Literary articles - Lewis Carroll 2024

In Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871)

Introduction

The visit of the human psyche in the world beyond the veil of established social or political harmony is one that has taken on various forms throughout time and it is also quite present in the later part of late antiquity. The underworld is a figurative rendition of the light which is encapsuled or trapped within certain illusory shapes or colors. The ‘salvation' or ‘deliverance' from the state of ignorance is accompanied with trespasses that pertain to the ‘coming of the pieces together'.

Lewis Carroll was fascinated with the playfulness of puzzles, puns, lists and riddles of various sorts. One of his main ‘cares' and consequently, careers, was to send and receive letters that would assure him of the well-being of his acquaintances. They would often contact him for supplying them with ideas and ‘entertainments'; he would admit that he wasn't capable of understanding the ‘meaning' of boredom and he took great interest in ‘entertaining' his female friends through wordplay and newly invented lexical and mathematical, in short – logically stimulating and oftentimes creatively refreshing inventions; on his side, Carroll cherished and nurtured his imagination and would esteem highly the presence and the spontaneity thereof of younger individuals.

Children during the Victorian Era are symbols, almost icons of certain purity or non-contaminated mentality. For Carroll, children were beyond symbolic, they were in a much more fluid connectivity with the world of ideas and they would often present him with dreamlike riddles, since in the child's mind, learning is often a process that necessitates a kind of playfulness or ‘participation', a longing for art which is immediately enacted. Charles Dodgson himself didn't grow up in an environment that either understood or cared to delve beyond the prescribed ‘modus operandi' of child care and development. He would be practically submerged in a world of austerity and rules. Therefore, despite memorizing and learning enormously through the classical mould of the established systems, he would take little ‘gratification' or joy out of it. It could be rightfully suggested that he employed the larger part of the second half of his life as an adult writer, explorer, socialite etc., in the direction of linking or ‘bridging' the abyss, between what is rationally ideated and what is experienced within the ‘shell' of the ‘citizen'. It is even known that Dodgson preferred to remain anonymous whenever it came to public exhibitions of skills and creativity. In fact, he was on a continuous quest of making amends with the split between the persona and the inner voice; between the ‘noisy' and the ‘silent' counterparts of consciousness, or between the left and the right hemispheres of the biological organ of the brain, to put it in more scientific terms.

If he refused to ‘synchronize' his inner quest with the public's approval or with his image as a ‘seeker' and a ‘mystic', it would have to do with his pronounced involvement, on both personal and social levels - with the life of the soul or with the investigation of the ‘psychic' factor. As it is explained in a site that can be found online :

“Dodgson was an enthusiastic charter member all his life of the Society for Psychical Research, and his library contained dozens of books on the occult. He believed in the reality of extra sensory perception and psychokinesis. In an 1852 letter, he speaks of a pamphlet on thought reading published by the Society for Psychical Research, which strengthened his convictions that psychic phenomena are genuine.

“All seems to point to the existence of a natural force, …, by which brain can act on brain. I think we are close on the day when this shall be classed among the known natural forces, and its lands tabulated, and when the scientific sceptics - who always shut their eyes till the last moment to any evidence that seems to point beyond materialism - will have to accept it as a proved fact in nature ”.

His position as a clergyman made it difficult for him to express his beliefs in anything but allegoric form, as such we see in his books the summation of his thoughts, but in story form. He seems terrified of being ‘found out', but at the same time doesn't want to lie, so when publicly asked by a reader about the Hunting of the Snark said:

“I'm very much afraid I didn't mean anything but nonsense! Still you know, words mean more than we mean to express when we use them, so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer meant. So whatever good meanings are in the book, I'm very glad to accept as the meaning of the book ”.

Nonsense, then, or chaos, becomes the central point of convergence of the literary work itself. In the study of David Day ‘ Alice's AdventuresinWonderland Decoded :The Full Text of Lewis Carroll's Novel with its Many Hidden Meanings Revealed ', we are told that Carroll took enormous interest in the logic term of probability and it allowed him to compose his literary works on a basis that would assure the logical lawfulness of the literary structure, in spite of the curious or ‘nonsensical' encounters –

‘Lewis Carroll applied the duality principle to literature. He reasoned that if the underlying structure of his writing was mathematically logical, the linguistc structure would retain its logical integrity – and the results would be ‘as sensible as a dictionary' (as he wrote in Through The Looking-Glass).

However, although grammatically logical, its message is usually absurd and comic. For, as Carroll the author – and Dodgson the logician – knew as well as any comic writer, the great secret of nonsense literature is that it is extremely sensible. That is, nonsense is humorous only if it works within a logical framework.'

When Carroll approves of ‘good meanings' that are found or deciphered by the reader, in the plural, this already makes for a generous verbalization of the author's lack of attachment (to mesmerize the audience) with definite frames and dogmas (what he may have had to individually face and suffer). Literature began to take on the importance that it has accumulated over time, for originally supplying the higher social classes and the clergy with stored ‘memory' or with ‘evidence' of a reality of the imagination and with human ingenuity which is subjective but is on its path toward perfected expression; literature as it has evolved and the forms it has taken on, slowly turned into an experimentation with the ‘stored' or cultivated sciences and arts, into a land of intertextuality wherein texts often seem to interlock or to address each other, either thematically, mimetically or melodiously.

The classical Western educational establishment would employ systems that would seek to ‘insert' the inquiring ‘aspirant' in the ‘tradition' of transmission which after the introduction of Aristotelian logic accentuated the formal or formative, rather than the ‘holistic' or sacred significance of growing into an adult member of the demos. However, Carroll's innate character would ‘grasp' the metaphysical and would strive to incorporate genuine or ‘conscious participation' in what the mind is presented with. We are led to understand how Dodgson's upbringing allowed or paved the way for setting into motion his combinative thinking. The first book “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland” was actually ‘manufactured' or produced as a gift or an expected offering from Carroll to the Liddell sisters. This stands out as a point of interest because we are again observing the stimulus for his creativity which is more organic than a result of a particularly self-oriented need for gratification of an ambition for recognition in the literary and/or public sphere; in other words, it is out of the imposed circumstances, of necessity that it would appear the stories would have never come into existence if it weren't for his child friends.

What Carroll projects is a tableau, a labyrinthine depiction of the complexity and the sophistication of the structure of the veil and its elating ‘textuality' or texture(s). Both the first and the second works of his with Alice as the heroine, are composed of twelve parts and this in itself is part of an ever more symbolic ‘storytelling' of the ‘clocklike' composition of the cosmic arena. From such a perspective, the Victorian epoch is given a ‘twist'; he practically denies the pre-established hierarchical outlook through exploring the neutral gaze of the ‘unified' psyche which is linked with impartiality.

There are various ‘keys' and clues all along Alice's path or that of the psyche. Usually, human conscience takes on the archetype of a young maiden who travels through the four elements, who learns to distinguish between good and evil and is also on a quest of re-conciling or repairing a kind of a prim cut, a division which causes the plot to turn upside down. Whether it concerns the dismemberment of Osiris, the descent of Inanna or of Persephone, the crucifixion and resurrection of the Christ, we are faced with a spiritual context that has mythological aspects and transcendent or supersensible orientation.

Actually, the human psyche is deliberately undergoing various trespasses, there is a calling, which is persistent and is to be fulfilled if the inner potentiality or plurality should be well distributed and resolved. Making amends with both the neutral and/or metaphysical aspects of language is a task that can be beheld in Carroll's work; it resonated with his own maneuvering in the land of dialectics and he continued to ‘hum' along with the melody of an eternal song of ‘innocence and experience'. In a way both Blake and Carroll were criticizing or disapproving of their respective experiences of English status quo. The relinking of word and image was Blake's quest to an important degree, too. In an article published in 2001 by the New York Times entitled “Fearful Symmetry”, the author Margo Jefferson comments on the formatting and the careful participation of both Blake and Carroll in their crafts –

‘I wish all readers could see reproductions of this art when they turn to Blake's writing. It had the odd effect of sending me back to Lewis Carroll's ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.'' Not the 1865 edition, though, with the now famous illustrations by John Tenniel; I took out my facsimile copy of the 1862 manuscript. Called ''Alice's Adventures Under Ground,'' this version was written in Carroll's (or Charles Dodgson's) own hand and accompanied by his own drawings.

There's such revealing pleasure and melancholy here. We feel we are really with Carroll as he devises these entertainments for 10-year-old Alice Liddell. His writing is so precise, so perfectly aligned on the page that one imagines he used a ruler. (It could be a choice on your own computer font program: the Victorian letter and manuscript look.) His illustrations are less expert, less deceptively realistic (ironically scientific, let's say) than Tenniel's. But they are at least as charming, more so at times. Alice is a dreamier figure here. Her hair is looser and her little pinafore is gone. The animals are more eccentric and more touching: Tenniel's White Rabbit is pompous; Carroll's is high-strung. And Alice's encounters with these various creatures -- the animals she swims through the pool of tears with, the hookah-smoking caterpillar -- look more fantastic but more intimate too. Alice is not making her way boldly but primly through Wonderland; she is finding her way through the underground of the imagination.'

I)The Hermeneutic Circle and The Hypnosis

Indeed Alice is to find her escape from the labyrinthine construct; however, it is a realization that is orchestrated throughout the maturation on both individual and collective level(s). The de-hypnotization which is executed referes to the coming at one mind or at an alignment with the lower and the higher natures; in the end, she understands how to plant her feet on the ground of a genuine reflexivity that has sprung from inside of confusion, from the muddy conditioning that haunts both the overland and the underworld.

A famous proverb from the Bible urges aspirants to be wise as serpents and benevolent or meek as doves. There are many puns that allude to the image of the serpent in ‘ Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'. In chapter five “Advice from a Caterpillar', for instance, Alice is mistaken by the pigeon for a serpent :

'Serpent!' screamed the Pigeon.

'I'm not a serpent!' said Alice indignantly. 'Let me alone!'

'Serpent, I say again!' repeated the Pigeon, but in a more subdued tone, and added with a kind of sob, 'I've tried every way, and nothing seems to suit them!'

Human conscience is highly evolved for its ability to distinguish or to contemplate the concept of good and evil. Alice experiences the sensation of injustice when being accused, or being seen or compared with a serpent. The symbol of the serpent however is primarily related to treasures and with wisdom. In the Hermetic Egyptian scriptures the illustration of the genesis of reality is painted through the serpentine motives. In the Hindu tradition as well, the symbol of the circulating energetic ‘stream' or the ‘kundalini' is represented through the serpentine ‘matrix'; that is, the very ‘pulsing' wave is so often employed, because it is in the shape of the letter “S”; in other words, the curved or the illusory quality of the reality of appearances and of changeability, is intimately connected with this symbol and the letter “s” itself.

While in denial of the sovereign Word or the heritage of living knowledge, the bearer of understanding, the character suffers a ‘plurality', a ‘dissociation' which produces numerous projections that fight with each other.

This is how in Wonderland, impermanence or changeability must be ‘seized' in order do be ‘transcended'. For if Alice is to come forth unchained from her ‘fallen' state or ‘wretchedness' she is called to be re-united within the primordial or original Being, which is more faithful to the divine image since it directs or navigates thoughts, perceptions and action through the perspective of the all-encompassing whole. This is also an archetypal poetic state, a space wherein speech is intimately related with integrated emotion and corresponding action(s); a ‘meditative' or ‘philosophical' state, in other words, the primordial awareness is harmonized or in service to the intelligible realm, rather than in perpetual fear or avoidance of the transcendent reality.

Carroll interprets this anagogic or vertical line of movement, while he is also renovating or reanimating this scheme. His is the purpose of depicting through the combination of fable, fantasy and humor, the unending journey of the Oversoul, that seeks deliverance and it is through admitting nonsense as a possibility that he virtually dismisses or annihilates the concept as such. Carroll when interviewed stated that ‘good meanings' or good interpretations of ‘sense' are always appreciated; nonsense is precisely ‘detected' by a ‘projector' or an ‘observer' who suffers defects; it is a matter of disengagement but primarily of disenchantment; thee revolutionary psyche which moves along the vertical path is on the contrary, already always enchanted and it grows through ‘leaps' of faith or ‘leaps' of ideation – a certain disposition is at hand, an intentionality for the de-cluttering or ‘synthesizing' of the ‘gibberish' of the ‘political animal' or the ‘intellectual animal'; the concept of ideal or of spiritual growth is presupposed or pointed to. When it comes to the ‘horizontal' or ‘trivial' line it has been over and over again by Oscar Wilde, as well as by Carroll, quite subtly so. The state which relies on inertia which is generated as it ensures prence of certain models of beaviour is the dense pool wherein immeasurable treasures are to be ‘covered'. The horizontal ‘dimension' is deemed the ‘right' or the ‘secure' one, it is involved with performing rites and scenarios that organize and/or direct mass events and ‘happenings'. Between these two ‘dimensions' occur most of the narratives, the conflicts and out of this tension new forms of vision can be born and new parameters can emerge. Alice herself strives to unite the space of discovery with clarity of vision. In the same manner are portrayed other famous literary polar opposites such as Don Quixote and Sancho Pansa, the shapes and the roles of the characters are already speaking before they enact their ‘inherited' potentialities. Oscar Wilde satirizes the nostalgic melancholy which seems to animate the English social arena. Many of his stories and plays target or expose the stagnant mood which is not only a poison to spiritual rejuvenation, but it is also applauded and is provoking the laughter of all the classes ‘the only really safe name is Ernest'

Shakespeare, too, relied and reflected on the ingrained polarity within the psyche of individuals and entertained all the classes through uniquely presented scenes of comic tragedy. However, inherent in the scripts and the staging of these ‘meditations' are certain observations on the genesis of language, its unfolding and its ability to only ‘cover' certain blankness of expression, or to convey and to truly ‘speak' or to serve as a tool for ‘transmuting' or ‘saving the appearances'.

There is according to Scholastic thought an order in language which is exemplified with names; in other words, ‘names' also designate or are composed of ‘presence' which also is conceived of as ‘the soul'. “ Saving the appearances ” is a Platonic term which Owen Barfield borrowed in the twentieth century to comment on the necessity of ‘ conscious participation' which he suggests is making for a coherent or enlivening experience of the ‘texture' of reality. The Scholastic tradition turns into a reason for abstraction as well; there are many instances when universal concepts are thought of as ‘ mere names' in the aspect of modern thinking especially throughout the nineteenth century. In a chapter entitled ‘ The Texture of Medi Thought' , Barfield argues that –

For us, the characters in an allegory are personified abstractions but for them the man of the Mddle Ages, Grammar or Rhetoric, Mercy or ‘Daunger' were real to begin with simply because they were ‘names'.

Further on we read ‘ to learn about the true nature of words was at the same time to learn about the true nature of things.'

Perhaps the usage made of satire or the effect of satire is effective in Carroll's and Wilde's inventions, mainly in the direction of pointing toward the gap that has been open between the ‘etiquette' and the messages that are to be circulated. It seems that in the twentieth century, the issue with the ‘full reality' is even more contestable than throughout the Victorian era; short fiction or novels were common in the era of gradual industrialization and this question escalated which is to be ‘detected' fairly quickly when one has another look at Oxford during the formation of the Inklings Society and their concern when it came to that ‘ lost world (…) the word conceived in the mind is representative of the whole of that which is realized in thought' (Verbum igitur in mente conceptum est repraesentativum omnis ejus quod actu intelligitur' . However when it comes to memory or literature, there is an entire re-staging of the process of ‘going astray' and re-orientating the gaze.

The reflection upon symbolic pictures and various qualities can give way to the ‘re-member-ment' or the re-dressing of the ‘revolutionary' or the vertical/ascending/anagogic psyche. Such a Passover or a resuscitation from the ashes of ‘mere' abstractions, into ‘living knowledge' is a work on all levels of the individual's conscience. It is up to Alice to admit in her own way that she's the ‘islanded consciousness' which got lost at sea and it is up to her again to integrate the experiences of the state of dismemberment which is universal and embedded within the collective muthos , which happens to be a ‘code' and a ‘message' rather than a universe of mechanical modus operandi. In this bewildering broken mirror-land/wonderland/underworld, causes and consequences can change places, there is a disturbing eeriness in either the concept of belonging or in that of journeying; thought is gradually uncovered as the ultimate ‘time machine'. Whereas in Moby Dick for instance the ‘transfiguration' or the dying of the ‘old ways' is depicted as a battle which takes more than four hundred pages to be narrated, in “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland” the light is concentrated entirely on the shifting of Alice's understanding. There is a perpetual questioning, negating, affirming, over and over again, until the moment of her newly transmuted ideating is launched.

There is homo ludens or the unbegotten Verb of God - reference to an utterance which is not necessarily audible or graphic but is expressed through living and/or re-enlivening of existence. It has to do with the ‘faculties' which pertain to the soul; it is from the soul that the ‘body' or language takes its form. Similarly if there are any ‘deviations' or illusions of language, it is due to the splitting of the symbol of the being which is self-begotten and self-aware; homo ludens is both outside of the arena of characters and is encompassing all of them which can be linked with a royal connotation; the re-integrated ‘psyche' has to be androgynous because through having gained a level of mastery of the land of signs, it now participates in the art of invocation, or of re-configuration of reality on all levels.

In a sense, homo ludens has stepped into the realm of ‘encoding' or ‘transmuting' the natural disposition toward the ‘tableau' or the labyrinth of signatures and categories. Thus, we are also presented with the figure of the shaman or the ‘sun hero', through the notion of ‘mastering' and ‘upgrading' the staging or the performance itself, through involvement which is detached or disinterested. This reflexivity which is also attributed to the ‘graduate' or the ‘fully humane' is however to be deserved or to be organically comprehended, by means of letting go of a state which is more ghostly, or less conscious. Regarding the emerging studies during the Victorian era on topics such as determinism, natural law, responsibility and reflex in the social, personal and cosmic paradigms, Vanessa L. Ryan discusses reflex and responsibility in chapter three of her book entitled “Thinking Without Thinking”, primarily targeting George Eliot's exploration in the field of awareness –

“Critics have underemphasized George Eliot's interest in the reflexive. By focusing on her treatment of order (moral, cosmic, social), on her attraction to metaphors of the organism and the web, and on her interest in the connections of things, they tend to pay scant attention to her depiction of disorder. It has become a critical commonplace to address questions of personal responsibility and individual autonomy – important moments of choice- whether they be Maggie's decision to join Stephen in the boat, Gwendolen's decision to marry Grandcourt, Romola's decision to leave her husband, or Lydgate's choice to marry Rosamond. Yet Eliot highlights the corresponding difficulty of isolating intentionality and gaining self-knowledge. Her fiction shows her profound fascinations with the ways in which not just the body, but the mind, too, functions in involuntary, reflexive, and automatic ways. We tend to speak of our conscious decisions and our unconscious habits. In “ The Mill on the Floss” is whether involuntary action allows a place for volition and moral responsibility. Aside from repeatedly depicting moments when it is unclear whether an action is freely chosen or determined by circumstances, Eliot focuses on the question of whether actions driven by involuntary memory and automatic habits can be a force for social and moral integration.”

In distancing the gaze from direct non-reflexive response, a realization of the ‘zero point', or of ‘perfect compression' the sphere of origination of novelty and of action, which is vacuum-like permits a mental emancipation from inherited or ‘pre-scripted' impulses, instincts, etc. In other words it is a non-dimensional or atemporal domain of perception which offers the chance for ‘regenesis'. However, Victorians would engage in lengthy and multilayered debates such as the hunt for evidence of the immateriality of the soul, the hesitation between material and supernatural demonstrations, the ether, free energy and the ‘faculty of morality'. Intentionality was continuously confronted with passive spectatorship of one's own deeds or the role and challenge of decision-making. Nowadays, many studies dealing with the phenomena of zero-point energy, inertial propulsion (without reaction mass), and superconductivity seem to confirm and claim that –

“an observation made in one part of the universe may have an instantaneous, faster-than-light effect on the possibilities of a second observer a long distance away.”

This is what Lothar Schafter noted, regarding the importance of paradigms and what is envisioned in the Buddhist “Dhammapada” as the ‘yellow dress' or the garment of ‘free will', that is one who knows and practices their accord with the essence of things.

Lewis Carroll's “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass” also became a source of inspiration for naming various observations in the field of physics and electromagnetism. For instance, the term “non-orientable wormhole” would reverse the ‘chirality' of anything that passes through it (chirality is described as a phenomenon which is not identical to its mirror image). In the Victorian lexicon, determinism, the vortex atom, mesmerism, the entropy law and the re-discovery of the Alexandrian medical school's teaching on pneumatism, would all unite in a gasp in the face of reality and its techné and its hidden-ness; order and chaos are now considered by modern physics as interlocked or co-operating. The literary means of expression, were perhaps one of the most elegant and wittiest means/conductors of communicating the underlying ‘strangeness' of the epoch. In “The Mill on the Floss”, George Eliot ponders the past and its re-emergence in newly formed moments that present themselves to the heroine, Maggie who feels that –

“that she was being led down the garden among the roses, being helped with firm tender care into the boat, having the cushion and cloak arranged for her feet and her parasol opened for her (which she had forgotten) – all by this stronger presence that seemed to bear her along without any act of her own will, like the added self which comes with the sudden exalting influence of a strong tonic – and she felt nothing else. Memory was excluded.”

In the dream of Wonderland, ‘figures' or ‘figurants' form a web of riddles together, inside of which everyone dreams, and yet, Alice is the only one that ultimately awakens; the state of slavery to the inverted pole of human heart and imagination appears to participate in a re-adjustment of the psychic reservoir. In the Hebraic representation of the organization of the human corporeality, depicted through the Sephirothic tree, there are two triangles beneath the head or the crown of the tree, (of life) which is also ‘the kingdom within', wherein the principles or the paradigm of love and wisdom abide. The upper triangle signifies the human heart which is governed through the principles of harmony and truthfulness; in the inverted triangle, there is wrath or war which governs the sight and the direction of the actus of the individual.

In her book ‘ The Symbolism of the human body' Annick de Souzenelle observes how the process of ‘becoming human' is the tale of the people of Israel who seek to come back on ‘the right path' which is a matter of re-directing the faculty of willing toward the harmonious or divine understanding of creation and creatures or of Natura and how this story is biologically illustrated through the function or the malfunction of certain ‘regions' of the bodily organism. The individual may be healed only if considered as a participant within a universal context, and only partially or inadequately misdirected through the application of medicaments that only take into account the terrestrial or the ‘lower' nature of the human being. In Medi thought arts and sciences were depicted also as extensions or the higher dimensions of the presence of one unified divine intelligence which also found its expression in nature. There was a continuity that was defended and was regarded with reverence. Thus, we are again provided with the symbol of creation through ‘the rabbit hole' which is actually the title given to the first chapter in “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland”. It indicates a descent into a world of disorder, that is to say a dimension ‘under construction' wherein amidst the state of disorientation, both the worst and the best scenarios are part of the ‘variations' of the maestro who is supposed to have gone through a similar trial and to await the ‘overcoming ones'.

Conversely, through her numerous demands for ‘beheadings', the Red Queen is in practical discord with the reasons and ways of Life in principle, she's in perpetual combat with the inherent cosmic or universal ‘standards' so-to-speak. In Wonderland, where ‘curiosities' are often threatening, whenever Alice tries to understand or to offer help, the red queen is either resistant or simply dismissive of whatever she hears; she is in a way summoned through Alice's eye/I (or through the seeker's personhood) and this is a character that is in correspondence with the notion of justice which is misinterpreted or which has been deprived of understanding. There is but the apparel or the garment of justice that the kingdom of the red queen is interested in and this is the reason for its doom.

In David Day's study “ Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Decoded ” that he spent over two decades in completing, we are presented with evidence of the usage and application of mythological and mathematical language which communicates the essential journeying of the soul or living thought and its liberation as the supreme goal. Day states that Carroll's tale is atimecapsule , ridden with meaning(s) and allusions to both the semantic and the metaphysical or ethical components of Western tradition. Since Dodgson was a logician and a mathematician as well as one of the earliest amateur-photographer, he would use almost constantly mathematical allegories or metaphors which would take on playful and entertaining images and characters. Other plausible theories suggest that the Oxford scene was in a sense given a ‘twist' and was ‘encoded' as Wonderland, where all the members of the social spectrum of the academe at the time during which Dodgson inhabited the area were re-imagined and were given pseudonyms and another ‘secret existence' which fell in the region of fable and/or fantasy. But this was also Dodgson's essential manner of perception, because he also observed his character and inclinations and was more than susceptible to laugh and to enjoy the interplay of principles within particulars; it could be said that he was cradled in such an atmosphere that later on he couldn't help but formulate most of his conceptions and activities from both the ‘training' he was provided with and his intimate inclination for the life of the soul and its transcendent home. David Day observes the following significance of the number 42 in Wonderland and it being the ‘oldest rule in the book' and the intervention of Alice which we will later witness, can be read and understood ‘phenomenologically', too;

It could be argued that the Wonderland adventure begins and ends with 42. Under deep cover, the number can be found at the beginning of Alice's adventures, where, in Wonderland's great hall, she recits the multiplication table. As we have seen, it is a system that is suddenly foreign to her: “Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is – oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate!” As Alice says, “the Multiplication Table doesn't signify.”But as observed earlier, it signifies a great deal and reveals that this table essentially presents us with a problem based on scales of notation.

The Wonderland multiplication table is sound up to the 12-times level in base 39, however, once we progress to the 13 times level, to maintain the rule of this system, we must employ base 42. This proves to be fatal and the entire system thereafter collapses. It is an object lesson in what may result from any mathematical system that does not submit to rigorous testing and toward absolute proof.

As we have demonstrated in chapter 2, because of number 42 (as a base number in the Wonderland multiplication system), Alice is right to declare that she will ‘never get to twenty at that rate.' And neither will the King of Hearts: “Let the jury consider their verdict', the King said, for about the twentieth time that day.' But like Alice, the King never gets to twenty either. For here we find the fatal number 42 looms up once more, and brings all in Wonderland to a cataclysmic end.

It is by the authority of Rule 42 that the King attempts to expel Alice from the court. Alice disputes this, however, objecting that if Rule Forty-two is the ‘oldest rule in the book' as the King claims, ‘then it ought to be Number One.” And with this logic, she suddenly finds herself capable of overruling the King and Queen of Hearts.

How is this possible? And why, besides the King and Queen, is Alice the only one not ordered executed? Once again, Carroll is playing a word game, this time the world-within-the-word game that he often played in letters to his child friends. In one example, he suggests that although one may find ‘ink' in a ‘drink', it is not possible to find a ‘drink' in ‘ink'. In another, he explains that one may find ‘love' in a ‘glove', but none outside of it. Consequently, Alice is ultimately to overrule the King and Queen of Hearts when she discovers her true rank in this game: hidden within the word Alice, there is an Ace.

Reflecting on the notion of concepts and the production of many workable or valid ‘programs' that populate the collective psyche, can be linked with the world of numbers and Carroll was quite fond of it. With the two primal symbols – that of the zero and that of the straight line which is also known as the number one – we are presented with the syllable IO. It can be often seen as a circle split in two, in other words it visually renders the idea of a division, of two halves separated which also interpreted visually forms the letter “D”, or two “D” letters which together form one full 360 degrees circle. In the Kabbalistic tradition the female womb is represented through the circle and the vertical implies the masculine or the innovative principle of the being which ‘spells' itself and enchants through utterance, through its alphabetic encoding. In this ‘pure theory' or in the territory of thinking in pure principles we are enabled to see more clearly and to be stimulated positively by the multiplicity or the incompleteness of ‘concept-programs' which were also perceived by the Greeks and Anaxagore as aporiae. The exuberance of these ‘ tricksters ' or imaginations of lower levels, in a sense are servants of a greater goal which has to do with the whirling or the setting in motion of certain forces that will help for the psyche to outgrow its initial prejudice or limitations. In Jean Largeault's book “ Logic, Mathematics, Texts” , we are told that the antinomy between the dot and the line led to the notion of split (coupure ) and to the multiplicity in a Cantorian context – that is tools which are destined to push further the incomplete programs which constitute our abstract concepts of the dot and the line, programs which we might have had prematurely ‘ formulated arbitrarily, and too soon ‘baptized' in this state as final definitions'.

The diversity of concepts on the real in antiquity is differing from the phenomenological distinction between the domain of real and effective in Husserl's native German language; Real becomes the order of the material or the visible and Efectif pertains to the intelligible for phenomenologists. On the contrary, reality and the aether were apprehended as intrinsically one and the same and Empedocles taught that the cycle of day and night resulted from the truth of the motion of the two ‘phases' of the aether's circulation – the light and the dark – which would revolve around the earthly disk and therefore reality could not be touched upon through naïve materialistic thinking. Nevertheless, we are given the possibility of discerning that concepts that are grouped together – either personal or universal – serve as maps of states of perception or of consciousness. In “Apollon and Dionysos – An Essay on Imparmenence” by Jean Zafiropulo, in the chapter “ The Real”, our attention is directed to the statement that –

An attentive examination, by the way, shows that (…) all of our concepts, without exception, always form unfinished programs, the sole validity of which resides in their adaptation to the assignment that we wish to give them.

In “ The Enigma of the transcendence of the world ”, Emmanuel Housset, a French thinker on the notions of the phenomenon of the person and a researcher of Husser's philosophic studies, gives examples from Husserl's “Formal and Transcendental Logic”, so as to explain how phenomenology follows in the steps of a non-materialistic tradition which allows for the collective psyche to acknowledge and perhaps re-uate the intelligible or the divine realm, beyond the world of representations. This directly undermines authorities and hierarchies for they rely on relative or fluid parameters which are entirely dependent on the percentage of inertia which supports a certain ‘method' –

“(…) the object of intention is inseparable from the constituting conscience” (…)

“The only authentic philosopher is the one who returns to the conscience of originality or of origin and who doesn't make turn the philosophical pursuit into a corpse”

“Thus is ordained the elevation of the subject, from the world of finitude toward the infinite world”

When Alice encounters the character of Humpty Dumpty in “ Through The Looking Glass ”, the sequence of “ Alice's Adventures in Wonderland ”, she's faced with the scientism which almost dominated the post-Victorian world. The dissociation of thought from the conception of the noetic or the transcendent, and the emphasis on naïve psychology, thriving alongside the ‘independent' tyranny of rationalism were sketched and caricatured through Humpty Dumpty's frivolous attitude toward words and their manipulation. Let us have a glimpse at the methods of the inverted philosopher –

(…) “ The question is (said Humpty Dupty) whether you can make words mean so many different things”

(…)

The question is (said Humpty Dumpty ‘which is to be master – that's all”

(…)

They've a temper, some of them – particularly verbs: they're the proudest – adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs – however I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That's what I say!

(…)

When I make a word do a lot of work like that, said Humpty Dumpty, I always pay it extra”

Humpty Dumpty is part of the Beings that inhabit Wonderland that Aristotle would probably describe as atemporal and self-sufficient; but they can be perfect only in a ‘relativistic' or ‘cartoonish' way; they are ‘upside down' and they can be alarming for the lacking in courage or poetic ‘genes'. Alice interviews and continuously applies the method of pure thought , even though, through the eyes of the child it can be regarded as a far-fetched statement; however, unprejudiced interest in the possibility of playing with form without taking responsibility for the wholeness, or the appreciation of reciprocity between form and content is typical for both the figure of the child and of the wiseman. The child is this in-between state of being, an ‘ ideal presupposition' of Logic, which is providing norms through original or conscious participation; the prime mover which in Astronomy is depicted as

‘ the outermost empty sphere in the Ptolemaic system that wasthought to revolve around the earth from east to west in 24 hours carrying with it the innerspheres of the planets, sun, moon, and fixed stars'

In the ‘ Perpetuum mobile' on the other hand, in the domain music, we are presented with the repetitive or the mathematical circulation of laws and formulae. What Dodgson managed to artfully present us with was the convention of history or its operation through universal fiction;

a ‘ hermeneutical circle ' – a theory introduced in Stylistics by Leo Spitzer, which lies on the grounds of the law of correspondence, wherein the dream-state and that of lucidity are interlinked or commune and communicate through either nightmare or engaged dreaming. The engaged reader or the psyche which is lucid is in a sense exchanging ‘information'; it refines and enriches itself through coming face to face with chaos and deception and ‘outgrowing' or ‘overcoming' it, through sustained understanding of its formality. George Perec comments on the postures when it comes to reading and puzzles. He claims that crime novels and mystery novels are among the most efficient models of the function of the novel as such; there are postures or chliches that the reader is always tempted to adopt. In her essay Le jeu, metaphore du texte enigmatique perecquien , Cecile de Bary elaborates on the etymology of the word ‘puzzle' and states that, the preamble of Perec's Life a User's Manual makes use of the range of meaning of the term ‘s ense'; only the resembled parts may attain a readable character, may have a ‘direction'/a ‘meaning' or sense.

An appropriate analogy with the ‘capriciousness' of verbs and the notion of entering into the sphere of regeneration of the subconscious or of the collective psyche can be met in the act of painting. Painting is an act which imitates or narrates creation; the human being is a mirror for the divine, there is an inherent verb in the mental web or the web-like mind, which is ‘saturated' with projections and true-to-life and not so true-to-life representations that are reanimated through the response of each individual who lends an ear and seeks to collect the pieces through their particular experience and experimentation(s).

In Gilles Deleuze's paper on “Francis Bacon and the Logic of Sensation”, in chapter 11 “The Painting before Painting”, we are led to meditatively conceive of the Figure – what crystallizes on a canvas – which happens to be a hybrid type of creation – it results from the insertion of the fiction of the painter within the world of apparitions or clichés and through apprehending the nature of time which is threefold and can be represented as a ‘triptych' in painting – the variation, or the particular can undergo a transfiguration which is, Deleuze suggests, Bacon's constant formula: ‘create resemblance, but through accidental and nonresembling means. So the act of painting is always shifting, it is constantly oscillating between a beforehand and an afterward: the hysteria of painting… Everything is already on the canvas, and in the painter himself, before the act of painting begins. Hence, the work of the painter is shifted back and only comes later, afterward: manual labor, out of which the Figure will emerge into view…

Deleuze also elaborates on the getting there , in the zone of contraction which operates both ‘beforehand' and ‘afterward' through examples with Cezanne's approach to painting. The matter at hand deals with the dramatization of the abandon of the painter –

And the reckless abandon comes down to this: th painter himself must enter into the canvas before beginning. The canvas is already so full that the painter must enter into the canvas. In this way, he enters into the cliché, and into probability. He enters into it precisely because he knows what he wants to do, but what saves him is the fact that he does not know how to get there, he does not know how to do what he wants to do. He will only get there by getting out of the canvas. The painter's problem is not how to enter into the canvas, since he is already there (the prepictorial task), but how to get out of it, thereby getting out of the cliché, getting out of probability (the pictorial task). It is the chance manual marks that will give him a chance, though not a certitude, which would still imply a maximum probability. In fact, the manual marks could easily add nothing, and definitively botch the paining. But if there is a chance, it is because they work by extracting the visual whole from its figurative state, in order to constitute a Figure that has finally become pictorial.

Through lending an ear to that which is ringing and singing, as if in the airs, through the artist's practical dissolution and disintegration of preconceived or passively received instructions and moralizations, he/she is baptized in the waters of the life which continuously, hermeneutically folds and unfolds; verses, reverses and converses itself; there is practically deceptively little for the ‘aspirant' to learn to ‘enact'; he/she must learn to be filled and to lack, when the Verb, or the Figure requires it from them.

In the Apocryphon of James, or The Secret Book of James the Christ counsels or christens the disciples through the teaching or the art of vitality –

For this reason I have told you, ‘Be filled', that you may not lack. Those who lack will not be saved. To be filled is good and to lack is bad. Yet since it is also good for you to lack but bad for you to be filled, whoever is filled also lacks. One who lacks is not filled in the way another who lacks is filled, but whoever is filled is brought to an appropriate end. So you should lack when you can fill yourselves and be filled when you lack, that you may be able to fill yourselves more. Be filled with spirit but lack in reason, for reason is of the soul. It is soul.”

In the same line of thought, we can allude to ‘knocking' on the doors of understanding; in the biblical scriptures, in Matthew 7:7 we read “knock and the door will be opened to you”. In Alice's case, in chapter six ‘Pig and Pepper' in the first part of the tale, she's going through a similar process of getting through the door which is opened only as soon as the questioning or the consideration of the door has ended.

“ There might be some sense in your knocking', the Footman went on, without attending to her,

if we had the door between us. For instance, if you were inside, you might knock, and I could let you out, you know' He was looking up into the sky all the time he was speaking, and this Alice thought decidedly uncivil. But perhaps he can't help it,' she said to herself; his eyes are so very nearly at the top of his head. But at any rate he might answer questions. – How am I to get in?' she repeated, aloud.

‘I shall sit here,' the Footman remarked, till to-morrow -----‘

At this moment the door of the house opened, and a large plate came skimming out, straight at the Footman's head: it just grazed his nose, and broke to pieces against one of the trees behind him.”

This envisioning of the coming into visibility of the triptych as a figure of novelty, or the flame of consciousness, the signifier par excellence can be ‘detected' in the envisioning of words as works of art as well. Thus, situations or encounters with the Verb are practically offered to the reader as possibilities or portals to his own becoming which is a chance to pay a visit to the gap between the public and the private spheres, between what is outlined or predestined, and what lies in potentiality or in the perception of speech and its (re)creation(s). The preface of Marc-Alain Ouaknin's work Lire aux éclats (Eloge de la caresse) begins with a quotation from Leon Shestov's Athens and Jerusalem that encapsulates the intention of his study of the alphabet and the enigmatic character of speech as apragmatic , that is to say a participating demiurge that reshapes any ‘ given' (donnée), which possesses the vigor of reanimating clichés, of reorganizing time itself.

‘ Wouldn't it be commendable to seek deliverance and to deliver the others from the pressure of concepts, the acuteness of which annihilates the mystery? The sources of being are in fact within what lies hidden and not in what is naked before the eye.'

In the process of ridding the mind of outwardly or inwardly imposed and imagined setbacks or beliefs, that may take on various forms and roles, the ‘way' or the road is opened. Dodgson himself would play with the ‘naturalness' of image and concept, either through photography, or through riddles. In fact, the quality of the riddle is part of his ‘tactics'. In chapter seven of Robert Douglas Fairhurdst's “The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland ”, we are informed about Carroll's penchant for playing with uncertainty in the capturing of artistic images, as well as in story-telling –

“Carroll enjoyed teasing viewers with a similar type of uncertainty, playing on the fact that the camera could seize on a particular moment in a story but could not reveal what happened before or after it. He also enjoyed the uncanny effects created by placing real people in fictional situations. In August 1857, he photographed Tennyson's niece Agnes Weld as Little Red Riding-Hood, and perfectly captured the fairy tale's slippery encounter of purity and danger. “

In Talmudic scriptures, it is of principal importance to let go of the obsession with finality or completion. The road is known or revealed through an exile or an exhale, a withdrawal which negatively seems to enact and assure the will of the revivifying speech. In both the first and the second parts of the tale of Alice, intentionality is taking the form of an encounter, a situation which resembles a painting, or a photography, which questions and confronts the reader with their own understanding(s) and conviction(s).

In George Perec's Life A User's Manual, the reader is lost in a labyrinth compared to a metaphysical or a mythical, an ‘exemplary' labyrinth in which Bartlebooth or the reader is lost in the web of signifiers. This contrasts the idea of a puzzle which is functioning in alignment with a pre-ordained triumph and it is close to the idea of the road which spells or traces itself out of itself. Alice and the reader are united in the adventure of redeeming the dialectic thread, in unveiling its plasticity through each (re)interpretation. As Angela Carter bravely puts it –

“Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.”
The dreaming or the weaving of the (meta)text is (within) the handwork of mankind, knowing that the word ‘ man' is related etymologically and semantically to maneuvering or manipulating ; many people seem to ‘speak' with their hands; the hands can also represent the activity of the universal or World Soul in the context of sensible reality, through establishing a proper ‘hearing' of the ideating or reasoning principle of the spirit. In “The Heart of Plotinus: The Essential Enneads”, Algis Uzadvinys breaks down the Plotinian depiction of this family in the realm of Forms –

“The very being of eikon depends upon the inner presence of paradeigma that makes it what it is. But Soul, though being an image of Nous, also has the characteristic lower intellectual activity of discursive thought, reasoning, reckoning and planning: she is not, like intellect, wholly absorbed in contemplation but is active in forming , animating, and ruling the sensible whole world as a whole and all of its parts. Since Soul turns to Intellect in her contemplative epistrophe , she is united with Intellect and thus keeps the iconic-contemplative relationship which holds together all levels of the cosmos.”

In Talmudic scriptures, the ‘just ones' are ‘makers' or co-creators of speech and the metaphor with manual work, with building and sculpting is linked with chanting; colleting the sparks of the language of light or sanctity, which could also be thematically connected with the theurgic understanding in late antiquity which implied the recollection of the letters of the sacred arc of the divine essence which would allow the initiates to sail through the the deluge and be illuminated. For instance, Algis Uzdavinys writes in his wide-ranging work “ Philosophy and Theurgy in Late Antiquity” –

By restoring one's spiritual wings, the initiate is able to come back to the marvelous noetic womb of the Rhea-Hekate, the front of all blessed substances that emanate from her with a whirling noise. For the great Hekate according to Damascius, ‘sends forth a life-giving whir' (zoogonon rhoizema procesi – she sends forth the life-giving principle and speech; afterwards to be imitated by the theurgists. Damascius, to whom the Orphic and Chaldean law transcends ‘philosophical common sense').

As a ‘fairy child' or a an eikon, Alice is a translation or another mirror for the hypostatic principle which is at the core of development or gradual re-union of the principle of pathos and that of gnosis ; in other words, since the child figure functions beyond its sentimental symbolic status, it's also an allegory of ‘anamnesis' which happens to belong to the ‘Hermaic chain' (Hermaike Seira) symbolizing the irradiation of divine intellect, or philosophic life which is in accord with divine wisdom. Victorians would often sublimate and aggrandize the implications of the stage of childhood as a kind of a priestly one, that would provoke inspiration and piety in grownups. There was a tendency to mythologize the infant which could be subject to various forms of injustice and malice. In “The Old Curiosity Shop” , for instance the heroine Little Nell who is given a saintly halo and of whom Dickens says “So shall we know the angels in their majesty, after death”. Carroll's stance to the cult of children is somewhat nuanced. Whenever it comes to the schism between purity and impurity, whenever opposites are concerned, results tend to differ from the established canons.

In Chapter 12, in David Day's Alice's AdventuresinWonderland Decoded: The Full Text of Lewis Carroll's Novel with its Many Hidden Meanings Revealed - which corresponds with chapter 12 in Carroll's Through The Looking Glass, a parallel with the Aeneid is provided –

“Donald Thomas observes this mythological motif of ‘the return of the dreamer' in Wonderland and compares it to Virgil's Aeneid: “Alice like Aeneas, emerges unscathed from the dream, he by the gate of horn and she to the Oxford river bank. The horrors and predictions which Virgil's hero encountered were implacable and unalterable. But Alice triumphs. However cruel their humour or authoritarian their manner, the figures of tyranny are, at last ‘nothing but a pack of cards.'”

Alice seems to reconcile within her both Penelope and Ulysses; the soul and the spirit that ‘operate' in harmony through merging the past and the future; the mythical matrix or the hermeneutical circle with the vertical line or the poetic priesthood. She is a moving triptych, too, to the degree that, a triptych as an art form is also a tribute or a reference to the actual number 3, which is the biblical expression of the prim unity, that distributes or organizes itself archetypically, through both the engendering or maternal principle and that of the headmaster – the paternal or the vertical pillar. Then, the redeeming impulse happens to crystallize in Alice. It can and is often perceived as an impulse or an act of civil disobedience. In other words ‘the fall' into darkness or ignorance is just as symbolic as ‘the rise' into light and gnosis. In Marc-Alain Ouaknin's work Zeugma – Biblical Memory and Contemporary Floods, through tracing the etymology and semantics of Hebrew language, there is a short analysis of the notion of risk which is linked unpredictability and intelligence –

“What characterizes the human in comparison with the animal is the ability to risk or to fall. Therefore, if the risk of risking is not taken, one remains within the certainty of the secure walk, that of the animal. This is what is ‘programmable' or ‘predictable'.

What constitutes the intelligence of man is the capacity to escape the programming, or to take a risk.”

Thus, in order for mankind to manifest its humanity, there is a necessary passage and the human walk itself is the risk which indicates homo itinerans who precedes homo faber. The role of provocation of literary discourse seems to ‘perpetuate' a form of cross examination; a baptism in risk through going on a promenade which is as mathematical, as it is ethical or pertaining to the ability to discern the probabilities and to contribute to the emancipation of thought, or in the words of Spinoza –

'Not tolaugh,not to lament ,notto detest, but to understand.'

However, in Wonderland , formalism reigns supreme when it comes to the understanding of any of the techniques or systems of examination or understanding; ‘cardboard' or marked artificiality is the ‘material', on which the entire construct relies. David Day observes in his decoding of Carroll's tale of Alice that –

“ In his ‘ Metaphysics ' Aristotle explains: “ Those who use the language of proof must be cross-examined. ” This was mirrored by the White Rabbit's reminder that the King must ‘ cross examine this witness ,' although Carroll makes a punning joke of this by having the King interpreting this literally: staring at the witness with such a cross expression that he complains to the Queen, “it quite makes my forehead ache!”

Here we could also add that through Husserl's observation in Formal and Transcendental Logic , which supports the claim that the possibility of all science relies on a certainty that pertains to their actual existence and that, there are theoretical truths which can be reached through gradually learning and it is the horizontal intentionality which seems to provide the condition for the vertical, so that the object can understood in the now. Therefore the reader and the aspiring human being share atelos , a road pertaining to the reanimation of time, which is also speech or the logos, circulating and reverberating omnisciently.

II) Plurivocity and Univocity

Thus, we may even perceive the re volutionary quality of the notion of telos since it also inhabits the natural world and serves as a bridge over a kind of an abyssal repetitive whirl. The image of the child in literature arises with Augustinian thought which is influenced from Plato. The image of the child participates in myth and the scriptures mainly as an ally of Phantasmata or of the faculty which seemingly lies lower than the Intelligible realm but is beyond the sensible or the mechanic modus of the natural world. Instead of perceiving the child as a beastly creature, which is the view of the great adepts of the Mysteries such as Plato, it is put into a context which is that of the formation or unfolding of the personality. From an Augustinian perspective, it is the potentiality and the inherent unpredictability of the child as a carrier and a messenger from the realm beyond the earthly which is accentuated; as a Verb which may articulate itself through continuous maturation, both rational and original in the sense of emerging from within rather than from the dead currents of inertia.

According to Bergson the free action is not a capricious one. In his Creative Evolution in the chapter examining the relation between Biology and Philosophy, Bergson explains –

“(…) a behavior which doesn't aim to counterfeit intelligence and which, while evolving itself, reaches through the way of gradual maturation, to perform actions the intelligible elements of which can be revisited indefinitely, without ever completely ceasing: the free action is incommensurable and its “rationality” must be defined through the very incommensurability, which allows to uncover therein as much intelligibility, as one would need.

Such is the character of our interior evolution. Such is also, no doubt, the evolution of life.”

Alice, as adream child , enters in the dimension of pure principles that have been somewhat muddied and she is one of Carroll's many means of participating originally or consciously in the world of (mis)comprehension of intentionality or tonality. She can be both perceived through the great or world soul of humanity, which is an instrument for the illumination through attaining the spirit of reason or unstained consciousness; or, she could also be approximated to a kind of aChladni figure, that is an experiment of resonance – when we spread evenly fine powder on a delicate brass plate and after that we stroke its ends with a fiddler's bow, the powder adjusts in concrete patterns. Thus, tone or repercussion distributes the material. From a pile of disorganized mass, or of latent potentiality, emerges the doxa or pattern. In other words, chaos or principles that are in the midst of nowhere, always are involved in cosmic evolution and these experiments seem to demonstrate such a perspective which can also be ascribed to the arts or the fabrication of harmonious sounds or the assortment of formulas to depict phenomena. Wordsworth's famous phrase from his Immortality Ode could also be considered or treated through such an interrelationship between what is yet to manifest and what already follows certain patterns or pathways.

“The Child is father of the Man”

Carroll's ‘version' of the envisioning of a ‘fairy child' is less sentimental than it is categorical or challenge-invoking. If ‘man' is seen as the reasoning or the being which is involved with the study of principles and their application, then Alice is a virtual depiction of the passage through the poles of the passive and the active principles; she swims through the pool of tears, or the flood of loss of direct understanding or knowledge in order to see anew. Thus, in spite of having adopted the language of recitation and imitation which was the standard of Victorian education, she learns how to pierce through its dogmatic repetitiveness and to gain understanding through ‘the heart of Plotinus' or through an intuition which starts to help her truly ‘navigate' or to create while she speaks. Alice's character and her journey toward pure thought is another ‘exercise' of Dodgson's mathematical-linguistic ciphers. In his poem “Phantasmagoria” also named “ Rhyme? And Reason” we read –

“The world is but a Thought /The vast unfathomable sea /is but a notion – unto me.”

In another instance, the triad is expressed differently in the poem “The Three Voices”, as an indication to the Verb in motion or in language, in time. The capitalization of ‘Thought', ‘Idea' and ‘Notion' point again to the hypostatic or underlining ‘blocks' beyond the mirror, of the Plotinian formless hyperspace –

“Thought in the mind doth still abide:

That is by Intellect supplied

And he, that yearns the truth to know,

Still further inwardly may go

And find Idea from Notion flow

And thus the chain, that sages wrought

For notion hath its source in Thought”

Dickens was one of the Victorian authors who experimented and seemed to give a new dimension to Wordsworth's immensely widespread phrase “ The Child is father of the Man”; however, his Manichean display of the demoralized stage of the concrete jungle and the ‘ principle of good' as he words it, is rather an attempt to engage the reader directly in a polarized reflection on exploitation and responsibility. In the face of stoic realism or moralizing, somewhat overlooking the Dickensian representation of ethical truths, Carroll's tale is more engaged with the education or the notion of emancipation of the psyche and of the imagination. Even if the presence of criticism of the status quo, the address is on a level of perception, which transgresses formality or rituality and urges the reader to undertake a labyrinthine exercise in the epistemological and political transformation through language and utterance, while simultaneously preserving the centrality of the figure of the child, or the innermost self-compound, which is linked with the transcendence of all groupings or technological determinism. Truthfully, Carroll sought to shine a light on the professorial body, its inadequate treatment of the unfolding of personal talents (which targets openly the upbringing he received); Dodgson's heightened interest in symbolic logic and wordplay was influenced and maintained by his individual quests and his time as a professor as mathematics wasn't too encouraging. He wasn't convinced that it was worth to entertain or engage with students or anyone who hadn't developed an authentic liking and appreciation of the beauty of principles and their reshufflings. His lifetime endeavor however, consisted in the growing and exercising of his mental wings that, to this day, take his readers on the journey of recollection or reunion through the conflicts and beyond the chaos of the ‘ id' or the false notions of which Bacon talks in the Novum Organum –

“The idols and false notions which are now in possession of the human understanding, and have taken deep root therein, not only so beset men's minds that truth can hardly find entrance, but even after entrance obtained, they will again in the very instauration of the sciences meet and trouble us, unless men being forewarned of the danger fortify themselves as far as may be against their assaults.”

In spite of Dodgson's position as aStudent at Christ Church College in Oxford and of his religious kinship and admiration for Edward Bouverie Pusey, of having earned the right to reside until the end of his days in his bachelor's studio, his taste for the higher levels of self-organization or the discovery of the possibility for rewriting reality through grasping what thought actually is, must have ‘stood in the way' of fully embodying or displaying what is old, and in a sense – worldly, driven by the law of competition and subtly repressed Darwinism. Wonderland, as a Victorian conceptual tohu-bohu , illustrates the re-emergence of mystical communion in the figure of the child as an agent of ‘ negentropy' (‘ things becoming more in order' ) in the lexicon of thermodynamics; from inside of the pseudo-hierarchical waters of argument, the ‘weak' God of the will of Life pulsates.

‘At this the whole pack rose up into the air, and came flying down upon her: she gave a little scream, half of fright and half of anger, and tried to beat them off, and found herself lying on the bank, with her head in the lap of her sister, who was gently brushing away some dead leaves that had fluttered down from the trees upon her face.'

In chapter 22 in Mi'Kha'il Na'ima's The Book of Mirdad: the strange story of a monastery which was once called the Ark, we find the following lines –

You can will many things, Zamora – you can will all things. But one thing can you not will, and that is to put an end to your will, which is the will of Life, which is the Omniwill. For Life which is Being can never will its own non-being; nor can non-being have a will. Nay, not even God can end Zamora.

Or, somewhere beyond the prehistoric stage of human development which is glued to what is assigned, stereotypically applied or mechanically performed and the historic stage of chronic tale-chasing which only imitates the state of awareness or innovation, therein hope is to be found in overcoming or in redeeming psychic lunacy which is mirrored or reflected in the world of deadened/ mechanic thought process . Thus, we can also see more clearly how the heroine – Alice, the human world soul is also largely a constitution of Carroll's most intimate ideations or of his ‘ innerman', since it's only through such minute self-observation that the puissance of imagination is set into motion; surely, ‘real life' children were more than gladly and warmly welcomed by Dodgson, through the interaction with whom, he felt encouraged and assisted in the unfolding of a novel paradigm.

There are puns made on the notion of the ‘unearthliness' of the child as an individuality in Alice's “ Through The Looking Glass”. Primarily because of the recurrent theme of the undeveloped core of personality in the child; it is in a sense a perfect expression or replica of the Monad or the divine; however, it is a ‘given'; in other words, it is a state of consciousness which is original and not fully conscious. In the chapter 7 called The Lion and the Unicorn she's the object of fascination and shock –

“What – is – this?” he said at last.

“This is a child!” Haigha replied eagerly, coming in front of Alice to introduce her … “We only found it today. It's as large as life, and twice as natural!”

“I always thought they were fabulous monsters!” said the Unicorn. “Is it alive?”

The child is a philosopher's stone – prima materia or consciousness which has to be refined , ennobled through various ‘transmutations' or a series of ‘tests' that intermingle with, and complement each other and are ridden with wordplay and math, as well as myth and analogies; and in the series of the adjusting of individuals, through a re-invocation of a transcendent spiritual or spirit-Self, a subtler consciousness occurs, a nobler metal , so-to-speak. The arrival at free thought or simply freedom of expression, of whatever kind, is attributed to the neutral or the non-polarized psyche which combines and reaches a stage of self-content, or blessedness. The Fall , the theme of amnesia which is the proverbial sin of the human race and the foundation of Western culture, is not taken at all as a final condemnation by Carroll; rather, it is an occasion for intense meditation on the inherent meaning of the concept of losing one's way, which turns out to still participate in the transcendence of duality and in the magnanimous, yet modest, will of Life beyond the fall, beyond good and evil. Carroll was also familiar with the notion of infinite compression, that was alluded to through the allegorical and visual evocation of the Fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio, presented more than once, for instance in the image of the rabbit hole, but also in the very name and memorable smile of the Cheshire cat... David Day has an insightful analysis of the matter in his ‘decoding' of the Alice stories that can make us see better these ingenious Carrollian machinations –

“An infinite sequence of convergents oscillate to form the walls of this rabbit-hole. “Would the fall never come to an end?” The answer is both no and yes. We too have constructed a tunnel with a clear view all the way to infinity. So we could answer that Alice's fall is infinite and will never end; or we may answer it will end in what is known as an ‘ideal point' at infinity – which in this case is the golden ration known asΦ (phi).And as this is, after all, a fairy tale, we must conclude that this ‘ideal point' is Wonderland: a land existing in that infinite dimension that is the human imagination – where Alice discovers the golden key:Φ.”

In the first chapter of “ Alice's Adventures in Wonderland”, the enveloping of intellect into what is mist, or mystical, begins with the precise direction of ‘descent'; gradually the main figure, the prototype of the awareness of the human destiny, is immersed into a polymorphous zone –

“Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end? "I wonder how many miles I've fallen by this time?" she said aloud. "I must be getting somewhere near the centre of the earth. Let me see: that would be four thousand miles down, I think-" (for, you see, Alice had learnt several things of this sort in her lessons in the school-room, and though this was not a very good opportunity for showing off her knowledge, as there was no one to listen to her, still it was good practice to say it over) "-- yes that's about the right distance -- but then I wonder what Latitude or Longitude I've got to?" (Alice had not the slightest idea what Latitude was, or Longitude either, but she thought they were nice grand words to say.)

Presently she began again. "I wonder if I shall fall fight through the earth! How funny it'll seem to come out among the people that walk with their heads downwards! The antipathies, I think-" (she was rather glad there was no one listening, this time, as it didn't sound at all the right word) "-but I shall have to ask them what the name of the country is, you know. Please, Ma'am, is this New Zealand? Or Australia?" (and she tried to curtsey as she spoke- fancy, curtseying as you're falling through the air! Do you think you could manage it?) "And what an ignorant little girl she'll think me for asking! No, it'll never do to ask: perhaps I shall see it written up somewhere."

/Down the Rabbit Hole, Ch. 1/

Finding the central point of one's understanding, which is also alluded to in ancient cosmology as the equator of the earth, or the center of the galaxy, at each level, physical, cosmic, individual, there is afusing that is necessary, which pertains to re-adjusting or re-aligning with the divine spark and detaching from an inferior nature so as to climb in the region of spirit. However, phantasia also participates in this process. As John Dillon has pointed out, Phantasia may serve as a mirror for the activities of Divine Intellect –

“In the course of discussion as to why we are not always conscious of the activity of nous within us, Plotinus presents phantasia as a mirror for intellectual activity, which only performs properly when the “surface” of the soul, so-to-speak, is unruffled by passion, and thus “smooth”. But when this is broken because the harmony of the body is upset, thought and intellect operate without an image, and then intellectual activity takes place without phantasia.”

Due to Carroll's intuitively rational understanding of the role of the faculty of imagination on the borderline between the sensible and the intelligible realms of perception, a constant stream of refreshing intention emanates from his ‘adventurous' work. James Joyce has been openly influenced by Carroll's approach to displaying universal narrative through intense revising of myth, math and speech. Both in Finnegans Wake and in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , we witness continuously allusions made to Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland , and the theme of humanity's universally inherited and shared world of form and content, of the hidden and the revealed, resurfaces in practically each sentence. In A skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, the mythologist J. Campbell comments on the first chapter of the second book The Book of the Sons which seems to organically follow The Book of the Parents . In the first chapter of the second book, then - “The Children's Hour” is a miniature of the genesis and regenesis of speech or verb through man as a hieroglyph or a stage wherein are re-played the main deific or glorious deeds from beyond; a meditation on the epochal re-diction of the phoenix rising from the ashes; of objective or universal re-phrasing in the midst of worlds and the distractions of the super-modern fluid capitalistic context. Interestingly enough, this opening chapter of the second book seems to announce a play, a staging which takes place in “Phoenix Playhouse”. It is “produced with the benediction of the Holy Genesius Archimimus, under the patronage of the Four Old Men, while the Caesar-in-Chief looks on. As played, after humpteen dumpteen revivals, before all the Kings' Hoarsers and all the Queen's Mum. Broadcast over seven seas in teuto-slavo-zend-latin sound-script. In four tabloids.”

Campbell gives a short resumé of the first chapter –

“presented as a play given by the children before their parents (…) Glugg is thrice tempted to adventures which he cannot accomplish, first by a game of charades, next by a coy little note, and finally by a sign that carries his mind to “ the house of the breathings .” Each of his failures results in a dance of triumph of the girls around Chuff, and in an excess of black bile within his own unhappy soul. First he swears to himself the three oaths of Exile, Silence, and Cunning; next he shows repentance, but confesses his father's and mother's sins instead of his own; finally, he indulges in sinful lustful thoughts. Whereupon the valiant Chuff makes at him, and they wrestle until the voice of the father summons them home.

[The little game is an image of the endless round of the aeons: the children tramp along Vico Road re-enacting the old story of their parent. The awakening of the father from his nap is analogous to that awakening of Finnegan which is to come at the end of the cycle. Then will take place the reconciliation of Mick and Nick: all contrarieties will have found their resolution in the eternal.]

Joyce as a modernist happened to perceive in Carroll's a dimension of “dramatic saturae”, the principle of adapting pure or abstract thought to rhythmic or imagistic patterns that address both concretely and indirectly the issues and the misfortunes of an era of hypnotic ritualism; confronting the death, or the degeneration of thought process, that was distorted through an endless accumulation of data and was run by demagogues and technocrats who would present the human mind as limited and utilitarian by the end of the eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth centuries, was a task that Carroll almost predicted and sought to dismantle; Joyce couldn't but appreciate the possibility for aligning his pen with the gray zone of shaking up, or of awakening a reader through a series of cathartic ‘streams of consciousness', elaborated fully and specifically through the codes of institutions and language, sautéed in the cell of his own thirst for alert dreaming. Carroll held both a degree in classical letters and in mathematics and he visited with great enthusiasm artistic exhibition and was himself an amateur of photography. His creative and professorial pursuits were also oftentimes ‘paused' or interrupted due to extended periods of necessary immersion in authentic experience, or simply, time spent in nature, in the company of children, or in contemplation; his self-conscientiousness was the primary reason for a not-so-common ‘schedule.

In his paper “ D'Alice à Stephen: voix d'enfance selon Carroll et Joyce”, Stéphane Jousni concentrates his argument regarding the continuity Carroll-Joyce on two key factors:

1. “The capital importance of orality , in its double acceptance of attitude toward food and production of narrative. Orality and oralisation : such is in fact the first highlight in Alice and the Potrait , through modalities that apparently contradict each other – the first being focused on nonsense, the second on mimetic realism – and at the same time unprecedented.

2. The crucial role of the notion of strangeness in both works, which shapes the representation of the child's world, which, through illuminating it, questions the real in an unprecedented way up until then.”

This strangeness is however part of the meta-intention of both works, it could be summed in Alice's words –

“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?”
It is the underlying strangeness of conscious creation, of observing one's own thought processing, as if it's a ‘remembrance of things past'. In her paper “ Exploring Narrative, Time, Circular Temporalities and Growth in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Peter Pan”, Alice Kjelgaard observes that, since Carroll's narrative is always ‘self-criticizing', or it points to its inherent strangeness, through repetitive usage of well-known expressions such as 'Curiouser and curiouser !', ‘Howqueereverything is to-day!' or “We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.”, the reader is welcome to bear witness of the displacement of the ‘saeculum', whereas in “Peter Pan” , the inhabitants of Neverland are in no mode of self-observation –

“Like the Wonderland mechanistic characters, the Neverland characters become caught up in movement, without having a way to differentiate between a beginning and end. Unlike the Wonderland characters, who display their misunderstanding of narrative structure with unfinished riddles and puns, the Lost Boys know that they have forgotten their past life, but cannot orient themselves to remember what it is. Therefore, while the Wonderland characters move mindlessly to stay in rhythm with their ticking clock mechanism, the Neverland characters stay in constant movement, to replace the absence of memory.”

The notion of déjà vu when it comes to reversing the doings of language's rigidity and the concept of unfreezing or initiating the mind, toward a new paradigm constitutes the core of the Socratic approach and it is recurrent, in both Carroll's and Joyce's works. Perhaps, theirs is what walking on the edge, or a tightrope is best viewed by readers and psychoanalysts, alike. In confronting the vital principle with the kaleidoscopic nature of the ‘collective dreaming' or ‘wheel of memory', strangeness is a symptom of choice, as well as a category in discourse, it demands to be expressed, dissolved. In “Victorian Literary Mesmerism” , we are introduced to the ‘ overlap in content between the vitalism and mesmerism debates' that precedes and predicts Faraday's discovery of electromagnetism; presence or absence of either the electric or the magnetic pole, the imbalance producing incoherence or hierarchical and individual division/duality, animated both the field of literature and medicine; they were in a much closer dialogue than it could be supposed at first sight –

“The medical context makes it possible to interpret the mesmeric theme in “A Strange Story” and Zanoni as a figure for development, and right use, of genius, since both mesmerism and genius consist in the ability of the imagination to exercise power over others. Great activity of the imagination is closely connected to mental derangement in the medical account of obsession and hallucination that we have been examining in a way which echoes commonplaces about the nearness of genius to madness. Since imagination is the faculty that imparts vividness to ideas it entertains, the price one pays for a strong imagination is liability to hallucination. Crichton makes this clear when he comments slightly later that “it is not wonderful that men of genius, who often confine their attention to one branch of study, should be more exposed to such illusions that any other class of people.”

In an article of “Time's Colonist” dedicated to David Day's decoding of Carroll's “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland” and “ Through The Looking Glass”, the curious shared cipher of Carroll and Joyce is noted, as well as the similarity of Alice's and Socrates' love of wisdom –

“His language just got ahold of me. I wasn't the only one who couldn't let it go. James Joyce when he was writing Finnegan's Wake was totally obsessed with Lewis Carroll. There are hundreds of verbal jokes about Alice in Finnegan's Wake. Both he and Carroll were doing the same sorts of things with language and the manipulation of language.” And both were unparalleled at it.”

Joyce, in the following of Carroll ‘down the rabbit hole', examines further the tyranny of dogma and the manufacturing of pseudo-individualities that are meandering in ciphered environments, that they seem to worship, rather than re-form and re-animate. Thomas Carlyle also opposed or dismissed the worries of the Victorians, who would put a significant stress on their relationship with time and would ceaselessly try to ‘belong' to their society, without really familiarizing themselves with the period, as such. Both Joyce and Carroll, as well as J.M. Barrie - the author of “Peter Pan” - made an attempt to re-contextualize the Victorian temporality, through the figure of the child. Alice Kjelgaard tells us that –

“For both the contemporary and Victorian reader, Alice and Wendy open up new possibilities ‘to what an ending entails'; instead of situating society temporally between a fading past and an apocalyptic future, Alice and Wendy shape time into a teleological infinitude cohering the separated sequences of beginnings and ends into a long cycle of regeneration and growth. Though the Victorians and modern day society have different views of society, each agrees upon the same general concept: the child can interpret and change society in ways that an adult cannot, since he or she has not yet been fit into social structures.”

While John Ruskin awaited the apocalypse, Thomas Carlyle laughed at the prospect that was plaguing the Victorian mindset in “Signs of Times” -

“How often have we heard, for the last fifty years, that the country was wrecked, and fast sinking: whereas, up to this date, the country is entire and afloat”

On their respective sides, Carroll and, later on, Joyce, quite judiciously made their readers alert to what lies before them, namely – response. Regarding the relationship between Stoicism and Carroll's exploration of sense and paradox in “Second series of paradoxes of surface effects” in “ Logique du sens ”, Gilles Deleuze points to the task of thought which lay sideways, that is on the surface or on the edge of untwisted experience, that is in the heart of Stoicism –

.” The question is as follows: is there something, aliquid, which merges neither with the proposition or with the terms of the proposition, nor with the object or with the state of affairs which the proposition denotes, neither with the “lived”, or representation or the mental activity of the person who expresses herself in the proposition, nor with concepts or even signified essences? If there is, sense, or that which is expressed by the proposition, would be irreducible to individual states of affairs, particular images, personal beliefs, and universal or general concepts. The Stoics said it all: neither word, nor body, neither sensible representation nor rational representation. Better yet, perhaps sense would be “neutral”, altogether indifferent to both particular and general, singular and universal, personal and impersonal. It would be of an entirely different nature. But is it necessary to recognize such a supplementary instance? Or must we indeed manage to get along with what we already have: denotation, manifestation, and signification? In each period the controversy is taken up anew (André de Neufchateau and Pierre d'Ailly against Rimini, Brentano Russell against Meinong). In truth, the attempt to make this fourth dimension evident is a little like Carroll's Snark hunt. Perhaps the dimension is the hunt itself, and sense is the Snark. It is difficult to respond to those who wish to be satisfied with words, things, images, and ideas. For we may not even say that sense exists either in things or in the mind; it has neither physical nor mental existence. Shall we at least say that it is useful, and that it is necessary to admit it for its utility? Not even this, since it is endowed with an inefficacious, impassive, sterile splendor. This is why we said that in fact we can only infer it indirectly, on the basis of the circle where the ordinary dimensions of the proposition lead us. It is only by breaking open the circle (the cell), as in the case of the Mobius strip, by unfolding and untwisting it, that the dimension of sense appears for itself, in its irreducibility, and also in its generic power as it animates an a priori internal model of the proposition. The logic of sense is inspired in its entirety by empiricism.”

Thus, it could be said that the Carrollian experiment through legomena or “things said” seems to participate in this great ‘empirical' mirroring of the human impulse toward the supreme arche, which is flooded or filled with a burgeoning multiplicity, which resembles the branching or the braiding of the human of DNA itself; when Deleuze differentiates ‘declension of the atom' and ‘conjugaison of events' in “ Logique du sens”, in the twenty-sixth chapter -“Language”, he describes the Epicurean relationship with language as woven of ‘nouns and adjectives' that would suggest the equivocity of nouns; Stoic, on the other hand, are on the side of the ‘verb', which is also shared in Deleuze's philosophy, who explores primarily the virtual poetry of Being itself which is a ‘single voice'. While Deleuze seemingly differs from Plato's abstract conception of the intelligible and the simulacra, the dialectical paradigm, stating that ‘there are not two paths' , he thoroughly understands and virtually or poetically contributes to its ‘historicity' so-to-speak. Carroll, in his own merging of logic and philosophy, participated in the transmutation of ‘thought' as a field in its own right, which Alain Badiou suggests in his study dedicated to: “Deleuze – The Clamor of Being”;

“Univocal Being is indeed nothing other than, at on and the same time, the superficial movement of its simulacra and the ontological identity of their intensities; it is, simultaneously, nonsense and the universal donation of sense. If thought seizes hold of these two aspects, which necessitates that it be the movement of two movements, it is adequate to Being.”

The idea of ‘ascent' or of anagogic dynamics, is inherent or pre-included in all spheres of engaged attention and the action of reading is, by default – a condensed metaphor of the unutterable or the ‘secret' itself; reading literature seems to verbally denounce the loudness of the repercussive play, while at the same time, it offers a ‘ sneak peek' in the ‘naming game'. It is man alone who knows or distributes the names , the titles among the kingdoms of nature and if man is whirled in self-deception by lack of awareness, he is also fully endowed with the power of ‘un-cursing', of resurfacing from sleep, while made aware of the dream.

Here we are witnessing a revision of the Romantic ideal of Novalis –

“Our life is no dream, but it ought to become one, and perhaps will!”

The continuity Carroll-Joyce resounds more within the Shakespearian tradition. In TheTempest, Act IV, Scene 1 , the Inspired genius of Prospero, utters in a fit of enlivened pity –
“We are such stuffAs dreams are made on, and our little lifeIs rounded with a sleep.”
At any rate, dreams seem to intersect or to communicate through various methods that escape ‘normal' or routine-like consciousness, just like in the concept of ‘intertextuality', there seem to be correspondences or threads of allegories and assonance between day and night, life and death, between the dimmed and illuminated perceptions of sound and symbol. Carroll, like Deleuze, deployed the ‘serial form', with full intention. In “Series of serialization” , Deleuze reminds us that –

“Aliceis the story of an oral regress, but ‘regress' must be understood first in a logical sense, as the synthesis of names. The homogeneous from of this synthesis subsumes under it two heterogeneous series of orality: to eat/to speak, consumable things/expressible senses. The serial form itself therefore refers us to the already described paradoxes of duality and forces us to address them again from this new point of view.”

In Victorian context, many articles dedicated to dreams and studies to the psychology of children began to circulate. In an 1851 article in Household Words , children were described as “more subject to a variety of internal complaints, such as teething, convulsions, derangement of the bowels, &c'” However through the eyes of poets and artists, dreams would provide a means for regenerating or at the very least, reorienting the mind's eye from the prosaic or the trivial perspective of existence. Carroll's writing attempts exactly to plunge the reader in a dreaming which offers a fusion of various emotions, pictures and moods that move the reader in a way which makes them both feel saturated with bewilderment and at the same time or by the end of the reading experience, offers them a unified sensation or a synthesis that had kept the entire experience together to begin with.

In “Sylvie and Bruno” the ending line from “Through the Looking Glass” is ‘resuscitated' in its opening lines:
“Is all our Life , then , but a dream?”
In this context, we could draw a comparison with Blake's exclamation “Exuberance is Beauty” deriving rom his “Proverbs from Hell” , which was elaborated specifically in service to the maturation or the aspiration of the mind to reclaim its liberty, and if not completely un-shackle it, then to urge it to perceive the shackles of imposed beliefs and concepts by exterior authorities. This ‘exuberance' is what can be related to Deleuze's ‘ Virtual' Being – considered in its chaos, ‘the nonphilosophical presupposition of all philosophical thought.' The ‘real-virtual' consists of a ‘givenness', it is the very foundation or fountain of perception and, consequently, of life, the ‘primordial soup', as it is often called.
In fact, in a letter from 1864 to one of his child friends – Mary MacDonald, daughter of the writer George MacDonald – whom Carroll admired for his commitment to childhood beyond the specific well-being of his own children – Mary is counseled to –
“Don't be in such a hurry to believe next time – I'll tell you why. If you set to work to believe everything, you will tire out the believing muscles of your mind, and then you'll be so weak you won't be able to believe the simplest true things. Only last week a friend of mine set to work to believe Jack-the-giant-killer. He managed to do it, but he was so exhausted by it that when I told him it was raining (which was true) he couldn't believe it, but rushed out into the street without his hat or umbrella, the consequence of which was his hair got seriously damp, and one curl didn't recover its right shape for nearly 2 days. (Mem: some of that is not quite true, I'm afraid.))”
Believing and dreaming continuously refer to or play with one another. Dreaming representing an intermediate state of consciousness, primarily linked with the experience of reconciling polarities and contradictions.
Carroll builds on this idea by indicating how difficult it can often be to distinguish between the waking and dreaming states. In chapter VIII of “Through the Looking Glass” we are provided with more food for thought –

“After a while the noise seemed gradually to die away, till all was dead silence, and Alice lifted up her head in some alarm. There was no one to be seen, and her first thought was that she must have been dreaming about the Lion and the Unicorn and those still lying at her feet, on which she had tried to cut the plum- cake, `So I wasn't dreaming, after all,' she said to herself, `unless -- unless we're all part of the same dream. Only I do hope it's mydream, and not the Red King's! I don't like belonging to another person's dream,' she went on in a rather complaining tone: `I've a great mind to go and wake him, and see what happens!'”

The ‘dreaming' or the process of entering an altogether ‘other' or ‘ulterior' perspective, is also a prominent character or ‘vehicle' in and out of itself, both in “ Alice's Adventures in Wonderland” and “ Through The Looking Glass”. The last page of “Through The Looking Glass” reads –

“But her sister sat there some while longer, watching the setting sun, and thinking of little Alice and her Adventures, till she too began dreaming after a fashion, and this was her dream. She saw an ancient city, and a quiet river winding near it along the plain and up the stream went slowly gliding a boat with a merry party of children on board – she could hear their voices and laughter like music over the water – and among them was another little Alice, who sat listening with bright eager eyes to a tale that was being told, and she listened for the words of the tale, and lo! It was the dream of her own little sister. So the boat wound slowly along, beneath the bright summer day, with its merry crew and its music of voices and laughter, till it passed round one of the many turnings of the stream, and she saw it no more.”

It could also be appropriate to ponder Carroll's impulse and dedication to the promotion and popularization of logic, to make it accessible for the common reader; as he also sought to illustrate his examples literarily or vividly, which would keep the attention of readers. Again, in the third chapter of Deleuze's “Logique du Sens” , he traces Dodgson's affair with what we could also call ‘memory shadows' (from the medi perspective of Giordano Bruno) –

“Jean Gattegno has indeed noted the difference between Carroll's stories and classical fairy tales: in Carroll's work, everything that takes place occurs in and by means of language; “it is not a story which he tells us, it is a discourse which he addresses to us, a discourse in several pieces…” It is indeed into this flat world of the sense-event, or of the expressible-attribute, that Carroll situates his entire work. Hence the connection between the fantastic work signed “Carroll” and the mathematico-logical work signed “Dodgson”. It seems difficult to say, as has been done, that the fantastic work presents simply the traps and difficulties into which we fall when we do not observe the rules and laws formulated by the logical work. Not only because many of the traps subsist in the logical work itself, but also because the distribution seems to be of an entirely different sort. It is surprising to find that Carroll's entire logical work is directly about “signification”, implications and conclusions, and only indirectly about sense – precisely, through paradoxes which signification does not resolve, or indeed which it creates. On the contrary, the fantastic work is immediately concerned with sense and attaches the power of paradox directly to it. This corresponds well to the two states of sense, de facto and de jure, a posteriori and a priori, one by which the circle of the proposition is indirectly inferred, the other by which it is made to appear for itself, by unfolding the circle along the length of the border between propositions and things.”

“Alice's Adventures in Wonderland” could be and has been proven to also serve as an illustration of the notions of ‘entity' and ‘nullity', which are again interdependent, that is a clause is a nullity in Carroll's terminology and the resolution for this form, he called linear, or sequential. So that in Carroll's poems, as the Duchess insists: “ Everything's got a moral if only you can find it. ” Further in Deleuze's “Logique du Sens” he follows along the lines of paradox and its relationship with essence or sense-insertion –

“How could we summarize these paradoxes of neutrality, all of which display sense as unaffected by the modes of the proposition? The philosopher Avicenna distinguished three states of essence: universal in relation to the particular things in which it is embodied. But neither of these two states is essence itself. An animal is nothing other than an animal (“animal non est nisi animal tantum”) being indifferent to the universal and to the singular, to the particular and to the general. The first state of essence is essence as signified by the proposition, in the order of the concept and of conceptual implications. The second state of essence is essence as designated by the proposition in the particular things in which it is involved. But the third state of essence is essence as sense, essence as expressed – always in this dryness (‘animal tantum') and this splendid sterility or neutrality. It is indifferent to the universal and to the singular, to the general and to the particular, to the personal and to the collective; it is also indifferent to affirmation and negation, etc. in short, it is indifferent to all opposites. This is so because all of these opposites are but modes of the proposition considered in its relations of denotation and signification, and not the traits of the sense which it expresses. Is it, then, the status of the pure event, or of the fatum which accompanies it, to surmount all the oppositions in this way? Neither private nor public, neither collective nor individual…, it is more terrible and powerful in this neutrality, to the extent that it is all of these things at once?”

Once again, this makes one see the mnemonic value in a tale such as “ Alice's Adventure's in Wonderland” , it should be regarded as a powerful intention and inwardly initiated will toward the construction of a vessel for the journey of what has gone beyond the scope of argument or anecdote. Giordano Bruno's “Wheel of Memory” presented the aspirant or fellow traveler with the enterprise of having memory or discoursing, which refers to the Thomist doctrine that encourages the soul to carry out its service toward its gradual elevation or coming out of the ashes of the territory of lower consciousness. In Alessandro G. Farinella's paper “Giordano Bruno: Neoplatonism and the Wheel of Memory in the “De Umbris Idearum”, we are informed –

“The formal structure for the memorization of names and places is Platonic and the simplicity of the model which inspires the action of the Demiurge is the same as that which, in a circular movement, pursues through time the circle of the diverse. The universal "architect" of the material of the imagination is the same soul as that which, following the multiple happenings of sensible reality, recognizes in it the "source and substance of all the arts."80 Human ingenuity reproduces this at an inferior level in the particular single arts (in De umbris in the figures of inventors in the memory wheel). Thus the art of all the arts can be used to inscribe inside the soul the ordered progression of the schala naturae. The Platonic Demiurge wrote the structure of the world with that "first instrument" which Plato does not name, but which for Bruno is in the innermost soul and allows that special kind of "inner writing" which he calls engraphia. The world becomes a page on which both the first intellect and the human mind inscribe the All. To the graphemes used by the soul to inscribe these signs in that part of the imaginative faculty and in the memory Bruno gives the name "garments," a term he takes from scholastic learning. These have substrata which define their properties and demand multiplication of the number of terms needed to refer to them. These are:" species, forms, simulacra, images, spectres, exemplars, traces, clues, signs, notes, characters, seals.”

Such is also the established relation between the point of a circle, or the seed and the blooming flower; another image that used to depict the connection the revealed or pure wisdom and the historic succession of interpretations, is that of the Golden Chain (s eire chruseie, Iliad VIII.18). Algis Uzdavinys's “Introduction to the golden Chain” identifies it as the Hermaic Chain, both the chain of manifestation or descent and the ladder of ascent.

“Socrates also regarded the Homeric Golden Rope as referring to the Sun. It signified that “so long as the Heavens and the Sun continue to move round, all things in Heaven and Earth are kept going, whereas if they were bound down and brought to a stand, all things would be destroyed and the world, as they say, turned upside down” ( Plato, “Thaet. 153c8-d5). Thus, the emperor Julian's claimed descent from the Sun (Helios) meant his vertical (or inner) relationship with the divine Intellect which was the source of illumination and manifestation of the logos, or logismos – including the power of reasoning in general.”

Just like in the structuring of a novel, there are conventions that may be observed or may be neglected, so it is with the adjustment of demonstrations of axioms and principles. When it comes to the effect of amnesia or the fall of humanity which has led to the obscuration of revelation and to the strictly categorical “philosophy” in restricted sense, we are even more inclined to perceive in Alice, an exemplification of Carroll's service to the redeeming of humanity's conscience or to its re-animation, be it through photography (which was seen by Victorians as ‘writing with light' because the photographer captured the image while the sun would ‘do all the work, through humor or satire, or through his letters to child-friends, through the perfection of his own manners; and we know that the perfectioning of the ‘stage' upon which the external and the internal worlds meet, or the aspiration to higher self-organization on behalf of the individual, was key to the cultivation of virtue and truth for the Pythagoreans as well as in Platonic philosophy. Again in the “Introduction to The Golden Chain” by Algis Uzdavinys this is put in the following terms –

“The fall in philosophical insight, as well as the mission of the superior souls sent down to recall corrupted souls to the divine abode, was exemplified in the Phaedrus of Plato. Thus even Socrates, who described philosophy as a kind of divinely inspired madness (mania), was referred to as a savior by Hermeias of Alexandria. According to him, Socrates had been sent down to the world of becoming as a benefit to mankind and to turn souls – each in a different way – to philosophy. Not only Pythagoras, Archytas, Socrates, and Plato, but also later philosophers such as Ammonius Saccas, Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus and Syrianus were “companions of the gods” (apadous theon andras) and belonged to the revelatory and soteriological tradition of philosophy, the main principles of which were received from daemons and angels.”

In 1856 , Carroll notes in his diary -

“When we are dreaming and, as often happens, have a dim consciousness of the fact and try to wake, do we not say and do things which in waking life would be insane? May we not then sometimes define insanity as an inability to distinguish which is the waking and which is the sleeping life? We often dream without the least suspicion of unreality:

“Sleep hath its own world” and it is often as lifelike as the other.”

The sensation of the riddle of speech is nowhere made so apparent as in the spelling or the resounding of a letter or a verse; the shapes of words and their interpreters seem to complete and enrich each other; a re-writing occurs of the entire history of mankind through each performance of either the process of writing a word or spelling it and reading, or uttering it, little does it matter if it's aloud or in silence. Reading and dreaming are discussed in a popular study of Robert Macnish in 1830, under the title of “The Philosophy of Sleep” –

“ however monstrous, incredible, or impossible, seems ‘absurd' in a dream: scenes can switch as suddenly as the turning of a page; time and space can be distorted or fragmented; people from different periods of history can be ‘brought together in strange and incongruous infusion'.”

The visual outpouring of symbols, of the letters of the alphabet also seem to provide a kind of a visual fusion which is connected to the navigation of attention. A certain sequence of images and emotions form the foundation of all religions, which is the main method to initiate a disposition toward devotion in the individual. Film-making, or the projection of images and stories that initially oppose, or are in contradiction with each other, only to intersect by the end, or to finally come to refer to each other harmoniously, also relies on the cognition of pure principles which lean toward organization of space. In Robert Douglas Fairhurst's “ The Story of Alice” , there is a reflection on typical conventions when it comes to Victorian theatre -

“One of the most popular conventions of Victorian theatre was the ‘point', reserved for moments of high drama, when an actor moved centre stage: flared nostrils to demonstrate pride, a twirled moustache to signify cackling villainy, and so on. Less intensely melodramatic, but equally conventional, was the ‘tableau', which concluded longer stretches of theatrical action by gathering together the play's major characters and expressing their relationships in spatial terms. Photography extended this idea indefinitely; each portrait was a little piece of domestic theatre that allowed the subject to hold a pose for ever.”

In the mists, or in the flood of possibilities, the writer, as well as reader, or human conscience can go through the exercise of ‘consumed perspective' which concentrates the attention span or the full engagement of the particular self, only to re-animate or re-vivify their perception, which is a transformative or a cathartic experience per se. This is a technique which Shakespeare employed a countless number of times, be it in “ AMidsummer Night's Dream” or in “As You Like It”. Upon observing a painting of Sir Henry Landseer's, named “ Scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream ”, Carroll observed “ there are some wonderful points in it… the white rabbit especially .” It is said to be the source of inspiration for the character of the white rabbit in “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland”. Interestingly, next to the white rabbit in the painting, there is a miniature figure of Puck – a mythological figure in the Celtic, Irish and Welsh tradition, that accompanies visitors to the fairy realm. In a painting of Blake from 1785, Puck looks like Pan from Greek mythology. In Shakespeare's “ A Midsummer's Night Dream ”, the characters, whether coupled or not, go on to experience and showcase the states of love, despair, anger, jealousy, joy; at the beginning we are not that led to ‘feel for them', to be compassionate; but by the end, we perceive their specific values and intrinsic necessity for us to witness and enjoy a unified tableau or event. --

Carroll never indicates the precise point of the start of the dream of Alice. However, in his letter to Tom Taylor – a Victorian dramatist and editor of “Punch Magazine”, he writes –

“Thewhole thing is a dream, butthatI don't want revealedtill the end.”

The marvelous vocation of coming alive in late antiquity or Neoplatonism demands a story or personal engagement which is anagogic or within an evolutionary context; Alice, the personification of universal conscience is herself the manifestation of the ascending sun hero or of the harpist Orpheus; this artistic dimension necessarily includes the principle of harmony or beauty. In the Cabalistic tradition Tifereth is the sphere in the Tree of Life, which corresponds with the principle of beauty and the color of the sun – yellow; the image is of a child, or a sacrificed God; the ‘ spiritualexperiment ' is worded as vision of the Harmony. For Aristotle, too, the eternal or divine intellect moves in accord through multiplicity. In “ Hellenic Philosophy: Origin and Character” by Professor Christos C. Evangeliou, for instance it is explained that –
“It is the great Beauty with which the entire Cosmos seems to be in Love. It is the Great Light and cause of enlightenment for the mind of the true philosopher in the triple Socratic manifestation: as lover of Hellenic mousike (that is, practitioner of the art of poetic rhythm, harmonious sound, and all audibly appreciated beauty); as lover of Hellenic eidike (that is, practitioner of the art of visible patterns, symmetrical forms, and all optically appreciated beauty); and as lover of Hellenic dialektike (that is, practitioner of the art of logic, ordered form, principled life, rational discourse, intuitive grasp of principles, and noetically appreciated truth).”

Alice learning to be centered or at-one-ment suggests salvation of the human odyssey in a nutshell. David Day's elaboration on Wonderland's mythological dimension helps us gain an even clearer vision of the vocational narrative –

“On the mythological level, the counterpart to Wonderland hall is the great hall in the Temple of Demeter-Persephone at Eleusis. Known as the Telesterion, or Hall of the Initiates, this was where all Eleusinian pilgrims gathered. Here they were tested on their knowledge of the procedures of the Mysteries before entering a labyrinth of chambers where they witnessed miraculous tableaux or epiphanies relating to the myth of Persephone –all of which we shall find are mirrored in Alice's adventures. In Wonderland's Telesterion-like hall, certain objects are displayed: the glass table with the golden key, the bottle with the label reading “DRINK ME,” the glass box with the cake marked “EAT ME” – all of which test and provoke Alice in her attempts to gain entry through the curtained door and into the inner sanctum of Wonderland's garden.

After she fails the initial test of the golden key and the curtained door, Alice finds herself wandering through a labyrinth (exactly like the pilgrim in the Mysteries) where one tableau vivant after another is revealed: the Pool of Tears, the Rabbit's House, the Caterpillar and the Mushroom, the Duchess's Kitchen, the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter's Tea Party. Each Tableau riddle reveals an essential life lesson so Alice may eventually learn how to use the golden key to achieve her aim of passing behind the curtain and through the little door to the garden. In the Eleusinian Mysteries, the initiate's fast is broken by a special psychoactive drink of barley and pennyroyal called kykeon, taken in the Telesterion where certain “hiera” (sacred objects) are revealed to them, as they recite, “I have fasted, I have drunk the kykeon, I have taken from the kyste (box) and after working it have put it back into the kalathos (basket).”

The rites in the Mysteries comprised three elements: dromena (“things done”), which was a dramatic re-enactment of the Demeter/Persephone myth; deiknumena (“things shown”), a display of sacred objects; and legomena (“things said”), commentaries accompanying the display of the sacred objects.”

III) Conscious Focus in the Making of NonsenseA budding or a potential logician-enchantress, Alice learns to regenerate her potential creative thinking that was her means of arriving in Wonderland anyway. Enthused, or animated by intention, which will only ‘crystallize' or articulate itself successfully through her speech when the dream or the hypnosis has lost its power over her being.

Carroll's ‘hint' seems to offer a cheerful ‘reading' of both the falling and the uprising of what Coleridge would designate as ‘ the empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word choice'. It is outwardly that ‘fancy' or ‘nonsense' functions and puzzles; since Dodgson was often perceived as a pedantic personality, which again was an exaggeration, his preferences for discretion when it came to the communication of ‘metaphysical' or transcendental insight, were tied with a sensibility which could grasp ‘the bigger picture' while in the same breath, refuted grandiloquence. He practically takes the reader through an experience of vivifying phantasmata, or ‘dreamlike reading' which is produced through a mastery of the linguistics and a subtle receptivity of the flux of consciousness that enables any puzzle, include that of what one calls ‘real', to present itself. In 1965, Wittgenstein writes –

"The philosopher is the man who has to cure himself of many sicknesses of the understanding before he can arrive at the notions of a sound human understanding. If in the midst of life we are in death, so in sanity we are surrounded by madness."

To some extent, the radicality of Carroll's approach, lies in the ‘ passing of the torch', he fuses with his fairy child, as well as with the reader, as if inferring his proper liberation. Navigating and exiting the wonderland of an entropic paradigm, is an event, rather than an allegory, and all readers are children, who may re-enter a ‘beyond' from within.

In Juliet Dusinberre's “ Alice to the Lighthouse: Children's Books and Radical Experiments in Art ”, in the chapter on “ The Literary and The Literal ”, we are invited to see the ‘footprints' of characters and those that we take through our reading performance as equally participating in the manifestation of ‘solid reality' ; in fact, what one is led to see matters, since matter or the symbol system is a sum or a formation of conscious focus, or momentum. When Virginia Woolf read “ Robinson Crusoe” she exclaimed that “ in Defoe's novel the contemplation of the literal contains all that the watcher need know about the literary .”

In David Day's decoding of the adventures of Carroll's fairy child, we are given precise details pertaining to the underlining progressive mathematical metaphor of the key to the philosophical life, or of the manifestation of latent doxa –

‘Throughout the Wonderland adventures, Alice and the narrator use the phrase “at any rate.” In the Wonderland hall, we are told, the golden key “at any rate” will open only the tiny door, and the passage behind door is the size of a “rat-hole” (a typical Carollian riddle: rat-o = ratio), which explains why the golden key – as the golden ratio [1/ Φ=1+ Φ= Φ] – fits the lock of the curtained door.Although Alice can open the curtained door with the golden key, the door and the passage beyond are so small that “she could not even get her head through the doorway.” Disappointed, Alice makes a rather peculiar wish and observation: “Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope! I think I could, if I only knew how to begin.” She returns to the glass table, where she hopes to find “at any rate a book of rules for shutting people up like telescopes.”

Perhaps Alice can't find this book of logarithms because it is actually “the book her sister was reading” before she went down the rabbit-hole – a book that Alice summarily dismissed: “what is the use of a book… without pictures or conversations?” It now appears that this book o rules and numbers would be very useful in resolving problems with ratios and proportions. Failing to discover a book or another key, Alice does find a bottle labeled “DRINK ME.” When she drinks from it, she shrinks to just ten inches, and exclaims: “What a curious feeling! I must be shutting up like a telescope.” Subsequently, she eats a cake in a glass box labeled “EAT ME,” and is again alarmed when she grows into a “great girl” some nine feet tall. Once again Alice compares this process of expansion and contraction to the opening and closing of a telescope: “Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice… “Now I'm opening out like the largest telescope that ever was!” Why is Carroll repeatedly using the mechanics of a telescope? What is he hinting at? In mathematics, the ‘telescoping series rule' has a specific meaning in calculus that could be applied to Alice's attempts to control her size. Calculus is the mathematics of change, and the manipulation of the infinitely large and the infinitely small. These are exactly the problems Alice is confronted with in Wonderland.

Calculus takes the regular rules of algebra and geometry and applies them to fluid, evolving problems. If Alice applies these rules, she may eventually overcome the many fluid and evolving problems she encounters as she passes through Wonderland's mathematical maze.'

Confronted with an infinite number of visions, Alice's journey prepares her how to take part or to respond, that is to be responsible, to ponder her wakefulness. Perhaps one of the main reasons for the cheerful or the fanciful tonality which is ascribed to “ Alice's Adventures in Wonderland” , has to do with the clues that are handed to the reader; time travel or dreaming, that is thinking which is awake and participating or cooperating in the field of imagination is the arc of Noah itself, or ‘the building of the ship', on which one of Carroll's contemporaries – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow that begins with the following lines –

"Build me straight, O worthy Master!

Stanch and strong, a goodly vessel,

That shall laugh at all disaster,

And with wave and whirlwind wrestle!"

Carroll in fact parodied Longfellow's poem “Song of Hiawatha” (1855), an epic ballad which was well-known even though it was often mocked for its meter. Carroll's rendition replaces the epic tonality with a whimsically artistic one, depicting the attempts of a photographer to take portraits at a family's home. However, it is the interplay of the poems which is central and the anecdotal aspect of which was another occasion for Carroll's exercise of oratory skills. His sensibility to his audience which would often consist of children also allowed for producing texts and images that would emanate a quality of grace or lightness. Carroll's devotion to his child-friends nurtured his oeuvre and the fact that he was the eldest child in his own family, resulted in the development of a lightness in both tact and speech, in thought and manners. Yet again, we are witnessing Carroll's acquiescence to the Aristotelian sine qua non with regard to the interdepence between epic poetry style and content. In their study of “Traditions of Heroic and Epic Poetry, volume 1”, the co-authors J.B. Hainsworth and Arthur Thomas Hatto draw our attention to what happens when the manner of the ‘epicality' doesn't coincide with the contents –

“Aristotle implies the specificity of the hexameter to the epic genre, noting that the Margites, which we would call a ‘mock-epic', had its own characteristic metre. Here, Aristotle operates with a notion essential to our own holistic view, though he does not formulate it explicitly, namely that in epic poetry style and content are to some degree interdependent. Since the same narrative nucleus can be ‘realised' in myth, folk-or hero-tale, eulogy, epic, or drama, an extremist might conclude that ‘epicality' must be sought in the epic manner alone. But, as Aristotle perceived, if the contents of an epic fall below a certain level, they mock the epic manne and so produce ‘mock-epic'. One element of this content which must be above a certain level is of course ‘ethos', of which Aristotle, in his highly intuitive as well as rationalistic way, was well aware.”

It's more than certain, that Dodgson sought to be seen as a friend ‘in reality' and in his literary works, as a consequence, both ‘pursuits' mutually enriched each other. So that, when T.S. Eliot employed the notion of a ‘ receptacle' in 1921 to indicate the nature of the ‘ poet's mind' in his manifesto “Tradition and the Individual Talent: An Essay” , once again he drew on the unfathomable ‘ flux' of consciousness or the ‘ stream of consciousness ', which is in a sense already predicated in Ovid's “Metamorphoses” , as well as in Carroll's depiction of the duality of dianoia, human understanding. The Platonic ‘receptacle' (chora ) and that of the ‘ subiectum ' (the seeker of truth) is what allows the principle of the ‘demiurgos' to ‘draw the primordial forms'.

“The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.”
Metaphysical poets were also deeply immersed in the ‘bridging' of the gulf between participating and perceiving, giving and receiving. Through another, much earlier, “magician-philosopher's” perspective, significantly inspired by both Aristotelian Neoplatonic tradition - that of Giordano Bruno developed in the ‘wheel of memory' or the ‘art of memory' the presentation of the ‘reasoning soul' wherein the entire “ essence of the whole soul ” in its pouring from the Unity (the One) is enabled of intending, discoursing, having memory, and so on. In the second chapter of “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland” , Alice is quite worried of ‘ going out altogether, like a candle. I wonder what I should be like then?”, her krisis or power of judgment appears mightily metaphysical; she goes on with numerous assumptions –

“I'm sure I'm not Ada,” she said, “for her hair goes in such long ringlets, and mine doesn't go in ringlets at all; and I'm sure I can't be Mabel, for I know all sorts of things, and she, oh, she knows such a very little! Besides, she's she, and I'm I, and – oh dear, how puzzling it all is! I'll try if I know all the things I used to know.”

Metaphysical poets would see enlightenment as a holistic task that would bridge the gap between the sensible and the supersensible, or between sensation and insight. By facing contradictions, namely in managing to detect them, the reader too, is invited or re-introduced to the process of comprehension, of mastering him/herself. The confusion that stems from the multiplicity of images surrounding both Alice and the reader is due to the need for development of latent qualities and faculties, which are developed through reading/dreaming; to enable one to perceive an event or a text, or reality as a whole, from various angles or perspectives. In “ The Heart of Plotinus: The Essential Enneads” , Algis Uzdavinys explores the integrity or the theurgic practices of late antiquity that are perennial and revelatory, rather than merely mechanic or of ‘cold' reasoning; in the chapter dedicated to Plotinus' Metaphysics we are told –

“The famous Plotinian phrase phuge monon pros monon (Enn. VI. 9. 11), usually rendered as “the flight of the alone to the Alone,” far from being his own original “invention”, is inherited from the ancient mystical tradition. The formula monos pros monon is related to the older formula monos mono as “private,” “secret”, thus presupposing an approach to the divine throne in the temple or in the heart. The Egyptian initiate hopes to see the divinity “alone, face-to-face,” and this mystical encounter is symbolically repeated (or modeled on) the encounter with the animated divine statue in the temple's holy of holies. The face-to-face revelatory discourse uses an archaic temple language and is to be understood within the theurgic context, since the flight (or ascent) to the divine Light of Lights is analogous to the Egyptian ritual for self-deification by uniting with the Sun, Amun-Ra.”

Alice's shift of perspective is achieved through a new level of awareness; while she has been ‘trapped' in a past structured by non-digested symbols systems, syllogisms and possible sequences, she grows to become a ‘custodian' who is animated by an ideal, she seizes the event that has got hold of herself and manages to name it ‘ from the viewpoint of the multiplicity of the divergent simulacra '; what is objective or self-organizing comes into cognition of its essere and into an expression of its omniscience or what is a kind of a leap into unlimited resources. In a contemporary fantastical work from John Crowley called “ Little, Big” , he dedicates special attention to the ‘art of memory' by referring to a meditation of Aristotle in his “ De Anima” , regarding recollection which is a holistic science, or one that transgresses both our natural and cultural predispositions. Crowley comments on “memory houses” or what we may find today as virtual galleries in cyberspace, as well as their repercussive influence upon their ‘builders' –
“(…) Also: as a memory house grows, it makes conjunctions and vistas that its builder can't conceive of beforehand. When out of necessity he throws up a new wing, it must about the original place in some way; so a door in the original house that previously opened on a weedy garden might suddenly blow open in a draught and show its astonished owner his grand new gallery full of just-installed memories from the backside, so to speak, at a left-hand turning, facing in the wrond direction – also instructive; and that new gallery might also turn out to be a shortcut to the ice-house, where he had put a distant winter once and then forgot.

Yes, forgot: because another thing about a memory house is that its builder and occupier can lose things in it just as you can in any house – the ball of string which you were certain you kept either with the stamps and the tape in the desk-drawer or in the hall closet with the tackhammer and the picture-wire, but which isn't in either place when you go to look for it. In the ordinary Natural Memory such things can simply vanish; you don't even remember you forgot them. The advantage of a memory house is that you know it's in there somewhere.”

As an expert of building spaces which in one way or another are ‘about the original place' (or person), or symbol. For example, there are many verses and songs in Wonderland that copy or refer to songs that were popular in the Liddell's family circle and that they would sing together. The mock turtle's “ Beautiful Soup” sung in chapter 10 of “ Alice's Adventures in Wonderland” is a parody of the famous poem “Star of the Evening” –

Beautiful Soup, so rich and green,Waiting in a hot tureen!Who for such dainties would not stoop?Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!

Beau--ootiful Soo--oop! Beau--ootiful Soo--oop! Soo--oop of the e--e--evening, Beautiful, beautiful Soup !

Beautiful Soup! Who cares for fish,Game or any other dish?Who would not give all else for twoPennyworth only of Beautiful Soup?Pennyworth only of beautiful Soup?

Beau--ootiful Soo--oop!Beau--ootiful Soo--oop!Soo--oop of the e--e--evening,Beautiful, beauti--FUL SOUP!

In his recent decoding of Alice, David Day concurs that Carroll's diary informs us that on August 1, 1862,

“ the girls performed for him the song “Beautiful Star”. This would be “Star of the Evening” (1855) by the American composer James M. Sayles, with its chorus, “Beautiful star,/Beautiful star,/ Star of evening, beautiful star.” There have been many attempts to match the creatures of the seashore academy with Victorian artists, particularly members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Ho Elwyn Jones and J. Francis Gladstone, authors of The Red King's Dream, claim to have found allusions in “Voice of the lobster” to the Pre-Raphaelites Burne-Jones, John Everett Millais, Ford Madox Brown, Dante Gabriel Rosetti and William Morris.”

While taking vivid interest in his cultural environment, Carroll necessarily would build his memory house, establishing conjunctions between the mathematical and the social stages, the abstract dryness with corresponding pictures of the tissue of the worldly which was woven out of speech figures or doublets which he would strive, to bring to a cohabitation in his life tasks. The editor of Carroll's journals – Edward Wakeling, accorded that –

Carroll's “method of condensation is like Alice shrinking and drinking from the bottle marked “drink me”. A large array of numbers gradually shrinks in size until a single number remains : the determinant.”

The Victorian physicist Oliver Lodge would speak of the ‘imponderable' or the ether and its ‘particles' in the second chapter of his “Ether and Reality: A Series of Discourses on the Many Functions of the Ether ...” –
“ The particles embedded in the Ether are not independent of it, they are closely connected with it, it is probable that they are formed out of it – they are not like grains of sand. The ether is the primary instrument of Mind, the vehicle of Soul, the habitation of Spirit. Truly it may be called the living garment of God.”

Having pondered terms from ancient theurgy, thermondynamics, painting, photography, logic and physics, it is impossible not to observe how the various teachings of different cultures such as the Chinese Tao, the Jewish Tsim-Tsoum, as well as the shamanic or eschatological/transcendental logic, come to form a semantically symmetrical ‘self-organizing' matrix .

Carroll's fairy tale has been and continues to be relevant in the light of the most recent studies on the reality of matter and vision; these studies correlate and resonate with teachings that have been passed on through the aeons and that revolve around the notion of access to what we may call ‘life', which, in Chinese tradition is a ‘great winged dragon', a fire or a flame which pierces through the entirety of creation. In the notion of momentum, or that of the ‘ unified field ' in electrical engineering, in the symbol of the seed, or the womb, additionally reflected or mirrored in those of the hermaic chain, the looking glass, the ‘non-orientable wormhole' and the golden mean (phi), we are engaged in observing and detecting everywhere the presence of relationships that participate directly in the realities to which they point, that is to say – readers become, too, the mediums or the weavers of new or revolutionary substructures and superstructures... When the reader is confronted with Alice's statement –

“Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't.”
he/she has begun to respond boundlessly, by means of his/her choice to embrace such an opportunity; he/she becomes freely or willingly, a prism for the painting of the rainbow anew; for the re-dressing of the mirror, of phantasmata , of the dance with the line and the circle, the golden mean spiral. Perhaps, the brightest example of the interdependence of chaos and order, or of ‘black holes' in the ‘collective unconscious', is available when it comes to the fantastical poem “ Jabberwocky ” in “Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There” , which allows anyone to experience their own contact or relationship with meaning and sound. In fact many of the words that are regarded as devoid of meaning, function as practical ‘vacuums' in the lexicon of the physics that has been emerging recently, which is concerned with the cyclic process of the in-breathing and out-breathing of reality. Carroll seems to continually, that is to say, repetitively, engage his readers in all of his works through ‘sustained intention', to be aware of their voluntary participation; that is, to always consider the nullity of the entity, the line and the circle; energy and matter; and to pay attention to what remains unsaid, or dissolves the illusions of stability. In “ Jabberwocky”, it is in fact possible to trace the formation of the nonsensical words and to re-think the poem through the application of the same modifications that were intended. In ”Logique du Sens” , Deleuze dedicates the seventh chapter on “Series of Esoteric Words” , and comments on the symbol-system of the word ‘jabberwocky' as a ‘ portmanteau word' -

“As a portmanteau word “Jabberwocky” connotes two series analogous to those of “Snark”. It connotes a series of the animal or vegetable provenance of edible and denotable objects and a series of verbal proliferation of expressible senses. It is of course the case that these two series may be connoted otherwise, and that the portmanteau word does not find in them the foundation of its necessity. The definition of the portmanteau word, as contracting several words and encompassing several senses, is therefore a nominal definition only.”

However, the initial and perhaps the preliminary emphasis is to be found in the ‘lens of genesis' or of creativity; the assonances and the entire epic atmosphere promote a re-activation of primordial necessities; the staging has been pre-included or pre-meditated in the poem, just like in most of Carroll's imaginations – language or illusion itself is ‘transferred' to the reader as a heritage, or a legacy. There is an understanding which pre-orchestrates all of rotation and mutation, or ‘the fall' , which Carroll invites us to reclaim, because of –

“The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!”

In “ Conscious Acts of Creation: The emergence of a new physics ”, William A. Tiller presents his definitions of principles related to “the outbreathing and the inbreathing of the All” , suggesting that future events are generated through taking responsibility in the present, that is a responding or decision-making, that causes all the parts or components of the fragments, the organs, to harmonize, to produce agreement, or common (shared) sense. He evokes “Gauge symmetry” and its relationship to space, which is established through conscious focus or intention, claiming that to“ lift the Gauge symmetry state throughout our entire world “, would help everyone move forward, or upward Jacob's ladder, or the evolutionary staircase, which would correspond to a reality that is more highly organized, or freedom-oriented. Regarding ‘mindsets' or ‘the power of one's mindset' he refers to an experiment carried out in the mid 1930's by a psychologist called Slater who designed what could be termed ‘upside down' glasses –

“Subjects were asked to continually wear these glasses that distorted their perception so that the wearer saw everything upside down. It was very disorienting for the wearer but, after about two to three weeks (depending on the wearer), there was a sudden ‘flip' and they saw everything right-side up. Then, if the subject permanently removed the glasses, the world was abruptly upside down again for about two to three weeks before the images returned to a normal perspective. Here, we see that the original mindset was so strong concerning the upright orientation of familiar objects, when the special glasses inverted this orientation, a force developed in the brain to [seemingly cause neural dendrites to grow into a configuration that essentially create an inversion mirror in the optical information path. Once this neural structure was ‘hardwired', with concomitant software adjustment, it took this ‘neural learning' and we humans do it all the time. “

By conditioning or framing the real, by imitating or challenging its materiality, formulas and texts challenge their respective audiences and in the case of a lover of all sorts of puzzles, such as Dodgson, it is more than probable, that he developed many games, riddles and stories, that would re-tell a self-evident truth, having to do with the crystallization of form out of thought. Both the beginning and the end of the ‘adventures' are contained within the singularity of an ‘adventure', the introduction and the conclusion of human history, is a matter of maturation, or of longing which is transformed through conscious intervention, which alludes to arriving at sense through nonsense. In discussing Deleuze, Badiou remarks that univocity demands ‘pure saying' and ‘pure event' which is the reason language needs to be deployed, as it insists (through the limit of the page, the wall of prejudice and dogma); in addressing the ‘matter of vision', the entire structure of the bodily, social, psychological and spiritual systems are put to a test –

“It is necessary to intuit that every object is double without it being the case that the two halves resemble one another” Thought is completed when, under the constraint of a case, it has succeeded in thoroughly unfolding that duplicity of beings which is simply the formal expression of the fact that univocity is expressed as equivocity. (…) Structuralism, which is only an analysis of beings, is incapable of this movement that consists in thinking how it comes about that nonsense is required to produce sense.”

In “Plain Superficiality” , Carroll explores the character of speech, or ‘ plain superficiality' that Gilles Deleuze considers through the Euclidian definition of the plain surface, which is also linked with Carroll's juggling with doubles (which we may say extends far beyond masks, or ‘ends'). Language is considered as a ‘playground' that may be animated with meaning through an ‘ exception '. As Sophie Marret observes in her research “ De l'autre coté de la logique” -

‘Reality appears as the domain of the exception to the rule in Carroll; marking the opposition between the natural language and the logical language, Carroll evokes the limits posed to logic by the subject and the real, which they approach through the dimension of ‘the event''

Rules that function as aporiae , such as the length of the word and its relationship to other words, which allow for a meditation on the etymology and cosmology of separateness, represent the apocalypse. In “Lewis Carroll – The Symbol and The Letter” , Sophie Marret comments on the apocalypse or the end of analysis, as well as the identification of the symptom, which suggests the re-emergence of the ontological or master signifiers. Again, this draws our attention to the necessity of inscribing reading or dreaming (that is, dreaming awake, consciously partaking of reality – as a religious and a philosophical deed). She quotes Jacques-Alain Miller, who underlines –

“ In psychoanalysis we can even claim that our knowledge inscribes itself not in the real but in the true […] It remains that maybe what inscribes itself in the real for us is not knowledge, but perhaps only a signifier, a signifier ‘one', and this is why Lacan, on occasion, defined the symptom as that which of the unconscious is translated by a letter.”

When Alice meets the White Knight in “Through The Looking Glass” , she witnesses the dissection of verse, of its epicality, under the guise of instruction or abstract sophistry; it is a disjointed announcement, intentionally displaced from what is ‘true'; thus, she is exposed to Frege's paradox or the approach to the ‘theory of reference', which is perceived by Carroll from the ‘other side' -

“The name of the song is called Haddock's Eyes” – “Oh, that's the name of the song, is it?” Alice said, trying to feel interested. – “No, you don't understand,” the Knight said, looking a little vexed. “That's what the name of the song is called. The name really is “The Aged Aged Man.” – “Then I ought to have said “That's what the song is called?” Alice corrected herself. – “No, you oughtn't: that's quite another thing! The song is called “Ways and Means”: but that's only what it's called, you know!” – “Well, what is the song then?” said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered. – “I was coming to that,” the Knight said. “The song really is A-sitting on a Gate!”…”

Meaning and naming, “means” and “names” are regarded as mutually replaceable and in the phrase “the end justifies the means”, their intensities are made equal or double. When Carroll plays with the literal dimension of language, he constantly warns us of its discursive dishonesty which is why one has to be informed of the cosmopolitan atomics of language. Even if he seemingly parodies many aspects of Plato's “ Republic ” in its mystical quality, Dodgson skillfully manipulates masterfully what in Neoplatonism is called a “fanciful cell” or Plato's allegory of the cave. Creatures like the Mock Turtle or the Gryphon are exemplary in the fabrication of ludicrous creatures, who belong to the wheel in Giordano Bruno's “ De Umbris Idearum ” that sketch or represent important historical events and people in ‘curious' ways. In the Thomistic substratum, the notion of the time capsule which Wonderland may well be perceived to perform, urges the aspirants to learn to ‘project' or construct through his imagination, the tools for the sculpting and transmission of his memory.

David Day elucidates Carroll's skilful ‘mise-en-scene' of remarkable historic figures, whose discourses continue to reform vision or lenses, and to reverberate through the simulacra, as well as, in the ontological distribution of univocal sense. On top of that, since Carroll was in love with ‘doubled' boomerangs, he virtually assigned the wondrous creatures with respective ‘aboveground' Victorian identities, that in their turn contained or reflected the characteristics of even more ‘primordial' ones. It is also peculiar that, as Trevor J. Saunders points out – in “ The Laws”, the dialogue is filled with “elephantine punning and other kinds of word-play, usually impossible to reproduce in English.” When Alice tries heroically to attribute to familiar tastes or substances, their effects or influences. In that way, we are in the midst of a satire in connection to the teaching of Hipppocrates who elaborated on the ‘four humours' and the harmonizing of the ‘mixtures' of fluids. Alice's interpretation of the classical humours – blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm – suggests a new construct – “pepper makes people hot-tempered, vinegar makes them sour, chamomile makes them bitter and barley-sugar makes them sweet-tempered .” In the ninth chapter in Day's decoding of Carroll's “ Alice” tells us that Carroll confirmed that the identity of the Mock Turtle was that of his colleague the Reverend Henry Parry Liddon –

“Wonderland, “turtle” implies teacher or philosopher. Consequently, we have another possible Carrollian pun on the name of Aristotle: Aris-turtle – aris in Greek means “top”, “best” or “first”, thus “best teacher” or “first philosopher”. Certainly, there was competition between Plato and Aristotle over who was ranked the top philosopher. Also, the Gryphon's lecturing style is similar to that of Aristotle who is believed to have walked as he lectured to his students. He lectured on the grounds of the Lyceum in Athens which became known as the Peripatetic school of philosophy. Furthermore, this (possibly mistaken) belief Aristotle's approach to teaching was consciously adopted by the Oxford Gryphon, John Ruskin, in his famous long outdoor walking-tour lectures. “

In the following excerpt from the encounter between Alice and the Mock Turtle's ‘ history', we are provided with more of Carroll's ingenious art of conjunction of historic figures and of vividly immortalizing them through ‘humor' or ‘the descent' as Deleuze suggests, in his “ Logique du sens” ; “ all height and depth abolished ”, in the “ adventure of humor ”.

“Once,” said the Mock Turtle at last, with a deep sigh, “I was a real Turtle.” These words were followed by a very long silence, broken only by an occasional exclamation of “Hjckrrh!” from the Gryphon, and the constant heavy sobbing of the Mock Turtle. Alice was very nearly getting up and saying, “Thank you, sir, for your interesting story – but she could not help thinking there must be more to come, as she sat still and said nothing.

“When we were little,” the Mock Turtle went on at last, more calmly, though still sobbing a little now and then, “we went to school in the sea. The master was an old Turtle – we used to call him Tortoise – “

“Why did you call him Tortooise, if he wasn't one” Alice asked.

“We called him Tortoise because he taught us,” said the Mock Turtle angrily. “Really you are very dull!”

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself for asking such a simple question,” addd the Gryphon; and then they both sat silent and looked at poor Alice, who felt ready to sink into the earth. At last the Gryphon said to the Mock Turtle, “Drive on, old fellow! Don't be all day about it!” and he went on in these words:

“Yes, we went to school in the sea, though you mayn't believe it – “

“I never said I didn't!” interrupted Alice.”

Lewis Carroll was truly ‘a follower' of Aristotle and it is well-known the “ Categories” , Aristotle's first work was an indescribable source of inspiration for the formulation of his personal investigation of syllogisms and his “ Symbolic Logic” he dedicated “ to the memory of Aristotle”. In its introduction we read –

“Since Aristotle, logicians have tried to formulate those rules underlying arguments which, when followed, will ensure that only true conclusions are drawn from true premises. These are called the rules of true argument.”

Thus Wonderland's syllogisms depict a central argument of Carroll's, that is what he writes in “ Curiosa Mathematica” –

“the validity of a Syllogism is quite independent of the truth of its Premisses.”

In Carroll's “The Dynamics of a Parti-cle” we are acquainted with a rule ‘number four” which states as follows –

“Rule 4: Once a name is inside speech acts, it can go anywhere.

Axiom: Since “speechacts” contains the same number of letters as “literature”, the two are equal by Rule 1.”

The hermetic or philosophical dimension of Carroll's vision is played out in the setting up of symmetries that function as one compass which is also a map or a capsule of the personality of, Dodgson, his will to pass on the ‘spiritual portion' of his eidos, his meditations that are but an extension, fusing into a larger plasma of thought.

In her paper “Plain Superficiality”, Judith Crews points out that here Carroll's argument takes on implications that may mysteriously evade our attention, namely that his “ definitions are applicable outside the realm of politics is easily seen once everything applying to politics within the article is simply ignored. Lifting out what is thus appropriate for the game at hand, we have the following definitions, postulates, and propositions:

PLAIN SUPERFICIALITY is the character of a speech, in which any two points being taken, the speaker is found to lie wholly with regard to those two points.

PLAIN ANGER is the inclination of two voters to one another, who meet together, but whose views are not in the same direction.

Let it be granted, that a speaker may digress from any one point to any other point.

That a finite argument (i.e., one finished and disposed of), may be produced to any extent in subsequent debates.

Scientifically, any ‘seed', (photon/electron) if well embedded/woven/encoded is sufficient to be every seed and it is focused or consciously guided, or ‘sustained intention' that feeds into the ‘visualization' or the hologram which appears wherever increasing in density of information has been ‘compressed'; and in the interplay between sense and nonsense we are witnessing what is experienced super-consciously as a yearning for returning to, or re-discovering the essence of all symbolic systems. This is a vision or a concept in the Early Renaissance that Giordano Bruno was in complete ‘coherence' with. According to him, in the case of understanding a particular act of knowledge or a portion of its universality, the mind or its ‘ subiectum' towards its demiurgic transcendence. In the Brunian system, focused attention on the dynamics of the soul, is what reconciliates; thus, proceeding to authentic or living knowledge is expressed in symbolic sequences, that are adequate to any field/category in the infinite. For Lacan the symbolic value of the ‘real' is entanglement, a virtual slipknot, which resembles visually the archetype of the winged dragon, as well as the braid of human DNA… In “Lewis Carroll: The Symbol and The Letter” , Sophie Marret re-affirms Carroll's “writing of the symptom” –

“ Lewis Carroll himself underlined that all his nonsensical writings were in fact born from ideas and fragments of dialogue that came into his mind and which he noted down in order not to forget them, without always being able to relate them to a precise cause. This remark concerning the creation of the work serves to underline the affinities of the latter with the formations of the unconscious. The neologisms are correlated to this. Carroll always affirmed that he did not know what The Hunting of the Snark meant, that he “hadn't meant anything but nonsense”, and that “a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer meant”.

Thus, Carroll's dreamlike writing could be and most of the time, is considered to be the outcome of fancy, rather than a certain exercise in spreading a holistic outlook; nevertheless, we are most susceptible to absorb unconsciously or to come to a state which allows us to put ourselves in the shoes of Alice, who is, after all a labyrinth winner, and her journey reminds us of specific trajectories that we have either noticed or slept through; this also rings a bell when we consider the theosophical perspective, according to which our dreaming state is the originating or the one that has allowed for the neutral and authentic Being to gradually form for itself physical organs to shelter and to ‘translate' it; in other words, from a single point beyond time and space, all the consecutive contractions and expansions have come about…

Thus we could consider ‘separateness' or the ‘building of cells' in the human organism, as well as in society, as a phenomenon which is cosmological and always demands to be transcended through embracing novelty, or neologisms, which bear an enigmatic presence that could be of transformative significance. Italo Calvino would address this in the twentieth century in the idea of literature that would appeal to the ‘transdisciplinary' – ‘ come filosofia naturale ', while he also perceived humor as a means of defense from the mechanization of thought. In both the first and the second parts of Alice's journey, each consisting of twelve chapters, we are completing full circles or cycles, only to begin to indentify and decipher the patterns with which the mind is involved with and that is also a very contemporary or relevant concept. In the end of the twentieth century, the movies which engaged the cosmological and conceptual dimensions of reality, namely – the trilogy of “The Matrix” – evoked the archetypal figure of the seeker, the logos that is re-born from Mr. Anderson – to “Neo”; the chessboard, or the polarized structure of the social scene as a ‘training field' for another, shrewd and integrated mindstate. In mathematics, the number ‘pi' points to what is anomalous or what is not falling into a pattern and both Alice's fall seems to be engaged with this mathematical anomaly, and in the second series of “The Matrix” : Reloaded” , Neo happens to reach a new intelligence, also called ‘source' in “ Reloaded” , through a window, the breadth of which is indicated to be 3.14 – or the approximate value of pi. In language, neologisms can be viewed as anomalies. In a manual called “The Medical basis of Psychiatry” , the authors S. Hossein Fatemi and Paula J. Clayton, define neologisms as ‘completely new word or phrase whose derivation cannot be understood. Sometimes the term neologism also has been used to mean a word that has been incorrectly built up but with origins that are understandable as caused by a misuse of the accepted methods of word formation.' In Alice's descent via the ‘cosmicomical' parallel of the established text, the overcoming of a pathological discourse, would be a trademark for the acknowledgment of an accompanying transcendental ‘seity' that opens the gateway to all of the consecutive stages of self-mastery of an individual's path. In Astrology, the matrix of the zodiac which consists of twelve archetypes is also considered to give us a glimpse into both the lower and the higher aspects of certain human traits; the zodiacal wheels are also linked symbolically with Bruno's ‘Memory Wheel' and the art of cognition of the higher ground through its facets; the signs are ‘fractals' in the sense that they are ‘the many' from which the one is shaped and the ‘shadows' of the singular voice or the undivided light. Nonsense as a choice of presentation is deliberate, not as much an act of unbridled fancy, as a trust in whoever lays their observant attention on the possibility which nonsense is, therefore it's pre-figured and plays with figures of speech and mathematics, so as to keep as within a zero-point, a vacuum of intention which is centered or objective.