I'm pleased to say that I've had a really productive few days, writing-wise. Iceapalooza 2011 forced me to spend some time working. I managed a few blog posts, a few smaller pieces, and 11,000 words on my big fiction project. (I'm at 111,268, which translates to 207 formatted pages in Word.) Unfortunately, I've picked up a cold and haven't slept very well, between the coughing and just being keyed up from the cold meds.
My restless mind woke up this morning, debating about my next blog topic. I realized I haven't really delved into Through the Looking-Glass yet. Let's take a little trip, shall we?
Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There opens on a wintery afternoon. Alice is warm by the fire at home in the drawing room, watching her cat Dinah and two of her kittens, one black and one white. Dinah is busy bathing the patient white kitten, Snowball, while the little black one, Kitty, is playing and making kitten mischief. When Kitty demolishes on a ball of yarn that Alice has been rolling, Alice scoops her up and chides her for being a "wicked wicked little thing."
Alice lists the kitten's crimes of drinking her sister's milk and mewing while Dinah cleaned her. Alice remarks that Kitty would look exactly like Red Queen from her chess board, if only the kitten would sit up and fold its arms. Of course the kitten isn't cooperative in Alice's little game of "Let's Pretend." (What cat ever is?)
So to punish it, she held it up to the Looking-glass, that it might see how sulky it was, "--and if you're not good directly," she added, "I'll put you through into Looking-glass House. How would you like that?"
Alice goes on to describe Looking-glass House, which looks exactly like her own house, 
in mirrored reverse. She explains to Kitty how everything there is the same but different, how the Looking-glass House milk is perhaps not good to drink, and how she would like to explore the tiny bit of passage she can see at the back of the parlor there. As Alice admonishes Kitty to play Let's Pretend and journey through the looking glass, the glass of the giant hearth mirror begins to "melt away, just like a bright silvery mist."
In another moment, Alice was through the glass, and had jumped lightly down into the Looking-glass room. The very first thing she did was to look whether there was a fire in the fireplace, and she was quite pleased to find that there was a real one, blazing away as brightly as the one she had left behind. "So I shall be as warm as I was in the old room," thought Alice: "warmer, in fact, because there'll be no one here to scold me away from the fire. Oh, what fun it'll be, when they see me through the glass in here, and ca'n't get at me!"
Everything Alice sees after she steps into Looking-glass House is very different from the "quite common and uninteresting" things she can see in the old room. The chess board is askew, and the pieces are walking about the board and talking. When Alice tries to intercede helpfully in the game, the pieces can't hear or see her and are frightened by being moved around by a huge, invisible force. She sees a book and finds all the words are written backwards, in mirror text, of course. The poem is "Jabberwocky", which she doesn't understand at all.
(In the entire Alice universe, we'll see the Jabberwocky years later, if Tim Burton has anything to do with it. And if I stand by the premise that the Jabberwocky is later representative of the physical embodiment of Alice's battle with her own self-doubt, it's interesting that it's utter nonsense to the childhood Alice. All she understands is that "somebody killed something.")
Alice reminds herself to explore the rest of the house before she has to go back through the Looking-glass, and she decides to see the garden. She finds that she doesn't have to walk to get down the stairs, that she can float, and must grab onto the door-post to stop herself from floating away.
She was getting a little giddy with so much floating in the air, and was rather glad to find herself walking again in the natural way.
She goes out to the garden but is shocked to find that the paths don't work like she expects. They' twist and turn "more like a corkscrew than a path!" The paths don't lead in the direction she wants to go, and she spends a long time getting turned around, but she always ends up back at the house. She encounters the talking flowers, which are beautiful but argumentative--both with each other and with Alice. They're judgmental and difficult, not at all what Alice assumed flowers would be like, you know, if they could talk.
Alice is suddenly confronted by the Red Queen from the chess board, who is the same size as Alice now. In anticipated Carroll style, the story just changes and moves on. There's rarely any resolution to the immediacy of the situation, but that style of storytelling lends itself well to the dream-like state of Wonderland, as perceived by Alice. She goes on through a series of loosely-connected events until she wakes and returns to her normal drawing room, with Dinah and Snowball and Kitty.
The Looking-glass House isn't all Alice thinks it's cracked up to be. It's not an exact opposite, it's a mirror.
For a quick refresher, mirrors work by reversing all asymmetrical objects, meaning objects that aren't superposable on their mirror images. (Left-right reversal is a recurring theme in both of Carroll's Alice stories and nonsense writing.) Corkscrews also come up again and again in Through the Looking-glass. Corkscrews are helices, asymmetric three-dimensional curves that spiral in reverse in the mirror.
So even when it seems that Alice has compensated for the visual reversal, everything still moves differently. Except Alice. Her right and left still function like they're supposed to; she still moves to and fro mostly as she expects her body to move, even when the world around her is in complete juxtaposition to herself.
I think everyone wonders from time to time what it would be like to step through the Looking-glass into the giant mirror-image of our own lives, to see what it would be like to live as a slightly different version of our selves. I also think we'd be surprised, like Alice, to find that things aren't as oppositely perfect as we'd imagined. It would be incredibly hard to function in that place where everything is backwards while you, yourself, are forwards. So much oppositional concurrence would be unnerving and distracting after a while.
As I've talked about before, the mirror is not always my greatest ally. To rely on a backwards, superficial image of myself to define who I am is screwy enough, but to be forced to take the perceived imperfections with me, the ones that stare back at me so glaringly, would kind of defeat the purpose of trying somewhere new.
Plus, I'd be afraid of what I couldn't see in the mirror. All of the little things hiding behind the big things. It's scary enough to live in a world where I can anticipate how the unexpected might move, but to be constantly blind-sided by complete chaos would send me down my own corkscrewing path.
There's a certain enjoyment in wondering how my life would be different on the other side of the mirror. Ultimately I find that I'd rather stay in my own parlor, curled up by the fire, and watch my kittens creating mischief their own mischief, while I ready my yarn for creating something new.
Firstly I would like to wish everyone a happy new year and prosperity. Each time I visit this website. I learned something new and different which is very important and beneficial. So I can not resist me to comment here.
Posted by: Fountain Pumps | Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 04:02 PM
Thanks so much for stopping by and saying hi! I appreciate your kind words -- and Happy New Year to you!
Posted by: StephQJ | Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 04:47 PM
It's pretty scary to live in a world where I can anticipate the unexpected can happen, but they are constantly faced by the blind chaos enough to send my own perverse way.
Posted by: Pond Filters | Monday, January 24, 2011 at 11:07 AM