Saturday August 3, 2019

Time to read Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a work that seems to conjure in its poetic preface the Fates, the Weird sisters, and the Faerie Queene all at once. Carroll is like Odysseus surrendering to the Sirens, the kubernetes granting control of his oars to Gloriana or Titania, who steer the “merry crew” happily toward home. The story begins, of course, with the Fall — the tumble down the bardo-like in-between of the rabbit-hole replacing the far more tragic one imagined by Carroll’s high-minded religious precursors. What happens when the story of the married couple who disobeyed the Father gives way to the one about the girl who wanders off from her sisters in pursuit of a time-worried rabbit? Weird stuff, folks! Who is Carroll, after all? Why should he be the one telling the girl’s story? (And with so many patronizing narrative intrusions, no less!) Is Alice in Wonderland a shamanic journey of symbolic death and rebirth disguised as a children’s narrative? Trippy stuff, indeed. The book’s second chapter, “The Pool of Tears,” retells the story of the Flood, with Alice of course as Noah, arriving to shore with a bunch of animals by chapter’s end. The pleasure of Carroll’s tale, though, comes mainly from the fact that once Alice wanders off into the land of Maya, she discovers keys and teachers that, by way of many wondrous detours, eventually guide her home again.