Through the Looking Glass VI -- chapter 4: BLACK BIRD

The first half of Chapter 4 (to the completion of Dee's recitation) manages a balance of true nonsense for nonsense's sake ("The Walrus and the Carpenter," for example, though I think there's yet some revelatory nuggets here anyway) and what I believe to be truly symbolic, either as intended by Carroll or as subconscious manifestation.

What are your thoughts regarding:

• the music from the tree, which starts when Alice and the Tweedles begin their brief dance and ends abruptly upon their finishing;
• Alice's narration of her story to her sister;
• "The Walrus and the Carpenter":

– There is evidence that Carroll intended no symbolism whatsoeverby this poem, and despite uncounted readers' attempts, and that it’s indeed complete nonsense, for Carroll left the choice of the second character to Tenniel, based upon the latter's preference in drawing, betwixt a carpenter, a butterfly, and a baronet.

– (from Roger Green, via Martin Gardner) The operetta Alice, by Savile Clarke extends the ending of the poem with an additional stanza, thus:

        The Carpenter he ceased to sob;

                The Walrus ceased to weep;

        They’d finished all the oysters;

                And they laid them down to sleep—

        And of their craft and cruelty

                The punishment to reap.

        —at which point the ghosts of two oysters return and dance upon the chests of the gluttons.  According to Gardner “Carroll felt, and apparently audiences agreed with him, that this provided a more effective ending for the episode and also somewhat mollified oysters sympathizers among the spectators.”

The second half of the chapter is significantly darker, even if you are an oyster sympathizer.

1. Which is Alice more justified to "like": the Walrus, who felt sorry for the oysters; or the Carpenter, who ate fewer of them?
2. The Red King is Carroll.  Defend.
3. Dee and Dum are mirror opposites (enantiomorphs; examine Tenniel's illustration of Alice preparing the brothers for combat.  Except for the accoutrement, they are indeed mirror images of each other).  If one stood before a mirror, he would not see himself (so to speak), but his brother.  As we're dealing with reflections, what do you think of someone battling with his/her own reflection?
4. This chapter opens with a famous nursery rhyme, which turns out in the end of the chapter to be prophetic--i.e. the crow actually comes.  Does Carroll, perhaps passively, hope that his writing might be similarly prophetic?  Does he have any such hope?
5. Interesting bit of double symbolism with the crow: first, consider the quotation from Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat, below; second, the fact that in 585 B.C. the war between King Alyattes of Lydia and King Cyaxares of Medes ended--or was interrupted--by a total eclipse of the sun.  Tangentially, is there a connection between Alice's taking refuge under a tree and the somehow-avoidance of dark and death?

From Tortilla Flat:

        Where is Danny?  Lonely as smoke on a clear cold night, he drifts through Monterey in the evening.  To the post-office he goes, to the station, to the pool rooms on Alvarado Street, to the wharf where the black water mourns among the piles.  What is it, Danny?  What makes you feel this way?  Danny didn’t know.  There was an ache in his heart like the farewell to a dear woman; there was a vague sorrow in him like the despair of autumn.  He walked past the restaurants he used to smell with interest, and no appetite was aroused in him.  He walked by Madam Zuca’s great establishment, and exchanged no obscene jests with the girls in the windows.  Back to the wharf he went.  He leaned over the rail and looked into the deep, deep water.  Do you know, Danny, how the wine of your life is pouring into the fruit jars of the gods?  Do you see the procession of your days in the oily water among the piles?  He remained motionless, staring down.

        They were worried about him at Danny’s house, when it began to get dark.  The friends left the party and trotted down the hill into Monterey.  They asked, “Have you seen Danny?”

        “Yes, Danny walked by here an hour ago.  He walked slow.”

        Pilon and Pablo hunted together.  They traced their friend over the route he had followed, and at last they saw him, on the end of the dark pier.  He was lighted by a dim electric wharf light.  They hurried out to him.

        Pablo did not mention it then, but ever afterwards it was his custom, when Danny was mentioned, to describe what he saw as he and Pilon walked out on the wharf toward Danny.  “There he stood,” Pablo always said.  “I could just see him, leaning on the rail.  I looked at him, and then I saw something else.  At first it looked like a black cloud in the air over Danny’s head.  And then I saw it was a big black bird, as big as a man.  It hung in the air like a hawk over a rabbit hole.  I crossed myself and said two Hail Marys.  The bird was gone when we came to Danny.”

*

The Tweedles always frightened me more than anything else in the two books when I was a kid.

"NOSTALGIA FOR THE NIGHT"

Go here and watch the trailer:

http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/independent/nostalgiaforthelight/

This is real.  Of it I'd love to learn more, and hope to see the movie; but this isn't the point:

O, how reality is so infinitely more 
creative than our imaginations!

The Atacama, by virtue of its simple geography, juxtaposes--generating a reciprocal, implicit allegory between them--the efforts of scientists gazing upward to space to find the origins of life to those searching the sand, digging downward toward their lost family, which task and object become their locus of self-identity.

I challenge you to find a fictional metaphor as poignant and original.

A PERFECT SIMILE

From The Riddle of the Traveling Skull (again -- I can't help myself -- Is there no end to Keeler's brilliance?):

Context:
A character, blackmailed for murder, seeks refuge without possibility of extradition in a fictional South American country by the name of San Do Mar, with possible plans to stop briefly in New Orleans along the way to await news from his friend.  He's worried about cold feet and comments that, "Yes, I--I am in a nervous state.  I know it.  And once I'm 900 miles or so from my home town, I'll--I'll be in a worse state than ever.  I'm even likely to head back to--to Canada--instead of giving the police a chance to pull me off of some United Fruit Company liner," to which the protagonist and the man's friend, not to mention employee, Clay Calthorpe brilliant remarks:

"No.  You're done for--if you do that.  

Canada is as much a refuge for you as--as a 

Wisconsin lumber camp is for a lost virgin."


*

Through the Looking Glass V -- chapter 3: NAMES and NO NAMES

1. Curiously, there are no bishops in the book, except here, however, this very subtle mention: bishops were once calls elephants, and in Russian still are.
2. "'Oh, I liked it well enough--' (here came the favourite little toss of the head)...."
3. The chorus on the train--like a musical or a Greek play--interests me (not the "pounds a ____," but its very presence).  What do you make of it in the Alice context?
4. (The passengers in the train coach are full of puns and suggestions of once-famous puns and rhymes.)
5. An interesting combination: the gnat sighs, much like the lamenting wasp in the retracted "Wasp in a Wig" episode; there is a "shadow of a sigh" mentioned in the prefatory poem; trains are classic symbols of choice, change, and the relentless passage of time, and this train is also "traveling the wrong way" (a reversal, of course, but also a metaphor for Alice's growth away from Carroll); finally, remember that Alice, according to the conductor, has forgotten her name, which may correlate to the Red Queen's advice at the end of chapter 2.  The gnat: "I know you are a friend, a dear friend, and an old friend.  And you wo'n't hurt me, though I am an insect."
6. If Carroll is the Gnat (which, considering the conversation, is, I think, inevitable), and we extend the characteristic adult-ishness of Wonderland to Looking-Glass House, then perhaps the fact the insects' silence where Alice comes from works on a level beyond the simple fact that, duh, bugs don't talk, at least not to children; and this then emphasizes Carroll's grief, where Carroll is so fundamentally different than the rest of his caste.
7. The fantastic thing, at least for Carroll, of a secret place without names or labels is its utter anonymity.  Here, nothing would prevent him from approaching Alice, especially in such form as an innocent fawn.  Only on leaving would the fawn and the girl remember who they were and, as it happens and by necessary skittishness of the former, have to part (or is it not Carroll, but merely an analogue of the otherwise inevitable distance between human/wild animal and the impossibility of their continued relationship?).  Note also that in its very beginning Eden must not have had names either.  (This is another scene, so much like that of Alice's moment thinking favorably of the snow forever beyond the window, that touches my soul.)  From Martin Gardner:  The wood in which things have no name is in fact the universe itself, as it is apart from symbol-manipulating creatures who label portions of it because--as Alice earlier remarked with pragmatic wisdom-- "it's useful to the people that name them."  The realization that the world by itself contains no signs--that there is no connection whatever between things and their names except by way of the mind that finds the tags useful--is by no means a trivial philosophic insight.
8. All the issues with names, and Carroll's own split between writer Carroll and professor Dodgson!

"My First Sermon," by John Everett Millais

A CALL FOR IGNORANCE -- and the Gap Between Observation and Reality

From chapter 3 of Summerland, by Michael Chabon:

Jennifer T. Rideout had spent more time at the ruins of the Summerland Hotel than any other child of her generation.  It was a thirty-seven-minute hike, through woods, fields and the parking lot of the county dump, from the Rideout place to the beach.  There was no road you could take to get you there; there had never been a road to the hotel.  That was something she had always liked about the place.  In the old days, her uncle Mo had told her, everything came to the hotel by steamship: food, linens, fine ladies and gentlemen, mail, musicians, fireworks on the Fourth of July.  Though nowadays it was a popular spot for teenagers in the summer, on gray winter afternoons Hotel Beach could be pretty forlorn.  As if in payment for the miracle of its summer sunshine, in the winter it was tormented by rain and fog, hailstorms, icy rain.  Green stuff grew all over everything, this weird cross between algae and fungus and slime that settled like snow over the piles of drift and anything else that was made out of wood.  On a damp, chilly winter afternoon she often found herself to be the only human being on the whole Tooth.

Another thing she liked, besides the solitude, were the stories.  A boy from up by Kiwanis Beach wandered into one of the abandoned beach cabins at dusk and came out stark raving mad, having seen something he could never afterward describe.  Ghosts of the hotel dead, ghostly orchestras playing, phantoms doing the Lindy Hop in the light of the full moon.  Sometimes people felt someone touching their cheek, pinching their arm, even giving them a kick in the seat of the pants.  Girls had their skirts lifted, or found their hair tied in intractable knots.  Jennifer T. didn’t necessarily believe these legends.  But they gave Hotel Beach an atmosphere that she enjoyed.  Jennifer T. Rideout believed in magic, maybe even more than Ethan did—otherwise she could not have been a part of this story.  But she also believed that she had been born a hundred years too late to get even the faintest taste of it.  Long ago there had been animals that talked, and strange little Indians who haunted the birch wood, while other Indians lived in villages on the bottom of the Sound.  Now that world had all but vanished.  Except on the ball field of Summerland, that is, and here at Hotel Beach.

My typical cycle of audiobooks has brought me back to Summerland.  I don't have very many audiobooks, and we haven't been back to the library anytime recently to get one I haven't already listened to a dozen times.  I don't mind.  This is a fantastic--and a fantastical--book, which, like so many of the best books, yields something new with each pass.

I listened to this passage (quoted above) about my favorite character from the book, Jennifer T., while driving home from work yesterday, and it got me thinking (fear not: I didn't hurt myself!) --not that my thoughts generally, much less these particularly, brought anything revolutionary.  Really this is all pretty old stuff, but borne upon something more poignant, less abstract.

We all know, of course, that superstition comes from ignorance.  The more educated you are, generally, the less superstitious you are.  Generally.  Along these same lines, and with far less connoted negativity, so the ability to live, to exist, and from within the very substance of one's imagination--to miss the fuzzy borders that divide personal fantasy from reality (and as only the recklessly preoccupied and gleefully distracted kid can do) --is reliant on ignorance.  Education and wisdom (conventional wisdom) de-fuzz that border.  This is not to say the educated can't imagine, but their (dare I say "our"?) imaginations must be lived out and delivered packaged neatly within the strictures of contrivance--the story, the picture, the movie, etcetera.

I watch my children, whose imaginations are just as real as reality, and I weakly relive, vicariously, the days when I was so ignorant (back before I'd burdened myself with the inconvenience of all this cumbersome knowledge, which, far from anything to boast of, so often translates merely to feeble pragmatism), and likely to trip, literally, into real fantasy, as they.

Maybe I'm irresponsible:  is the desperate speed with which we educate our children, and in effort to keep up with all the international and unimaginative Joneses, really so necessary?  More favorably and locally:  I wish I could be less responsible; and, even less likely and more selfishly, I wish I could be both.  I wish, often, that I could backtrack, wash away, as does Ethan in Summerland's finale (vague spoiler in the next phrase), where, by the mighty force of his childish faith and desperation, he returns the magic, eradicates Coyote's mischief, and the galls between the several worlds are remade.  But I can't.  No one can.  Once the magic is lost, it's gone, only to be had second-hand or through the machine--organic or calculated--of art and entertainment.  The less we know, the greater the gap between our observations and reality, and the more space there is for our imaginations to fill.  That gap shrinks as our life, within the real world, jades us.

Not that education is so bad.  Learning about this world and the reality of distant others--which learning is so often just as mysterious and mystifying as that childish magic in the gap--for me, an adult (more or less), carries, as far as I can tell, a very similar, and often as powerful, a bliss as those bygone fantasies and space-aliens and lands where I could speak the languages of all the prolix beasts, all so tangibly "real."

Dreams are insufficient proxies for the waking reality of childhood magic that lives and breathes around them, wheezes and coughs under their beds, in the vacant spaces away from knowledgeable adults, within the stuffed heads of teddy bears and rayon tigers--in the Lego box, the coloring book, or building blocks.  That empty air that crackles with life between the ecstatic faces of my 6- and 3-year-olds.

I love my books.  I love my "academic" discussions.  I love watching Jeopardy or playing Trivial Pursuit and knowing stuff.  I love being an English teacher and yet find that I can fairly fluently teach 7th and 8th grade science (not that this is so impressive, I know, but you get the idea).  And when it comes right down to it, the loss of magic--the narrowing of that gap--is inevitable.  'Tis the world we live in.  Responsibility erases the freedom of childhood.  Stuffed animals and Legos are no longer any more than stuffing and plastic.  That electric air loses its charge, as stress of bills, work, and family mount.  For this, then, to preserve what does yet remains of the gap, or even just fabricate a little more of it every once in while, I am eternally grateful for books, for movies, for stories, and  the ever-childish interest I have in creating/writing, and maybe, flimsily, even inhabiting my own.