Lewis Carroll lives on in Alices’ Wonderland
“One of the deep secrets in life, “ once told to his friend, the actress Ellen Terry, is “that all that is really worth the doing, is what we do for others.” When you take a look into his letters you can conclude that he really was serous when he made the remark. He wrote a lot for free. Not only books and stories, but also instruction about mathematics, art and science. Sometimes he even gave away food and clothing or payed, in silence, medical bills. Carroll was not only a puzzling character himself. He liked to invent games and puzzles, based on the mathematical rules and logic. On the other hand: it is still an enigma that this serious, religieus man wrote books, poems and stories which have nothing to do with morality, logical rules and other practical ideas. He created an universe where impossbility is ruling, without using scorcery. In fact Carroll is the counterpart of J.K Rowling. By the time her nerdy Harry Potter is forgotten, his little hero Alice will be as fresh and alive as she was when Carroll gave her to the world, and she is today. Talking about magic......
1998 marked the centennial of the death of the author of the Alice in Wonderland stories, Lewis Carroll. Carroll's real name was actually Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and his pseudonym represents an anagram, which is not so surprising when you know that this vicar's son was a lover of puns and word games. Besides having penned what is probably the most well-known of all children's stories, Carroll also wrote a number of other children's stories as well as lots of nonsense poetry. But is it all nonsens, or is it something else? And what do Alice and drugs have in common?
When Gulliver's Travels was first published it was read as satire by adults whereas nowadays it is considered to be an exciting children's story. The same fate is shared by Don Quichotte. Youth classics such as Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe were also never intended for children. With Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll saw children as his audience. He intended it to be a child's book and strangely enough many an adult as well as children have found it endlessly intriguing. A strange effect appears often while reading Alice: when you are young, you will like it as a very funny story. Not a fairytale, but a children story with talking animals, mad hatters and other funny charcters which are saying funny things. When you are aging and reading Alice again the story is still funny, but not all of the time. Slowly you will stop laughing and recognize that the characters are not fun at all. They are crazy. A parade of fools is passing by, there’s no security in the world Alice entered after falling in te hole and the white rabbit seems more a sinister pied piper then a friendly guide. It looks as if Alice’s universe becomes more and more a dimension where everything is meaningless. There are no certainties anymore for Alice, she’s lost in a world that doesn’t have any connection to the real world, she came from. Or is it, like we all do, our own look at the world that changes as we are growing older? Childhood lost, funny Alice lost....
Set and Setting
Once I asked the Dutch author Koos Verkaik, whose reputation in the Netherlands is similar to that of Stephen King, which book had influenced him the most in his life. Without losing a second he replied, "Alice in Wonderland, that is such a weird and scary book. A lot scarier than any of my own horror and ghost stories."
A lady I met recently was recounting how after eating some magic mushrooms, she found herself in a world that made her think of the one on which Alice had found herself.
"When I looked down I saw a deep well and at the very bottom of the hole, all kinds of unimaginable action was taking place. My greatest fear at the time was that just like Alice, I would be caught in a house that was shrinking. It was pure horror! I had read Alice as a child and had not thought it very nice then. I was really afraid."
Alice is a book you will a) - enjoy if you are in a good mood or b) - scare you senseless if you are feeling insecure. Set and setting!
At the high point of the psychedelic wave of the Sixties, two popular LSD related songs also refer directly to Alice in Wonderland, namely; White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane and 5D (fifth dimension) from the Byrds. This last song contains the lyrics:
All my two dimensional boundaries were goneI had lost to them badlyI saw the world crumbleAnd thought I was deadBut I found my senses still workingAnd as I continued to drop through the holeI found all the surroundingWho showed me the joy that innocently isJust be quiet and feel it around you
This is exactly how Alice feels after she drank from the bottle –drink me!!- and started shrinking and stretching. Roger McGuinn who wrote the song, told the press that these lyrics were inspired from a book he red at the time, One Two Three Four, More, More, More, a book about the possibility that there are a lot more dimensions than we look at. But I think he’s telling a part of the truth: just before his drug inspired song Eight Miles High was banned from the radio because it could be experienced as the description of a psychedelic trip. McGuinn tells that it was about in an airplaneride from L.A. to to London. Trying to save the airplay of the song. But he loves playing these games even in these times. Almost hidden messages are common in his work...The connection between Alice’s drop in the hole and McGuinn’s theory about dimensions is loud and clear for anyone using mindbending drugs, cannabis included. And isn’t a hole another dimension? Also McGuinn is known to know his classics. Het knows Alice... It’s a looks a little like Lennon’s trick to slow down the discussion about the Sgt. Pepper album. Lennon used telling about his Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Is there any person who believes his explanation that the song tells about a child’s drawing instead of LSD?
Drugs and Morals
Lewis Carroll is far from subtle when referring to the use of drugs. One of the first characters Alice meets is a large caterpillar, who is seated on a mushroom whilst sucking on a water pipe. Please note that when Lewis Carroll wrote this story the use of cannabis and other psychedelics was accepted as normal in British intellectual circles and was also completely legal. It seems pretty obvious that Lewis Carroll, just as Coleridge and Swinburne, to name another two psychedelic poets, used these hallucinogenic substances and then reworked the experience to form the Alice stories. If you’ve ever been in a psycedelic state of mind than you will regognize Alice surely as a deeply well written tripreport. Walls are crumbling, ceilings are moving, dimensions changing, fear turns into fun, fun becomes fear. All these imaginations are well known psychedelic pictures. And so it’s a lot more easy to understand why Alice in Wonderland is extremely funny and extremely scary at the same time. Children are not scared, they accept talking rabbits and mad hatters because children go with the flow. When children grow up, they discover that’s impossible not te be scared. Parents and evironment are warning against everything that’s out of order (and also against a lot that’s normal) and when a child has learned that rabbits cannot talk they it’s scared when a rabbit talks....The fear we read in Alice is the fear for being mad. Lewis Carroll was playing a game with the mind when he wrote Alice, Jabberwocky and made his mindbreaking puzzels.
Pedophilia and incest are currently a hot issue. Lewis Carroll is often criticized for being a pedophile who misused children, but in Victorian times, the adoration of innocent children was regarded as the norm. That Lewis Carroll loved little girls is a fact. Alice in Wonderland was at first not even intended for publication but was meant as a gift to Alice Liddell, the daughter of a friendly reverend and there is no evidence in his letters to suggest that Lewis Carroll saw their relationship as anything more than purely platonic. And the same goes for all the other young girls that he had loved. He is also known for the number of photographs he took of very young naked children, but none of these suggest any misuse, plus they would not have been taken without parental consent. ’n the letters (the one’s I saw, hundreds) he wrote to children he knew, Carroll talks mostly about the brain and the funny things it triggers. There are no sexual hints. A lot of good advises, a lot of funny stories and a lot of good advise. And puzzles, always puzzles... Think about thinking is the message.
One would have to be seriously Freudian in order to find any hint of sexuality between the lines in Alice. What makes the story so special is that it lacks any moral. Alice finds herself in a completely surrealistic world that is populated by all sorts of, to be polite, unsympathetic characters. A queen who constantly shouts, " Off with their heads!", not to mention the Cheshire cat who just hangs in the trees with a dazed grin on it's face. The White Rabbit disappears whenever Alice needs him most, but due to her uninhibited behavior, no serious harm befalls her.
Probably the lack of a moral to the story is what keeps it alive. This is quite an achievement when you consider that it was written in an age which seems to have discovered the term, moralism.
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