Our Alice

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

I can imagine what that boat trip with little Alice Liddell was like.  It seemed innocent enough, but that little trip probably changed her life forever.  I remember Billy Gray telling me stories of episodes from The Twilight Zone as a small child.  I saw the actual shows, but the way he told stories was way more effective, which means scary.  The thing is, I think Billy taught me lessons in narration.   Even though I knew how the story ended, the journey to the end of that narrative was the most important to me.  So as I mentioned, I can understand why Alice was so entertained by the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's story, but what amazes me is how Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, came up with such a tale on such short notice. 

When Dodgson told the story to the three little girls on the boat - Alice and her two sisters, he was trying to amuse them, perhaps out of their boredom of taking this specific boat trip from Folly Bridge near Oxford to the village of Godstow.  The story is about a bored young girl by the name of Alice.  I always felt that boredom has a role in creating and doing art.  Speaking for myself, I find boredom a great source of inspiration. When Alice requested Dodgson write down the story so she could have it, she gave him the idea of making a book.  Eventually, Dodgson gave Alice the manuscript of “Alice’s Adventure Under Ground, ” with him doing the illustrations himself.  He inscribed her “A Christmas Gift to a Dear Child in Memory of a Summer’s Day.” The version he gave to her was 15,500 words, but he went on to do another version of the narration that’s 27,500 words, where he added the Cheshire Cat and the Mad-Tea Party scene.  

The beauty of Dodgson’s work is how he mixed up the world of pure fantasy. Yet it was inspired by natural science.   In a way, he must have been like Sherlock Holmes in figuring out the narrative by what was around him at the time.  Nature usually brings me nothing but dread, but here is a story based on a specific type of nature that, to my taste, is a perfect cocktail of a book.  The book works like a fantastic Rube Goldberg machine, which is always elaborate machinery or system to do specific things.  As a writer, I want to explore my world in such a fashion that I tear up my room and then put it back together again.  But, of course, all under my power of observation, which is entirely subjective. 

The TV show “Twilight Zone” greatly affected me as a child.  It was the first time I realized that there might be another sort of world besides the one I’m living in or on.  Billy’s telling me of the stories from the TV show profoundly influenced how I perceived the landscape that lay in front of me.  If you dig around or look at that world in a particular light, you may find another form of life or perhaps an entrance to another world.  I’m fascinated that the ‘other’ world of “Alice” was underground.  I think here of the sky or above the sky as being endless, but how far down does the earth's core go?  Surely it can’t be endless.  In my generation, it comes above, but perhaps in Lewis Carroll's era, the answer was placed under the ground.  I’m also intrigued by the thought that people are buried under the ground when they die.  Do death and mad-Tea parties go hand in hand?

Alice Liddell appeared to have a long and relatively normal life. Yet what must it have been like to be the model for one of the most prominent literary characters of all time?  The only thing I can compare what I imagine is her oddness of seeing copies of those books in a bookstore is seeing my father’s face on the Sgt. Pepper cover in gift shops.  It is part of me, but at the same time, it has nothing to do with me.  It is the property of someone else.  I have an emotional sense of ownership of that image, and Alice was the spark that led Dodgson to create his masterpiece.  Inspiration comes from all places, and once we know where it comes from, our lives are and will always be affected by the attention one gets that is not from us specifically but from being the son of the artist and her being on that boat trip, which changes everything.