not entirely sure what it means, though it seems to inform a great deal of my existential perspective.

I looked it up, and that’s not much help. I guess we know it when we see it. Like Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Romeo & Juliet, the deafness of Beethoven. And of course we’re hearing stories of soldiers surviving the dangers of Iraq, only to die in a traffic accident while home on leave.

OK. I’ll give you ironic. Writing is ironic. We who do this throw our best hours of vision and skill into choosing the best words and the best order of them, in the belief they will stand and survive. Then what do we do? We carry them like water in a bucket to the end of the wharf, and heave them into the cold and truculent sea.

Google is searching eight billion Web pages. Have you been in a Barnes & Noble lately? Am I wrong, or is it an ocean of paper and ink, uniform and rolling in gray distances? … Oh, I know! It’s like the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, when the Ark of the Covenant is nailed up in a plain box and trucked away into that vast warehouse.

“The saint proves his vision by stepping cheerfully into the fires. The poet, somewhat less spectacularly, proves his vision by submitting it to the fires of irony, in the hope that the fires will refine it. In other words, the poet wishes to indicate that his vision has been earned, that it can survive reference to the contradictions of experience.”

-Robert Penn Warren

So why do we do it? It’s a psychic itch that’s gotta be scratched. It’s a message in a bottle, dispatched in the hope of finding a commonality of mind or heart. It’s the threadbare faith that someone else out there has seen the ecstatic dance of eucalyptus leaves, and walked on into the evening overjoyed.

And see, that’s ironic: I knew what it meant all along.