Stuck as I am, I cant help but wonder
Why I stay and seldom wander
To linger longer or lumber yonder?
Trapped between these pages plenty
Forever twelve and never twenty
The sense is gone, the meaning empty
Questions elude understanding
But darn it! They can be demanding
So on what literateau are you standing?
Vast numbers of different theories
All bring up even more queries
My confusion grows until it wearies
But if you stop and if you think
Then you will see a common link
The one who put their thought to ink.
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Emily was starting to get rather tired of sitting by her sister on the park bench, and of having little to entertain herself with: a few times she took a peek at the book her sister was reading, yet she deemed the language of the book to be somewhat stupid, and just a tad too ridiculous. She also had a problem with the illustrations, thinking that the girl looked odd and old-timey, wearing weird, old-fashioned clothes. “What is the point of a book,” thought Emily, “if it is but a bunch of outdated nonsense?”
Turning away from her sister and looking a few yards away from the bench, over near the bushes, Emily spied a sandpit and ruminated, (as best she could in the undesirable heat that currently consumed Sydney), as to whether or not the effort of going that far would be worth the fun that could be had in the sandpit, when suddenly a little girl wearing a pinafore ran around from behind the bench and off into the distance.
There was nothing terribly out of the ordinary in such a display; nor did Emily think it so very unprecedented or out of the ordinary to hear her rabbit on in a fashion so fitting for a fool, muttering, “Oh dear! Oh dear! Where could he be?! Where could my Author be? Oh dear!” Afterwards, it occurred to Emily that this was not the most conventional thing one could witness and that she ought to have wondered about the queer way this scene seemed to be unfolding, but once she realised that it was the girl from her sisters book, Emily started on her feet, for a thought flashed across her mind – never before had she seen the character from a book in real life.
“Christ,” thought Emily, “how on earth am I to catch up with her? Argh. Knowing names or having read that nonsense book wouldv’e been a helpful move around about now. I could, like, you know, get her to wait, or stop, or whatever. Ugh. God damn it.” It was around about now that what would have been a strikingly simple thought to most (and I hope the reader is, like the Author, part of this cohort) struck her. She could simply go back to her dearest sister and find out. Hurriedly, Emily doubled back and seized the book from her sisters hands, much to her sister’s annoyance, and held it up. “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” She was present only momentarily before beginning to depart once more. Her sister, who did not think kindly of young Emily looked up, and was about to call out in hope of her return, but refrained on the basis that life without Emily was life with less annoyances and thus a life most improved.
And with such a question, only more arise. For example, if she is not 2-D what is she? Surely she could be 1-D, or perhaps even 4-D. We are clearly not restricted to 3-D. Also, Emily, like all humans, only sees in 3-D, so how would she know what 2-D things actually look like in the confines of a 3-D world? But let us suppose that this is “the” question, for this is what Emily did and, in doing so, she could not help but feel her grip on reality sneakily slide away from her. I say sneakily because, one moment it was there (those moments before she secured sight on Alice), yet it disappeared a moment later. So in a simple moment or two, reality was yanked away from underneath her. And thus she fell from the dizzying heights of sanity down to the depraved depths of insanity, no longer capable of differentiating between reality and its antithesis. But really, what’s the difference?
“Excuse me, Madam,” started Alice in her typically polite manner, “this will sound strange – so please don’t be too taken aback by this, for I did warn you- but…. Oh, how do I say this without sounding kind of crazy?”
“Well, you could say it English, that generally helps. And if not, I guess you could try French,” replied Emily..
“No, no, no. For you see, it is not language that is the problem,” confessed Alice, “but rather what it is that I’m trying to say. What I’m trying to express.” Alice, in her youthful arrogance and naivety, clung desperately to her belief that despite being a child – and a fictional one at that- that she could indeed adequately articulate everything she wanted to say. The poor girl was wrong.
Alice sighed. Then she began to speak again, ‘ Okay. I’ll tell you. But do you promise to believe me?” Emily nodded politely, perhaps the only thing she could do. “Alright. I’m looking for my Author.”
Now its one thing to feel reality slide away from you, but it is another to be consumed entirely by the surreal. For Emily’s world was fast becoming overrun and overpopulated by total madness and some kind of crazed unreality. Amidst her strange haze of confusion and her vague, largely useless attempts to understand the many unbelievable things that kept happening to her, Emily found herself speechless. However, her mother did say that if one has nothing nice to say, one should say nothing. It didn’t seem to fit this situation, though. It just didn’t seem true in this instance.
“Uhm… That’s quite an unbelievable tale you’ve got there. I’m not too sure I can stomach it!”
“Oh goodness gracious me!” remarked Alice. “Whatever are you on about? I haven’t a tail, and, if I did, I surely wouldn’t let you eat it!”
“No, no, no!” replied Emily. “I meant “tale” as in a story, not a tail like what a rat or a monkey has.”
“Why, I shall have you know that it isn’t a story at all, its all a true. As true as the sky is blue,” came Alice’s indignant response.
Frustration fluttered by Emily, swirling around until it encompassed her. Was she alone in this frustration? An unlikely situation. However, it would be but a benevolent assumption premised on madness to think the feeling was shared equally. Emily’s frustration was but minuscule compared to Alice’s.
And who can blame her? Alice had, after all, before suddenly appearing in the “real world” had to deal with some of the most stressful and complicated and confusing questions known to mankind; why am I here and where am I going?
“Alright,” continued Emily, “So, lets assume for a second that I believe you. Like, why do you want to find your Author? What’s the point?”
Seemingly getting quite fussy and stressed about the entire situation, Alice exclaimed dramatically, “Oh goodness, gracious me. You are a bit of a silly one, aren’t you? So I can find out how my story finishes. So I can understood just who exactly I am. Why else would I want to find them?”
Emily stood there and thought over this statement briefly. Thoughts flurried around her head like a flock of pigeons scattering from a young child’s loud and angry interjection at their feeding frenzy. She finally voiced one of these many thoughts. “So do you mean an Author is the reason for everything, ever?”
Alice looked shocked, and for largely obvious reasons. Emily had communicated the very words on the tip of Alice’s tongue.
However, insofar Emily failed to see the clearly religious, almost godlike connotations of her previous statement. For are the reasons she depicted not similar to the reasons for which one pursues religion?
At this point, (“this point” being a convenient point in time for such a thing to occur), Emily, perhaps by some stroke of divine intervention, noticed a church off in the distance. The gears in her head began to turn, And then, with a blinding flash of common sense, it struck her. The Author was like a God.
“Alice, if the Author knows everything about you, which I reckon he must, because he wrote you and invented you and stuff, well… he’d be like a God, right?”
Alice, after giving herself a few moments to think about this, nodded and replied, “Yes, I think that could be so.”
Emily thus concluded that Alice must indeed find her Author – it was him exerting his power and influence over an original text that defined all meaning. A brief discourse followed in which it was decided that the work must be a whole in itself that all springs from the same common root of genius. ( I would have thought this to be obvious.) Unfortunately though, neither Alice nor Emily had the slightest idea on how to actually find her Author. But on a lighter note, Alice found it reassuring that she was part of a work of genius and profound originality, and promptly decided that this must mean that she means something very important. After all, any work that is comparable to a blooming spring emerging from a barren waste must be rather important, truly the work of a transcendental genius.
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A voice interjects intermittently
Disrupting thoughts quite suddenly
With questions of the literary
Her Author, Carroll, gone or not?
When in his grave he doth rot
No longer present, but not forgot
This time as well, the same applies
But his meaning dons disguise
Presently, I must apologise
For connecting meaning straight to me
Is, alas, unfortunately
Relying upon a fallacy
When what I mean, I may miss
You can’t say, “the Author meant this!”
Otherwise, why have analysis?
Watch as it splits apart from the whole
Meaning goes down the rabbit hole
Further from common sense’s control.
Emily and Alice, after much deliberation, had decided that the logical place to begin their search for the latter’s Author was a large library; the kind forever haunted by eager readers, stressed students and pretentious intellectuals. Alice, however, felt somewhat uneasy about the idea, for she feared that people may be shocked to see her, as she is traditionally little more than the product of ones imagination. She feared that the minds of those who saw her may suddenly snap, crackle and pop and spiral into madness. Consequently, Alice found herself utilising the path of entrance into the library used by all fictional characters; the book return slot.
The book return slot went straight on like a tunnel for quite a while, and then spiralled down suddenly, so suddenly, in fact, that both Alice and Emily found themselves without even a moment in time to consider stopping their descent before falling down what seemed to be a very deep well.
Perhaps they fell slowly, or perhaps the book return slot was very deep indeed, for both Emily and Alice had plenty of time as they fell further and further down to look around at their surroundings, and to ponder what may happen next in this strange scenario. Alice found herself overwhelmed by a peculiar sense of déjà vu, leading her to sigh to herself and to exclaim, as if she were a cliché character in a children’s movie, “Oh dear! Here we go again.” Alice, as she looked about, found herself under-whelmed by her current surroundings, perhaps even bored by the repetitive nature of it all. Emily, on the other hand, was simultaneously both delirious with excitement and frozen with fear as she looked about, noticing that the sides of this book return slot, in all its seemingly never-ending glory, were filled with cupboards and bookshelves. Fuelled by her own curiosity, (which would surely be a problem for the plot were she a cat and not a girl), Emily stretched her arms out as far as she could, and grabbed a book from a shelf as she passed it; it was labelled “The Death of the Author,” but to her great disappointment it was an essay; she was too careful and polite to feel comfortable dropping it and potentially scattering and ripping all the pages, and so she held it with a firm grip. Alice, who was still quite apathetic about her surroundings, was examining her nails in great detail, seemingly enthralled by their appearance, and was also wondering what all Emily’s fussing and bothering was about.
Down.
Down.
Down.
“Well!” declared Emily, who was by now uncomfortable with Alice’s silence as her only company, “we surely have fallen quite a remarkable distance, haven’t we? Do you think this fall shall ever come to an end? In fact, I find it quite remarkable that we have even managed to fall so far down a book return slot. How is that possible?” Although she had never had the impetus to read Alice in Wonderland, Emily had indeed, like almost all children in our modern age, watched the movie adaptation. Emily thought herself to be rather clever, and although her school teachers recognised that she was intelligent, there was undoubtedly some disparity between her own views of her intellect and theirs. However, she could not help but notice the strange similarities between the lengthy fall she and Alice were currently enduring, and the fall Alice had faced in her original story.
Down.
Down.
Down.
Emily was adamant that the fall would never end, whilst Alice knew that even if it were to take a while, it would end nevertheless. Suddenly, as if some transcendent figure had anticipated our characters boredom, a humungous and hefty book, a combined encyclopaedia and dictionary, came crashing down on poor Alice’s head, when suddenly, thump! Thud! Alice and Emily tumbled down onto a heap of books and paper, and with that, their fall had ended.
Alice’s head was still aching from the book that had fallen on top of her head. Emily, however, was not hurt a bit, and leapt to her feet in no time at all: she looked up, but she struggled to notice anything but darkness, and so she looked down instead, and at first glance the floor looked to be covered in strange, asymmetrical tiles of multiple colours, but when she bent over and inspected them closely, she ascertained that they were in fact books that had been scattered all over the entire floor. It was at this point that Emily realised that she was still holding that essay she plucked from the shelf, and so she delicately placed it on a nearby shelf. Alice groaned and murmured, then she began to speak. “Golly gosh! What a terrible decision this has been! Oh, how I wish we had entered this place in a more conventional manner. Surely no Author would admit to writing me in the state I am in now… What a fussy and whiney character they would assume I‘ve become! I guess I should‘ve taken more care, I should’ve clung to his writings.”
Emily interrupted Alice. “Hush your whining. You’re very cynical, Alice, did you know that? Besides, look over there.” Emily pointed towards the opposite end of the long corridor they had found themselves in. This corridor, in fact, was so long that Emily was unable to see where it ended. “What am I meant to be looking at, exactly?” asked Alice, who was quite upset by Emily’s rudeness and saw nothing significant about this corridor. “There’s nothing there,” continued Alice. Emily put her palm to her face, and reluctantly explained what she was pointing out. “It looks like it shrinks. How could you be so unobservant as to fail to notice that?”
Agitated by Emily’s hoity-toity attitude, Alice smugly pointed out that of course it would look smaller at the other end of the corridor, that it must be a trick of the eye, and that everyone who has ever looked at an artwork should know this. “It’s called perspiration. It’s especially important in art.” (Alice was completely ignorant of the fact that the word she was searching for was “perspective” and that “perspiration” merely refers to fluid excreted by ones sweat glands.) She began walking down the corridor to prove her point, and was consequently quite surprised when she found her head colliding with the ceiling after only a few paces. “Oh dear. It would appear you were quite right Emily,” said Alice indignantly…. “Oh dear! I wonder where this strange place leads,” continued Alice curiously, and so she moved onto her hands and knees and began to crawl down the corridor, whilst beckoning Emily to follow suit. ( Alice’s intensely curious nature is quite renowned, leading me to assume that she is thankful that she is not a cat. I assume also, that the reader is aware of the dangers associated with mixing cats and curiosity.)
For a while they crawled, crawled and crawled, until the ceiling and the floor had become too close together to crawl any further. Alice looked up, and although she was dismayed by how much further the corridor seemed to go, when she strained her eyes she could faintly make out a sign on the door situated at the corridor’s end. The sign read, “DO NOT DISTURB. CREATIVE GENIUS AT WORK.”
“That’s odd,” started Alice, “for what kind of genius would ever be so small?” Emily was frightened by the strangeness she faced in this queer place, and scurried away back to the larger side of the corridor. “I want to go home, I want go home!” exclaimed Emily. So quickly did she scurry along backwards, that she failed to notice the table that had appeared behind her, and found herself tumbling over it and onto her head. A loud thud accompanied her fall, as well as a sharp, high-pitched cling-clang. “This place is all wrong. Everything is weird and topsy-turvy!” yelled Emily. Alice also moved back to the larger side of the corridor, and helped her frightened friend back to her feet.
In doing so, Alice noticed that there was a small bottle next to Emily’s feet, which was quite unusual since there was certainly no bottle there when they first went past. However, it did explain the cling-clang sound that occurred as Emily tripped over the table, (“which certainly was not here before,” said Emily), and round the neck of the bottle was a paper label, with the words “Do not drink me” raggedly written on it in obscurely sized letters.
“Do you think it’s poison?” asked Emily, who had enough common-sense to think it a bad idea to drink anything that explicitly states that it should not be consumed. Alice, however, had dealt with just enough equally bizarre situations and weirdly labelled bottles to decide that it would surely not be life threatening to drink it. And so Alice said, “Nope. I think that it would absolutely okay to drink. It must be reverse psychology. Why fill up a bottle with a liquid if not to drink it? We can only not drink it, if we entertain the possibility of drinking it. It’s surely a test. If it’s purpose has nothing to do with it’s consumption, then why mention anything about drinking it to begin with? Let alone on the bottle itself!” Once she explained her twisted logic and assumptions, Alice grabbed the bottle, ripped out the cork and curiously took a sip. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “What?!” enquired Emily frantically, assuming the worst. Alice took another sip, and “Oh!” said Alice once more. “What? What!? What?!” yelled Emily.
“It’s really tasty.”
A brief silence, in which the two girls nervously stared at one another, followed Alice’s consumption of the oddly-labelled drink. Emily was expecting something horrible and surreal to happen to Alice, “perhaps she shall grow and grow, until she is as tall as a building. Or perhaps she will shrink down to the size of a mouse, which would surely be frightening, as people could easily squish you under their feet if you were that small,” thought Emily to herself. They were fairly close to accepting the drink’s normality when the rumbling noises began. Alice said something like; “I feel a bit light-headed, maybe I should lie down…” And all of a sudden there was a terrible roar, and the walls began to shake and rattle in the wind that flew down the corridor towards the tiny door, which looked much more frightening than it did before. And a voice was screaming; “Holy Jesus! What are these long-haired creatures?”
Then it was quiet again. The small door had been opened and Lewis Carroll peered through it, to see what all the fuss was about. “What on earth are these girls doing here?” he muttered, observing the two little girls with only one eye visible and the rest of his face obscured by the walls surrounding the small door.
“Good grief, I guess you shouldn’t have had a drink from that bottle!” cried Emily, “this is total madness.” Carroll snarled and then Alice cried out; “Oh crap! Emily, look at that eye…” but at the same time Carroll was ranting and raving; “What are you doing here?” the questions continued quickly, as did Alice’s previous statement. And so poor Emily, trying to decipher what each of them were on about, could only make out, “Oh Emily, are you that I?” (And I assure you this was a difficult question for her to answer; she was not even aware of the eye peering through the doorway yet.) Emily sat there, dazed and confused, trying to figure out which “I” she was being asked if she was, and what was wrong with Alice’s voice, the deep tone of which she assumed could be attributed to the strange liquid. She just knew that it wasn’t safe to drink from that bottle.
It was then that Emily noticed the eye. “What the flip?” she cried, and as she jumped back in terror the eye focused on her; it widened suddenly like a diverging train track and stared her down. The rumbling noises began again – Emily heard strange banging and clanging noises come from down the corridor – and a voice boomed, “Juvenile delinquents! I don’t believe it. Who are you? Do you know Dodgson?”
“Dodgson? Dodgson who?” shouted Emily, as she slowly backed further away from the tiny corner of the corridor. Alice crouched quietly behind a tower of books. The voice said, “if you don’t know Dodgson, then why are you here?” Alice looked back guiltily at Emily, who hadn’t had time to hide, and thus had to deal with the big, freaky eye and the deep, booming voice.
An uneasy silence followed; it was almost awkward – the kind of silence that is accompanied by a sense of nostalgia harking back to the simpler days of primary school and the frightening voice of an overzealous teacher, who screams (in a stress-induced state of madness) that you’ve “done the Wrong thing!” Emily was quite accustomed to such silences. It was typical of Emily to, during such undesirably quiet moments, to smile tentatively, charming onlookers with her childish cuteness… and with that, both parties would be at ease. This was an exception, for the silence was unexpectedly broken by soft footsteps and the creaking, creaking sound of an old door opening. The sound startled both the girls. Previously, they had failed to even notice the presence of this door – they had both been too distracted by the other, much smaller door at the end of the queerly shrinking corridor. This particular door was larger than the other one, and was situated only a few dozen steps behind them.
They turned around, frightful and anxious. Creak, creak, moan. The door opened further and further. The shadows around the door were long and dark, and a silhouette danced across the floor; its hands long and claw-like, its head appeared exaggeratedly large amidst the messy, birds nest hair resting on it’s crown. The looming and lanky shadow edged closer and closer, until the figure was no longer obscured by darkness. A short, stout and scruffily dressed man stood in the doorway. His face was long and drooped downwards, adorned with a pair of oversized coke-bottle glasses – the kind Buddy Holly wore, only this pair was far too large and wide for such a skinny face. The glasses made him resemble a beetle of some kind, and attributed to his generally timid demeanour. His name was Charles Dodgson, and he was a complicated character. To an extent, he has become a controversial figure.
Dodgson’s eyes narrowed, and he peered curiously at the two girls. In a very polite tone, he said, “And just who exactly do you think you two are? Why are you here? This is my private library, and only guests I‘ve invited are allowed to be here!” A terrible silence engulfed the girls. Dodgson looked away from the two girls, and over towards the door at the opposite end of the corridor. Both girls expected him to be shocked by the weird eye peering through the door, perhaps even scared. The girls followed Dodgson’s gaze, and were bewildered by the door now being shut – both the eye and the voice were gone. Dodgson, however, knew something about what lurked behind that tiny little door that is yet to be revealed to Alice and Emily. He, you see, knew that it was merely the entrance to Lewis Carroll’s room. It was as it looked – a door, nothing more and nothing less. Carroll, however, was a curious creature.
Alice suddenly found the entire situation to be overwhelming. “Hey, excuse me, I need some help. I’m looking for my Author. Who are you? Can you help?” asked Alice. She had spoken very loudly and clearly, attempting to stress the urgency she thought the situation had. Emily’s eyes darted about apprehensively. Dodgson, raising his eyes at young Alice, said, “Isn’t the real question who you are?”
“Me?,” asked Alice. Dodgson nodded.
“I’m Alice,” she said.
“Alice who? You have to have more than one name. I know an Alice. She’s a lovely girl,” remarked Dodgson.
“Uh…What do you mean? I’m just Alice,” replied Alice, who was quite confused by Dodgson’s question.
“Well hey, Just Alice, I’m Charles Dodgson. What’re you doing here?” Alice was unsure what to say; she was struggling to keep up with the constant stream of questions.
Emily spoke; the confusing conversation had started to irritate her…she had endured enough insanity at this point. “Gosh darn it! Can someone just tell what in the blazes is going on here? This is undoubtedly the most whacked library I’ve ever entered. Get me out of here, or explain what on earth is going on…that door, for example – down the end of the corridor – what the heck is that thing? And the eye! The eye! And the voice; the voice most intolerable and omniscient and loud!” (Emily was unaware that once again, she had chosen the incorrect word, and that the word she was searching for was, in fact, “ominous.”) She was about to continue ranting and raving, when Alice interjected, “Stop it. I think you forget that this isn’t about you. It’s about me. I’m trying to find my -”
“Shut up. I just want to know what’s going on.”
“Oh, and you think I don’t? Surely you realise that’s ridiculous.”
“Well, I’m also here. I was just trying to help you when I was unexpectedly roped into this madness.”
Dodgson interrupted. “Quiet in the library! Even as children you should be aware that one is quiet in a library,” he said. He pointed his index finger towards Emily, “You, Just Alice’s friend, you’re being far too loud. As the librarian, I will have to ask you to leave unless you maintain socially acceptable behaviour. I am a man of few rules, and so the only behavioural prerequisite I ask you to adhere to is that you be quiet.”
Emily flew into a rage. “I don’t care, tell me what the heck is going on and then I’ll happily leave“, she said, and then she pointed out that the corridor got smaller and smaller, and that whatever was in that room was yelling a lot and frightening the living daylights out of both herself and Alice. Dodgson simply replied, “That’s Lewis Carroll’s room. The corridor get’s smaller and smaller because he get’s bigger and bigger. But this is your final warning, be quiet or you’ll have to leave. I don’t like to disturb Carroll, he‘s a genius, you know. ” Alice, being the polite girl she is, respects her elders and so she asked, in what was barely more than a whisper, what it was that made him a genius.
“He writes books,” replied Dodgson.
“What sort of books?” asked Alice. Emily was not convinced that this constituted genius.
“Children’s books,“ he replied. “Alice in Wonderland, Through The Looking Glass. Perhaps there is more, but I‘m not too sure. He is wonderful and he is gifted but he is also quite tragically, insane.”
“Woah, hold the phone!” shouted Emily, once again disregarding the rules of Dodgson’s library. “Alice, that’s your book! That’s it. I’m sure. My sister was reading it when I saw you run past. I remember having looked at the picture Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland… Lewis Carroll must be your Author.”
“You’re both mad,” said Dodgson, “get a grip on reality girls. And get out of my library. Neither of you are welcome any longer.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said Dodgson, “otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”
Alice failed to see how this proved she was mad; however, before she could articulate an argument to the contrary, Dodgson suddenly scampered away. Alice, who had by now been somewhat desensitised to all thingsweird and wonderful, thought that there was nothing particularly odd about this display, nor did she think it without precedent to hear Dodgson say to himself, over and over again, “Oh dear, oh dear, I must be mad. Be mad I must. Must I be mad?” He disappeared through the door from which he had originally entered. Emily and Alice followed.
They had entered another long corridor. They were roughly halfway between each end. Doors of all different shapes and sizes lined the walls, which were in turn adorned with books, books, and even more books.
Dodgson, however, was nowhere to be seen.
This corridor, oddly enough, was exactly unlike the last one in a single and strange way; this corridor became bigger and bigger the further on it went. Neither young girl could fathom how this was possible. “If it get’s bigger and bigger, surely it get’s smaller and smaller from the other end,” thought Alice. Emily verbalised her agreement. There was a broken mirror decorating the door which Alice had just closed, and while she stood there looking at her fractured reflection, she decided some disgusting delinquent must have vandalised it; “it’s broken and some naughty child has scribbled all over it. They must have terrible handwriting, or be from another country that uses a different language, for I cannot read a word of this,” said Alice. She said this more for her own benefit than Emily‘s. The mirror was adorned with the following.
CAROLLWOCKY
‘Twas represfictive; both untrue and uncouth.
‘Twas riddled with oniony layerings,
And obfuscated by portmanteau.
So “Why?” frightful nonsense sings.
Emily puzzled over where she picked up this piece of superstition and what language this peculiar message was written in for some time, but at last a bright thought struck her. “Why, this is not a foreign language – it’s not French, at the very least. Of course! I know what it is – it’s a looking-glass language. If we find another mirror, and hold it up to the glass, the word’s will go the right way again!”
This was the poem that the two girls read.
CAROLLWOCKY
‘Twas represfictive; both untrue and uncouth.
‘Twas riddled with oniony layerings,
And obfuscated by portmanteau.
So “Why?” frightful nonsense sings.
‘Beware the Carrollwock, my son!
The mask he dons, his fake veneer!
Beware the Authors words, and shun
The frumious balladeer!’
He took his subversive pen in hand:
For paragraphs his foe he sought -
So he rested by stanza number three,
And stood awhile in thought.
And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Carrollwock, with his nonce words,
Declared as silently as he could,
That all of this was just absurd!
To the beasts plight, he held the pen tight
And scribbled all over the Carrollwock’s name.
And with that motion, that poisonous potion,
The Carrollwock fellapsed in shame.
‘Twas represfictive; both untrue and uncouth.
‘Twas riddled with oniony layerings,
And obfuscated by portmanteau.
So “Why?” frightful nonsense sings.
“It seems very nice, almost pretty in a strange way,” said Alice when she had finished reading it, “but it’s ratherhard to understand!” (The fact of the matter was that Alice merely refused to admit, even to herself, that she understood nothing of what she had just read.) “It seems to fill my head with all sorts of thoughts – only I’m unsure what they are! However, somebody vandalised something: that’s obvious, at the very least -”
“But oh!” said Emily, suddenly grabbing Alice’s attention, “if we don’t make haste we shall never find Dodgson again, and we need to find him so you can find your Author. You have things to learn, and questions to be answered. We’ll have to look through every room, and that will surely take forever.” They were out of the corridor in a moment, and disappeared through a door labelled, “Carroll’s Cafeteria.” Both girls reckoned that, despite an Author being akin to a God, that Carroll would surely still need to eat at some point. Using this logic, his own cafeteria seemed a sensible location to begin their search.
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Why I stay and seldom wander
To linger longer or lumber yonder?
Trapped between these pages plenty
Forever twelve and never twenty
The sense is gone, the meaning empty
Questions elude understanding
But darn it! They can be demanding
So on what literateau are you standing?
Vast numbers of different theories
All bring up even more queries
My confusion grows until it wearies
But if you stop and if you think
Then you will see a common link
The one who put their thought to ink.
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Emily was starting to get rather tired of sitting by her sister on the park bench, and of having little to entertain herself with: a few times she took a peek at the book her sister was reading, yet she deemed the language of the book to be somewhat stupid, and just a tad too ridiculous. She also had a problem with the illustrations, thinking that the girl looked odd and old-timey, wearing weird, old-fashioned clothes. “What is the point of a book,” thought Emily, “if it is but a bunch of outdated nonsense?”
Turning away from her sister and looking a few yards away from the bench, over near the bushes, Emily spied a sandpit and ruminated, (as best she could in the undesirable heat that currently consumed Sydney), as to whether or not the effort of going that far would be worth the fun that could be had in the sandpit, when suddenly a little girl wearing a pinafore ran around from behind the bench and off into the distance.
There was nothing terribly out of the ordinary in such a display; nor did Emily think it so very unprecedented or out of the ordinary to hear her rabbit on in a fashion so fitting for a fool, muttering, “Oh dear! Oh dear! Where could he be?! Where could my Author be? Oh dear!” Afterwards, it occurred to Emily that this was not the most conventional thing one could witness and that she ought to have wondered about the queer way this scene seemed to be unfolding, but once she realised that it was the girl from her sisters book, Emily started on her feet, for a thought flashed across her mind – never before had she seen the character from a book in real life.
“Christ,” thought Emily, “how on earth am I to catch up with her? Argh. Knowing names or having read that nonsense book wouldv’e been a helpful move around about now. I could, like, you know, get her to wait, or stop, or whatever. Ugh. God damn it.” It was around about now that what would have been a strikingly simple thought to most (and I hope the reader is, like the Author, part of this cohort) struck her. She could simply go back to her dearest sister and find out. Hurriedly, Emily doubled back and seized the book from her sisters hands, much to her sister’s annoyance, and held it up. “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” She was present only momentarily before beginning to depart once more. Her sister, who did not think kindly of young Emily looked up, and was about to call out in hope of her return, but refrained on the basis that life without Emily was life with less annoyances and thus a life most improved.
“
In another moment, Emily spied Alice a short distance away. Alice appeared as if she was looking around, disorientated by the confusion that currently consumed her. However, Alice’s confusion could not compare to that of Emily’s. For Emily spied something most strange and unnatural. Alice, as it were, looked as though she were ripped right out of the pages of a book. Oh yes, oh yes! I deceive you not, for Emily no doubt had a firm grasp on what one would call sanity. From what I understand and have thus far written, Emily is one of the few featuring any common sense around here, and even she saw that Alice looked like a picture; a picture propagating a powerfully potent projection of 3-dimensionality that previously would have been purposeless. But yet here we are as we discuss the queer nature of Alice managing to look so very two dimensional whilst looking so strikingly three dimensional… 2-D or not 2-D? That is the question.And with such a question, only more arise. For example, if she is not 2-D what is she? Surely she could be 1-D, or perhaps even 4-D. We are clearly not restricted to 3-D. Also, Emily, like all humans, only sees in 3-D, so how would she know what 2-D things actually look like in the confines of a 3-D world? But let us suppose that this is “the” question, for this is what Emily did and, in doing so, she could not help but feel her grip on reality sneakily slide away from her. I say sneakily because, one moment it was there (those moments before she secured sight on Alice), yet it disappeared a moment later. So in a simple moment or two, reality was yanked away from underneath her. And thus she fell from the dizzying heights of sanity down to the depraved depths of insanity, no longer capable of differentiating between reality and its antithesis. But really, what’s the difference?
“Excuse me, Madam,” started Alice in her typically polite manner, “this will sound strange – so please don’t be too taken aback by this, for I did warn you- but…. Oh, how do I say this without sounding kind of crazy?”
“Well, you could say it English, that generally helps. And if not, I guess you could try French,” replied Emily..
“No, no, no. For you see, it is not language that is the problem,” confessed Alice, “but rather what it is that I’m trying to say. What I’m trying to express.” Alice, in her youthful arrogance and naivety, clung desperately to her belief that despite being a child – and a fictional one at that- that she could indeed adequately articulate everything she wanted to say. The poor girl was wrong.
Alice sighed. Then she began to speak again, ‘ Okay. I’ll tell you. But do you promise to believe me?” Emily nodded politely, perhaps the only thing she could do. “Alright. I’m looking for my Author.”
Now its one thing to feel reality slide away from you, but it is another to be consumed entirely by the surreal. For Emily’s world was fast becoming overrun and overpopulated by total madness and some kind of crazed unreality. Amidst her strange haze of confusion and her vague, largely useless attempts to understand the many unbelievable things that kept happening to her, Emily found herself speechless. However, her mother did say that if one has nothing nice to say, one should say nothing. It didn’t seem to fit this situation, though. It just didn’t seem true in this instance.
“Uhm… That’s quite an unbelievable tale you’ve got there. I’m not too sure I can stomach it!”
“Oh goodness gracious me!” remarked Alice. “Whatever are you on about? I haven’t a tail, and, if I did, I surely wouldn’t let you eat it!”
“No, no, no!” replied Emily. “I meant “tale” as in a story, not a tail like what a rat or a monkey has.”
“Why, I shall have you know that it isn’t a story at all, its all a true. As true as the sky is blue,” came Alice’s indignant response.
Frustration fluttered by Emily, swirling around until it encompassed her. Was she alone in this frustration? An unlikely situation. However, it would be but a benevolent assumption premised on madness to think the feeling was shared equally. Emily’s frustration was but minuscule compared to Alice’s.
And who can blame her? Alice had, after all, before suddenly appearing in the “real world” had to deal with some of the most stressful and complicated and confusing questions known to mankind; why am I here and where am I going?
“Alright,” continued Emily, “So, lets assume for a second that I believe you. Like, why do you want to find your Author? What’s the point?”
Seemingly getting quite fussy and stressed about the entire situation, Alice exclaimed dramatically, “Oh goodness, gracious me. You are a bit of a silly one, aren’t you? So I can find out how my story finishes. So I can understood just who exactly I am. Why else would I want to find them?”
Emily stood there and thought over this statement briefly. Thoughts flurried around her head like a flock of pigeons scattering from a young child’s loud and angry interjection at their feeding frenzy. She finally voiced one of these many thoughts. “So do you mean an Author is the reason for everything, ever?”
Alice looked shocked, and for largely obvious reasons. Emily had communicated the very words on the tip of Alice’s tongue.
However, insofar Emily failed to see the clearly religious, almost godlike connotations of her previous statement. For are the reasons she depicted not similar to the reasons for which one pursues religion?
At this point, (“this point” being a convenient point in time for such a thing to occur), Emily, perhaps by some stroke of divine intervention, noticed a church off in the distance. The gears in her head began to turn, And then, with a blinding flash of common sense, it struck her. The Author was like a God.
“Alice, if the Author knows everything about you, which I reckon he must, because he wrote you and invented you and stuff, well… he’d be like a God, right?”
Alice, after giving herself a few moments to think about this, nodded and replied, “Yes, I think that could be so.”
Emily thus concluded that Alice must indeed find her Author – it was him exerting his power and influence over an original text that defined all meaning. A brief discourse followed in which it was decided that the work must be a whole in itself that all springs from the same common root of genius. ( I would have thought this to be obvious.) Unfortunately though, neither Alice nor Emily had the slightest idea on how to actually find her Author. But on a lighter note, Alice found it reassuring that she was part of a work of genius and profound originality, and promptly decided that this must mean that she means something very important. After all, any work that is comparable to a blooming spring emerging from a barren waste must be rather important, truly the work of a transcendental genius.
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A voice interjects intermittently
Disrupting thoughts quite suddenly
With questions of the literary
Her Author, Carroll, gone or not?
When in his grave he doth rot
No longer present, but not forgot
This time as well, the same applies
But his meaning dons disguise
Presently, I must apologise
For connecting meaning straight to me
Is, alas, unfortunately
Relying upon a fallacy
When what I mean, I may miss
You can’t say, “the Author meant this!”
Otherwise, why have analysis?
Watch as it splits apart from the whole
Meaning goes down the rabbit hole
Further from common sense’s control.
Emily and Alice, after much deliberation, had decided that the logical place to begin their search for the latter’s Author was a large library; the kind forever haunted by eager readers, stressed students and pretentious intellectuals. Alice, however, felt somewhat uneasy about the idea, for she feared that people may be shocked to see her, as she is traditionally little more than the product of ones imagination. She feared that the minds of those who saw her may suddenly snap, crackle and pop and spiral into madness. Consequently, Alice found herself utilising the path of entrance into the library used by all fictional characters; the book return slot.
The book return slot went straight on like a tunnel for quite a while, and then spiralled down suddenly, so suddenly, in fact, that both Alice and Emily found themselves without even a moment in time to consider stopping their descent before falling down what seemed to be a very deep well.
Perhaps they fell slowly, or perhaps the book return slot was very deep indeed, for both Emily and Alice had plenty of time as they fell further and further down to look around at their surroundings, and to ponder what may happen next in this strange scenario. Alice found herself overwhelmed by a peculiar sense of déjà vu, leading her to sigh to herself and to exclaim, as if she were a cliché character in a children’s movie, “Oh dear! Here we go again.” Alice, as she looked about, found herself under-whelmed by her current surroundings, perhaps even bored by the repetitive nature of it all. Emily, on the other hand, was simultaneously both delirious with excitement and frozen with fear as she looked about, noticing that the sides of this book return slot, in all its seemingly never-ending glory, were filled with cupboards and bookshelves. Fuelled by her own curiosity, (which would surely be a problem for the plot were she a cat and not a girl), Emily stretched her arms out as far as she could, and grabbed a book from a shelf as she passed it; it was labelled “The Death of the Author,” but to her great disappointment it was an essay; she was too careful and polite to feel comfortable dropping it and potentially scattering and ripping all the pages, and so she held it with a firm grip. Alice, who was still quite apathetic about her surroundings, was examining her nails in great detail, seemingly enthralled by their appearance, and was also wondering what all Emily’s fussing and bothering was about.
Down.
Down.
Down.
“Well!” declared Emily, who was by now uncomfortable with Alice’s silence as her only company, “we surely have fallen quite a remarkable distance, haven’t we? Do you think this fall shall ever come to an end? In fact, I find it quite remarkable that we have even managed to fall so far down a book return slot. How is that possible?” Although she had never had the impetus to read Alice in Wonderland, Emily had indeed, like almost all children in our modern age, watched the movie adaptation. Emily thought herself to be rather clever, and although her school teachers recognised that she was intelligent, there was undoubtedly some disparity between her own views of her intellect and theirs. However, she could not help but notice the strange similarities between the lengthy fall she and Alice were currently enduring, and the fall Alice had faced in her original story.
Down.
Down.
Down.
Emily was adamant that the fall would never end, whilst Alice knew that even if it were to take a while, it would end nevertheless. Suddenly, as if some transcendent figure had anticipated our characters boredom, a humungous and hefty book, a combined encyclopaedia and dictionary, came crashing down on poor Alice’s head, when suddenly, thump! Thud! Alice and Emily tumbled down onto a heap of books and paper, and with that, their fall had ended.
Alice’s head was still aching from the book that had fallen on top of her head. Emily, however, was not hurt a bit, and leapt to her feet in no time at all: she looked up, but she struggled to notice anything but darkness, and so she looked down instead, and at first glance the floor looked to be covered in strange, asymmetrical tiles of multiple colours, but when she bent over and inspected them closely, she ascertained that they were in fact books that had been scattered all over the entire floor. It was at this point that Emily realised that she was still holding that essay she plucked from the shelf, and so she delicately placed it on a nearby shelf. Alice groaned and murmured, then she began to speak. “Golly gosh! What a terrible decision this has been! Oh, how I wish we had entered this place in a more conventional manner. Surely no Author would admit to writing me in the state I am in now… What a fussy and whiney character they would assume I‘ve become! I guess I should‘ve taken more care, I should’ve clung to his writings.”
Emily interrupted Alice. “Hush your whining. You’re very cynical, Alice, did you know that? Besides, look over there.” Emily pointed towards the opposite end of the long corridor they had found themselves in. This corridor, in fact, was so long that Emily was unable to see where it ended. “What am I meant to be looking at, exactly?” asked Alice, who was quite upset by Emily’s rudeness and saw nothing significant about this corridor. “There’s nothing there,” continued Alice. Emily put her palm to her face, and reluctantly explained what she was pointing out. “It looks like it shrinks. How could you be so unobservant as to fail to notice that?”
Agitated by Emily’s hoity-toity attitude, Alice smugly pointed out that of course it would look smaller at the other end of the corridor, that it must be a trick of the eye, and that everyone who has ever looked at an artwork should know this. “It’s called perspiration. It’s especially important in art.” (Alice was completely ignorant of the fact that the word she was searching for was “perspective” and that “perspiration” merely refers to fluid excreted by ones sweat glands.) She began walking down the corridor to prove her point, and was consequently quite surprised when she found her head colliding with the ceiling after only a few paces. “Oh dear. It would appear you were quite right Emily,” said Alice indignantly…. “Oh dear! I wonder where this strange place leads,” continued Alice curiously, and so she moved onto her hands and knees and began to crawl down the corridor, whilst beckoning Emily to follow suit. ( Alice’s intensely curious nature is quite renowned, leading me to assume that she is thankful that she is not a cat. I assume also, that the reader is aware of the dangers associated with mixing cats and curiosity.)
For a while they crawled, crawled and crawled, until the ceiling and the floor had become too close together to crawl any further. Alice looked up, and although she was dismayed by how much further the corridor seemed to go, when she strained her eyes she could faintly make out a sign on the door situated at the corridor’s end. The sign read, “DO NOT DISTURB. CREATIVE GENIUS AT WORK.”
“That’s odd,” started Alice, “for what kind of genius would ever be so small?” Emily was frightened by the strangeness she faced in this queer place, and scurried away back to the larger side of the corridor. “I want to go home, I want go home!” exclaimed Emily. So quickly did she scurry along backwards, that she failed to notice the table that had appeared behind her, and found herself tumbling over it and onto her head. A loud thud accompanied her fall, as well as a sharp, high-pitched cling-clang. “This place is all wrong. Everything is weird and topsy-turvy!” yelled Emily. Alice also moved back to the larger side of the corridor, and helped her frightened friend back to her feet.
In doing so, Alice noticed that there was a small bottle next to Emily’s feet, which was quite unusual since there was certainly no bottle there when they first went past. However, it did explain the cling-clang sound that occurred as Emily tripped over the table, (“which certainly was not here before,” said Emily), and round the neck of the bottle was a paper label, with the words “Do not drink me” raggedly written on it in obscurely sized letters.
“Do you think it’s poison?” asked Emily, who had enough common-sense to think it a bad idea to drink anything that explicitly states that it should not be consumed. Alice, however, had dealt with just enough equally bizarre situations and weirdly labelled bottles to decide that it would surely not be life threatening to drink it. And so Alice said, “Nope. I think that it would absolutely okay to drink. It must be reverse psychology. Why fill up a bottle with a liquid if not to drink it? We can only not drink it, if we entertain the possibility of drinking it. It’s surely a test. If it’s purpose has nothing to do with it’s consumption, then why mention anything about drinking it to begin with? Let alone on the bottle itself!” Once she explained her twisted logic and assumptions, Alice grabbed the bottle, ripped out the cork and curiously took a sip. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “What?!” enquired Emily frantically, assuming the worst. Alice took another sip, and “Oh!” said Alice once more. “What? What!? What?!” yelled Emily.
“It’s really tasty.”
A brief silence, in which the two girls nervously stared at one another, followed Alice’s consumption of the oddly-labelled drink. Emily was expecting something horrible and surreal to happen to Alice, “perhaps she shall grow and grow, until she is as tall as a building. Or perhaps she will shrink down to the size of a mouse, which would surely be frightening, as people could easily squish you under their feet if you were that small,” thought Emily to herself. They were fairly close to accepting the drink’s normality when the rumbling noises began. Alice said something like; “I feel a bit light-headed, maybe I should lie down…” And all of a sudden there was a terrible roar, and the walls began to shake and rattle in the wind that flew down the corridor towards the tiny door, which looked much more frightening than it did before. And a voice was screaming; “Holy Jesus! What are these long-haired creatures?”
Then it was quiet again. The small door had been opened and Lewis Carroll peered through it, to see what all the fuss was about. “What on earth are these girls doing here?” he muttered, observing the two little girls with only one eye visible and the rest of his face obscured by the walls surrounding the small door.
“Good grief, I guess you shouldn’t have had a drink from that bottle!” cried Emily, “this is total madness.” Carroll snarled and then Alice cried out; “Oh crap! Emily, look at that eye…” but at the same time Carroll was ranting and raving; “What are you doing here?” the questions continued quickly, as did Alice’s previous statement. And so poor Emily, trying to decipher what each of them were on about, could only make out, “Oh Emily, are you that I?” (And I assure you this was a difficult question for her to answer; she was not even aware of the eye peering through the doorway yet.) Emily sat there, dazed and confused, trying to figure out which “I” she was being asked if she was, and what was wrong with Alice’s voice, the deep tone of which she assumed could be attributed to the strange liquid. She just knew that it wasn’t safe to drink from that bottle.
It was then that Emily noticed the eye. “What the flip?” she cried, and as she jumped back in terror the eye focused on her; it widened suddenly like a diverging train track and stared her down. The rumbling noises began again – Emily heard strange banging and clanging noises come from down the corridor – and a voice boomed, “Juvenile delinquents! I don’t believe it. Who are you? Do you know Dodgson?”
“Dodgson? Dodgson who?” shouted Emily, as she slowly backed further away from the tiny corner of the corridor. Alice crouched quietly behind a tower of books. The voice said, “if you don’t know Dodgson, then why are you here?” Alice looked back guiltily at Emily, who hadn’t had time to hide, and thus had to deal with the big, freaky eye and the deep, booming voice.
An uneasy silence followed; it was almost awkward – the kind of silence that is accompanied by a sense of nostalgia harking back to the simpler days of primary school and the frightening voice of an overzealous teacher, who screams (in a stress-induced state of madness) that you’ve “done the Wrong thing!” Emily was quite accustomed to such silences. It was typical of Emily to, during such undesirably quiet moments, to smile tentatively, charming onlookers with her childish cuteness… and with that, both parties would be at ease. This was an exception, for the silence was unexpectedly broken by soft footsteps and the creaking, creaking sound of an old door opening. The sound startled both the girls. Previously, they had failed to even notice the presence of this door – they had both been too distracted by the other, much smaller door at the end of the queerly shrinking corridor. This particular door was larger than the other one, and was situated only a few dozen steps behind them.
They turned around, frightful and anxious. Creak, creak, moan. The door opened further and further. The shadows around the door were long and dark, and a silhouette danced across the floor; its hands long and claw-like, its head appeared exaggeratedly large amidst the messy, birds nest hair resting on it’s crown. The looming and lanky shadow edged closer and closer, until the figure was no longer obscured by darkness. A short, stout and scruffily dressed man stood in the doorway. His face was long and drooped downwards, adorned with a pair of oversized coke-bottle glasses – the kind Buddy Holly wore, only this pair was far too large and wide for such a skinny face. The glasses made him resemble a beetle of some kind, and attributed to his generally timid demeanour. His name was Charles Dodgson, and he was a complicated character. To an extent, he has become a controversial figure.
Dodgson’s eyes narrowed, and he peered curiously at the two girls. In a very polite tone, he said, “And just who exactly do you think you two are? Why are you here? This is my private library, and only guests I‘ve invited are allowed to be here!” A terrible silence engulfed the girls. Dodgson looked away from the two girls, and over towards the door at the opposite end of the corridor. Both girls expected him to be shocked by the weird eye peering through the door, perhaps even scared. The girls followed Dodgson’s gaze, and were bewildered by the door now being shut – both the eye and the voice were gone. Dodgson, however, knew something about what lurked behind that tiny little door that is yet to be revealed to Alice and Emily. He, you see, knew that it was merely the entrance to Lewis Carroll’s room. It was as it looked – a door, nothing more and nothing less. Carroll, however, was a curious creature.
Alice suddenly found the entire situation to be overwhelming. “Hey, excuse me, I need some help. I’m looking for my Author. Who are you? Can you help?” asked Alice. She had spoken very loudly and clearly, attempting to stress the urgency she thought the situation had. Emily’s eyes darted about apprehensively. Dodgson, raising his eyes at young Alice, said, “Isn’t the real question who you are?”
“Me?,” asked Alice. Dodgson nodded.
“I’m Alice,” she said.
“Alice who? You have to have more than one name. I know an Alice. She’s a lovely girl,” remarked Dodgson.
“Uh…What do you mean? I’m just Alice,” replied Alice, who was quite confused by Dodgson’s question.
“Well hey, Just Alice, I’m Charles Dodgson. What’re you doing here?” Alice was unsure what to say; she was struggling to keep up with the constant stream of questions.
Emily spoke; the confusing conversation had started to irritate her…she had endured enough insanity at this point. “Gosh darn it! Can someone just tell what in the blazes is going on here? This is undoubtedly the most whacked library I’ve ever entered. Get me out of here, or explain what on earth is going on…that door, for example – down the end of the corridor – what the heck is that thing? And the eye! The eye! And the voice; the voice most intolerable and omniscient and loud!” (Emily was unaware that once again, she had chosen the incorrect word, and that the word she was searching for was, in fact, “ominous.”) She was about to continue ranting and raving, when Alice interjected, “Stop it. I think you forget that this isn’t about you. It’s about me. I’m trying to find my -”
“Shut up. I just want to know what’s going on.”
“Oh, and you think I don’t? Surely you realise that’s ridiculous.”
“Well, I’m also here. I was just trying to help you when I was unexpectedly roped into this madness.”
Dodgson interrupted. “Quiet in the library! Even as children you should be aware that one is quiet in a library,” he said. He pointed his index finger towards Emily, “You, Just Alice’s friend, you’re being far too loud. As the librarian, I will have to ask you to leave unless you maintain socially acceptable behaviour. I am a man of few rules, and so the only behavioural prerequisite I ask you to adhere to is that you be quiet.”
Emily flew into a rage. “I don’t care, tell me what the heck is going on and then I’ll happily leave“, she said, and then she pointed out that the corridor got smaller and smaller, and that whatever was in that room was yelling a lot and frightening the living daylights out of both herself and Alice. Dodgson simply replied, “That’s Lewis Carroll’s room. The corridor get’s smaller and smaller because he get’s bigger and bigger. But this is your final warning, be quiet or you’ll have to leave. I don’t like to disturb Carroll, he‘s a genius, you know. ” Alice, being the polite girl she is, respects her elders and so she asked, in what was barely more than a whisper, what it was that made him a genius.
“He writes books,” replied Dodgson.
“What sort of books?” asked Alice. Emily was not convinced that this constituted genius.
“Children’s books,“ he replied. “Alice in Wonderland, Through The Looking Glass. Perhaps there is more, but I‘m not too sure. He is wonderful and he is gifted but he is also quite tragically, insane.”
“Woah, hold the phone!” shouted Emily, once again disregarding the rules of Dodgson’s library. “Alice, that’s your book! That’s it. I’m sure. My sister was reading it when I saw you run past. I remember having looked at the picture Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland… Lewis Carroll must be your Author.”
“You’re both mad,” said Dodgson, “get a grip on reality girls. And get out of my library. Neither of you are welcome any longer.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said Dodgson, “otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”
Alice failed to see how this proved she was mad; however, before she could articulate an argument to the contrary, Dodgson suddenly scampered away. Alice, who had by now been somewhat desensitised to all thingsweird and wonderful, thought that there was nothing particularly odd about this display, nor did she think it without precedent to hear Dodgson say to himself, over and over again, “Oh dear, oh dear, I must be mad. Be mad I must. Must I be mad?” He disappeared through the door from which he had originally entered. Emily and Alice followed.
They had entered another long corridor. They were roughly halfway between each end. Doors of all different shapes and sizes lined the walls, which were in turn adorned with books, books, and even more books.
Dodgson, however, was nowhere to be seen.
This corridor, oddly enough, was exactly unlike the last one in a single and strange way; this corridor became bigger and bigger the further on it went. Neither young girl could fathom how this was possible. “If it get’s bigger and bigger, surely it get’s smaller and smaller from the other end,” thought Alice. Emily verbalised her agreement. There was a broken mirror decorating the door which Alice had just closed, and while she stood there looking at her fractured reflection, she decided some disgusting delinquent must have vandalised it; “it’s broken and some naughty child has scribbled all over it. They must have terrible handwriting, or be from another country that uses a different language, for I cannot read a word of this,” said Alice. She said this more for her own benefit than Emily‘s. The mirror was adorned with the following.
CAROLLWOCKY
‘Twas represfictive; both untrue and uncouth.
‘Twas riddled with oniony layerings,
And obfuscated by portmanteau.
So “Why?” frightful nonsense sings.
Emily puzzled over where she picked up this piece of superstition and what language this peculiar message was written in for some time, but at last a bright thought struck her. “Why, this is not a foreign language – it’s not French, at the very least. Of course! I know what it is – it’s a looking-glass language. If we find another mirror, and hold it up to the glass, the word’s will go the right way again!”
This was the poem that the two girls read.
CAROLLWOCKY
‘Twas represfictive; both untrue and uncouth.
‘Twas riddled with oniony layerings,
And obfuscated by portmanteau.
So “Why?” frightful nonsense sings.
‘Beware the Carrollwock, my son!
The mask he dons, his fake veneer!
Beware the Authors words, and shun
The frumious balladeer!’
He took his subversive pen in hand:
For paragraphs his foe he sought -
So he rested by stanza number three,
And stood awhile in thought.
And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Carrollwock, with his nonce words,
Declared as silently as he could,
That all of this was just absurd!
To the beasts plight, he held the pen tight
And scribbled all over the Carrollwock’s name.
And with that motion, that poisonous potion,
The Carrollwock fellapsed in shame.
‘Twas represfictive; both untrue and uncouth.
‘Twas riddled with oniony layerings,
And obfuscated by portmanteau.
So “Why?” frightful nonsense sings.
“It seems very nice, almost pretty in a strange way,” said Alice when she had finished reading it, “but it’s ratherhard to understand!” (The fact of the matter was that Alice merely refused to admit, even to herself, that she understood nothing of what she had just read.) “It seems to fill my head with all sorts of thoughts – only I’m unsure what they are! However, somebody vandalised something: that’s obvious, at the very least -”
“But oh!” said Emily, suddenly grabbing Alice’s attention, “if we don’t make haste we shall never find Dodgson again, and we need to find him so you can find your Author. You have things to learn, and questions to be answered. We’ll have to look through every room, and that will surely take forever.” They were out of the corridor in a moment, and disappeared through a door labelled, “Carroll’s Cafeteria.” Both girls reckoned that, despite an Author being akin to a God, that Carroll would surely still need to eat at some point. Using this logic, his own cafeteria seemed a sensible location to begin their search.
* * * * * * * * * * *
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