making sense of nonsense

a thought/first impression after reading alice part 1 (adventures in wonderland that is; through the looking glass and what alice found there is next)...

for me, and for many adults i venture to presume, reading (or even viewing) Alice in Wonderland is a sort of mind fuck. Carroll bombards you with nonsensical characters, verse, situations, symbolism, metaphor, and song. 

little is crystal clear, all is intriguing because you know there's truth and subtext buried in there (probably, well at least i hope so). and even though everything is nonsensical, the images are so vivid, you can't step away. you are wow'd just like alice is. 

and what i love is, at some point, (well hopefully), while you're reading-- maybe it's when you reach the lobster quadrille, at which point everything is so far gone at this point it just get more amusing then anything else-- at some point you're reading and you forget all the mumbo-jumbo close-reading BS you learned in college and you just enjoy the mad story exactly for what it is. 

& it's all make-believe. a dream. lewis carroll has this beautiful mini-chapter at the very end of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland from the pov of her sister, and her sister admires Alice's imagination...and even for a brief second she can hear and see herself in alice's very own wonderland world....but in a flash, when the wind brushes through the grass, she remembers her place in society and how make believe is not the here&now. how it all vanishes when the scent of reality sets in. 

her sister is us. us today. we flirt with make-believe for a half-hour sitcom, okay maybe a 2 hour movie or a play. but that's it. and we leave our make-believing up to a lot of OTHER people. we certainly don't really do it ourselves. Isn't that sad? 

i felt like a child when i was reading parts of this book. i felt like i was 5 years old again, playing dress up in my basement, dancing to funky music, playing with my animals, creating this vivid, real, very very very real and serious (but totally ridiculous but SERIOUS to me) world. i had companions, i had adventures, i had quarrells, i had highs and lows and tea and cake and sword fights and dragon duels ninja turtles and the batman soundtrack all in my basement. 

alice is a little girl in her backyard. the caucus race, the pepper, the cat, the flamingos, the king&queen of hearts, the rabbit, the hookah, the mock turtle et cetra, are all apart of her imagination. 

playing make believe as a kid, or with kids, is completely nonsensical. if you're adding sense to something you're not being a kid. sensical is not make-believe. alice in wonderland is total make-believe. i think to some degree is shouldn't be overly hashed out or critiqued. it should be taken for what it is. with less thinking and more dancing. 

will you won't you will you won't you join-the-dance??

god. i love it.