Muchness and Light

And I built a ship for two, it waits for me and you in the dew of the fields.

For me, love is the spark at the center of the universe, the absolute essence of truth and good. It’s the moment of origin at the Big Bang. It’s the snap of God’s fingers to create it all.

There is nothing more valuable to me, whether it’s romantic or platonic or familial. True love that cares and is concerned and active, not mimicry that makes someone seem a more palatable version of human.

Maybe it wouldn’t mean so much, and maybe I wouldn’t love so hard, had I not been hurt in the ways I was. For all of my exploration and self-evisceration, there is no way to know for sure. I don’t get a George Bailey Christmas, when I get to see how my life could have been different. I get the life I create from the rubble, sometimes balanced precariously across a glittery web of scars, littered with lost hopes and dreams.  

But through all of the discord, through all of the incessant buzzing inside me, there is a constant pulse, like a faint homing beacon at the center, echoing in my core, through the emptiest and most desolate parts of me. In me but outside me, like a marker for my path through and out to something bigger than me.

My path to God, to arcane truth and to wholeness.

Love.

If I’m quiet enough and still enough, I can find my way. There is a path. Maybe not for everyone, but it’s the only way I have left to go. Every other direction has been explored, defiantly and exhaustively.

My pasts are tangled like obstacles, certainly, and therapy has been vital in helping me to make sense of it all. To make sense of myself. And it is a process, occurring in the time in space in which I live. Even when I’m not in session, the work is still happening, consciously and un. A slice here and there of a valiant sword, and I can take another few steps. But sometimes it feels like those thorny vines close back up, fueled by their own blood and sometimes mine.

I’m fucking tired from the battle.

Sometimes I want to curl up and sleep, to let it all block out the sun. But every time I have relegated myself to dim solitude, I have been overcome with a greater fear of what hides in the dark, of the darkness itself. And I have taken one more swipe, in the desperate hope of finding someone, anyone, hidden in bramble, who will hold back the tangles for me to step ahead again. A simple man, tattered and bruised, but smiling and willing, offering me a hand to hold to steady me. His boots coated in stardust.

I don’t need him to slay my dragons. If there’s an evil enchantress in all of this, it’s me, desperately trying to protect my own heart.

But, God, that’s too much to ask of anyone. No mere mortal can be expected to love me like that.  And I don’t know that anyone could be ready or able, no matter how much he might want to be. I don’t know if I am ready to believe that someone else even could.

I am not selfish in my intent. I am willing to fight for him in the same ways, to cheer him on and to appreciate his efforts. He deserves someone who will wipe his brow and kiss his face gently and tell him that he’s on his own right path. He deserves someone who will protect him while he sleeps.

I want to be able to grasp his hand, to draw on his strength when I am lacking. I want to be able to call out in the dark and hear his voice as more than a distant echo that might just be my own.

I need the reassurance that comes from knowing someone who loves me is truly and completely there.

Consistency. Reliability.

I have stumbled upon men before, of course, as surprised to find them as they were to find me. But, in the end, they’ve all been nothing more than fever dreams, absurdities fleeting in the light and forgotten in detail if not in feeling. Distant echoes like a memory of thunder.

In my hurt, I have retreated, time and again, afraid of the fear that piles like more rubble, threatening to blot out the sun entirely in self-preservation.

Pandy says love isn’t worth having if we aren’t willing to risk self-annihilation. But I don’t think that destruction of myself is a measure of love. It’s a measure of fear, of protection from the pain of the burning sun on my skin after so many years of darkness. For me, it’s a way to maintain the darkness and comfort from the unknown. It is mimicry of martyrdom.

I want to live in the light. I want to be free of the tangles and the thorns. I want to let the sun burn them all away so that there is no more fight. To stop watering them with my own blood and tears.

I need open space and fresh air. I need the last battle through the brush to be freeing.

And I want to find the source of the pinging, in rhythm with my heart. I want to find the beacon that leads me home.

Because I believe that I will also find a simple man with dusty boots that shimmer. I believe that there will be an arcane, perfect smile and outstretched hands that glisten with dew.

And so I fight. Every day. Sometimes the battle is just to get out of bed and soothe my own fears. The hardest battles are fought in the middle of the night, awake and alone in the dark, knowing that what I want and need most is somewhere out there in a vast universe that is no larger than the breadth and depth of my heart.

The way out is through. I couldn’t go back, if I tried. So I keep moving forward, step after exhausted step, because I believe there is love to be found.

I believe there is love to be found for me.

 

 

Some dance to remember, some dance to forget.

Last week, I had this awkward moment of running into an ex (read: very brief fling) in an unexpected public place. We didn’t speak—just eye contact and awkward silence. The next morning, Facebook Memories reminded me that it was three years ago that day that the fling had happened. The next day (and for the next two) Facebook reminded me that it was a major milestone anniversary with a different ex, tossing pictures of Vodka-soaked memories at me like Molotov cocktails. Somewhere in the midst of that, yet another ex made his presence known.

The Parade of Ghosts has begun.

This time of year marks the beginning of a couple of months of incredibly difficult anniversaries, from multiple relationships. Some days are reminders of more than one relationship—sometimes more than two—and the memories are not always kind. Yes, it is reminders of the hurt from other people, but it is also riddled with reminders of the choices I made and their lasting impact.

But I’m also riddled with reminders of who I was, of the transformation that occurred over the course of two years. I am plagued by pictures of myself from those times, and then I see myself now.

And I weep.

I know. In the last three years, I finalized my divorced, worked three part-time jobs (and then no part-time job) while going to school full time, while finishing one degree and continuing to finish another, while now working full-time and schooling part-time, while winning a huge award, while establishing a new relationship, and while raising two sons with very little help from their absentee father.

And it turned out my body was revolting but I didn’t know it, hence the extreme fatigue and hormonal issues and weight gain. Followed by an injury that has kept me out of the gym since October and that culminated in surgery last week.

Reasons not excuses.

In my heart, I feel like a fucking fraud.

None of the other stuff matters, because I got fat again. Because I regained part of the weight I spent three hours a day, for fifteen months, fighting off. When I was a stay-at-home mom who had to rely on a distant and emotionally-inconsistent husband for everything.

So right now, I’m fighting not just the ghosts of my exes and my former life, I’m battling the ghosts of myself, and they are bitches.

They are snarky and blond, with thinner thighs and less sag and a tighter ass. They are unapologetic for their choices, even now when it’s me who has to face their implications. They remind me that they warned me, that I wrote openly about how I couldn’t relinquish control of my food and weight for the rest of my life, how exactly this would happen. (I told you so!)

How maybe if I hadn’t made some of those choices along the way, I wouldn’t be in this emotional predicament.

So for all of my talk then—hell, even this talk now!—who the hell am I to tell myself or anyone else anything??

In so many ways, it feels like I’m back in the summer of 2010, in chronic pain and uncomfortable in my own skin, struggling to keep the house and the kids together and still give Stephanie time to breathe and enjoy the things that make her soul feel not dead. Not even alive. Just not dead.

I have come to accept that things are often outside my control. Really, I’m good with that. This doesn’t even feel unmanageable, just unmanaged.

So I take a deep breath—I don’t have the luxury to get real high—and try to make the mental list of what needs to be done. I tally projects and plans and intentions and expectations in an ongoing psychic To Do list, and then I am overwhelmed by it all and I just want to crawl in my bed and go to sleep.

But I can’t. There’s too damn much to do.

And even if I could sleep, my goddamn ghosts are there, just waiting.

It’s like my own production of No Exit starring Stephanie as Garcin, Inez, and Estelle simultaneously.

Existential crisis, indeed.

Today, I have no swarthy internet wisdom. I have no words of encouragement or really anything else. I can’t find the out, not yet. I know I will eventually scratch my way through the dark, along the dank wall, and claw my way out if that’s what it takes. But there’s no door opening today.

Those most I’m getting today is dirty fingernails.

 

Blind faith, heartache, mind games, mistakes, my sweet fireball, my sweet rigmarole, I want it all.

I was watching something insipid on television a few nights ago.  (It's hard to remember which stupid thing I was clearing off the DVR between sessions of homework.)  But I remember watching these characters on a couple of shows, walking through their lives and hoping to fall in love.  They'd meet their currently-ideal love interest in some less-than-ideal situation and visibly fight the thought that just maybe that was the person for them.  They were all looking for magic but refused to admit when they found it. 

I want magic. 

I spent a glorious Saturday evening with Pandy (née Hot Pocket) this past weekend.  After hours of dancing and laughing and eating and a little too much whipped cream, we settled into the quiet while our babies slept down the hall.  Eventually the talk turned yet again to my love life, specifically about what I loved about each of the men who have impacted my life so dramatically.

"What do you want?" she asked.  "Not what qualities you want in a man—what things?  If you could make a wishlist, what would be on it?"

Pandy knows damn well I've written a couple of times about what I want—the affection, the attentiveness, the lack of addiction.  But I know Pandy, and this was her Practical Magic moment of daring me to put my wishlist out there where Fate might get ahold of it and take her chance at offering me exactly what I want.

I started to think about it in terms of these prior relationships—DH, Absolem, Bounder, Katniss, Rex—that had offered me something good in their way but had still not managed to be good enough.  Like thinking about what you want in your unborn child, I started to pick and choose from those men. 

From DH, I would want the care he could provide.  For all of his flaws, he was an exceptionally good, practical caregiver when I needed it.  Whether stopping at the grocery store while I was busy with a baby boy or carefully doling out medication and clean bandages after surgery, he took really good care of me.  Eventually I learned to care for myself, which was one of the many problems we were never able to resolve, but I would want that active, tangible concern.  (Check for both Bounder and Katniss for doing this, as well, in their own ways and times.)

From Absolem, I would want the clarity of vision.  He could peek readily through my façade and see me.  It was impossible to hide my truths from him, and he never failed to tell me exactly what he saw—even if I didn't like it.  Bounder was just as adept, though he often danced around sharing his thoughts.  I would also want the fearlessness, the adventure for life, that I have only ever found in Absolem.

From Bounder, there is so much.  He set the bar so high in so many ways, though he often let it clatter to the ground—sometimes abrading me with those collapsing expectations.  The depth of emotion, both his own and felt with me.  The strength and vulnerability that were intricately interdependent.  The mischievous, crinkling eyes every time he smiled when I told him I loved him.  The ease with which he could cry with me, for me, in front of me, and how he never, ever withheld my emotions even when they were more than he thought he could bear.  How he would patiently and without recrimination listen as I unleashed my crazy, circuitous head and heart, but how I never had to actually say what I was thinking because he always just knew.  And the kiss that could stop time and turn the seas to dust.  That kiss that may never be topped. 

From Katniss, the chivalry and the romance.  The single red rose the first time we met, and the choice of a perfect book for Christmas.  The stories he would weave for me.  The way he could calm me with a single word, dropped at the exact, magical moment when I needed it most.  The way he would watch me intently while I spoke, and the lullabies he would sing to me over the phone just before I fell asleep. 

From Rex, the largess.  Not just the physical size—though make no mistake that I loved the way his hugeness felt, wrapping me into a dainty package that didn't feel like it would break.  How his hands dwarfed mine.  But there was a largeness of character, of dynamic, that was simultaneously gentle and kind.  The way he could make me laugh at anything and everything, but also how he could shut down my humming brain and quiet my overthinking with a look.  In some ways he did outdo Bounder, and I was thankful to know the bars could be raised even further.  And I have never been so immediately comfortable with a man as I was with him. 

But my wishlist is missing the one trait that each of these men has in common: their ability to make me feel negligible.  The practical, magical one will be there, no matter what.  He will call me every day that he can, even if it's just to tell me he loves me and goodnight after a really long day.  He will text me random thoughts and pictures and be thrilled that I message him regular  love letters, equally romantic and raunchy.  He will lie with me in the floor and the firelight, letting me sing whatever song I feel that night, while he strokes my hair gently and whispers to me that I am beautiful. 

And he will be there in the middle of the night, when I wake cold and scared, afraid of what comes out of my dreams.  He will sleep comfortably, soundly next to me.  He will actively, happily love me, and he will fight Heaven and Hell to be with me.  He will do what no one has ever been willing to do for me before: he will value me, openly and honestly, and remind me every day that I am worth his fight. 

And in return, I will love him like no other.  Every fiber of my being, every moment of soul and joy and heartache, every laugh and every tear, every angry word and every whisper of adulation in the dark.  To fill in every crack, to give him strength to be vulnerable, safety to be dangerous, acceptance to be who he was meant to be.   

Maybe it's foolish to wish these things.  Maybe it's childish or naive to hope that I find what I want most, what I seek as doggedly as I have ever done anything. 

And maybe it's magic. 

I saw my life flash by the very minute, saw my lightning, click, click, click in a little glass bottle.

"Did I dream you up?  Did you step out of my fantasy?"

"I've searched the world for you.  You are everything I ever dreamed about but never thought I'd find."

"You're like this dream that I try not to lose when I wake."

"You're every guy's wet dream."

All in the last year.  (That first one, almost to the day.)  Not all from the same men.  Not even all of the quotes, of the times and ways it has been said. 

Maybe I've been the nebulous hope or desire for something, or the metaphysical entreaty for relief through some uncanny fulfilment.  Maybe I've been the center of reverie-fraught, hazy images and impressions and feelings—impractical and tantalizing and seductive.  Mystical, phenomenal, and evanescent. 

Dreams are our brain's way of dealing with our day, our problems, and our lives.  We subconsciously make sense of what confounds us by sorting and shifting and shuffling, playing out possibilities in confusing symbolic meanings.  Dreams last for moments or minutes.  Sometimes we remember them and hang onto them as long as we're able, and sometimes they are lost to the eye-opening. 

I don't want to be a dream.  I want to be a wake. 

Yes, the waking, the predominant amount of time in which we conduct these fragile lives.  But also the spray and splash that trail a craft as it propels, the beautiful pattern that follows movement through time and space, a confluence of current that can only exist in that way at that moment. 

Coincidentally, a wake is also a group of vultures.  In the metaphysical realm of animal totems, vultures are a reminder to be patient; to use your keen insight in order to soar above your limitations, powerfully and efficiently and effortlessly; and to choose paths that support your higher consciousness and your heart, demanding the same from those of whom you are fiercely protective.  (Vultures always appear at the most poignant of times in my life.)

I don't want to be someone's unattainable dream.  I don't want to be stored tightly in the darkest corners of a heart until it's safe to pull me out and look at me one more time. 

If you dream of something and it comes into your life, seize it.  Don't waste it.  Reach out and grab it and don't let it go.  You may still fumble and drop it; it may shatter into a million, irreparable pieces.  But you were given the opportunity for a reason, whether you believe it to be divine intervention or the result of your own subconscious calling forth what it wanted and needed most.  Don't wither what you've worked so hard to bring to fruition.

Sleep to rest.  Dream to live.  And if you're dreaming of me instead of living me, you're a goddamn fool to let that go. 

This post's title taken from Frank Ocean's "Wake Up" (from The Lonny Breaux Collection). Click on the image to stream the track.

With one breath, with one flow, you will know.

I have ludicrous amounts of coincidence in my life. 

It's far beyond thinking of someone and then they call.  I have quit being surprised when I dream of someone and hear from them the next day, or even when I dream very detailed, seemingly random events that later come true. 

It's really more a matter of synchronicity.  In the 1920s, Swiss psychologist Carl Jung developed the term to explain "the experience of two or more events as meaningfully related, whereas they are unlikely to be causally related."  It's meaningful coincidence, though the events do not have to happen simultaneously and there doesn't have to be explanation of their meaning in terms of cause and effect. 

For Jung, synchronicity gave a basis to his concepts of "archetype" and "the collective unconscious".

For me, it means a whole bunch of batshit. 

It happens so often that it's become a fucking joke within the Castration Committee.  But what also regularly happens is that these patterns of synchronistic events precede the most poignant and profound moments in my life.  They are like omens for what's coming, both good and bad.

When my crying jag started last week, it took about two days to run its course.  In addition to all of the stress I've been under, Friday brought a series of events that were both unexpected and unsurprising.  Unrelated to each other, but these two currents in my life that should be skew—meaning they are not parallel and do not intersect—began to curve toward each other and resulted in a momentary traversion. 

That continuum of crisscross marked yet another landmark event in my life, specifically with Bounder—the person with whom I am most synchronous.

Days before it happened, I told Hot Pocket and Growler that something was brewing.  ("Something penis this way comes," I said.)  I could feel it, the shift in energy around me.  I'm very sensitive to such things; Absolem once told me I was like some kind of freaky, voodoo static magnet.  I just feel other people's energies.  With the people I'm closest to, I can do it from a distance.  I just know when something is wrong or happening.

The synchronicity often comes in waves, and inundations of it often herald the approaching crazy.

Right now, and especially tonight, I am swimming in portent. 

I don't know what this will be.  I almost never do.  I just know that it is coming.  It doesn't feel bad, though it does feel colossal.  Based on what happened in the past week and what I know is supposed to happen over the next month, I could take a guess as to what (and whom) in involves, but the details won't be revealed until the actual time.

Part of it is that I am open to the idea.  I am willing to see signs and meaning in the strangest of things.  I do actively look for it in my life, though I try very hard not to see more into something than is actually there.  Sometimes when I call something out and name it for being important, the person on the receiving end of the prognostication will tell me I'm full of shit.  All too often, I get to tell them I told you so.

Four hundred years ago, I would've been burned at the stake. 

I pay attention to these things, because my life has consistently shown me that there's reason for me to do so.  I get these vibes, for lack of a better term, and they almost always happen just before my path shifts dramatically. 

In the past, when it's been this strong, Fate has stepped in and forced me to come face-to-face with my next step, the impact so strong that it leaves me figuratively bruised and shaken.  She's a bitch, for sure, but I know better than to fuck with her.  There's a reason for it, every time, although I don't always see it until it's too late to even beg her to let me turn back. 

Whatever it is this time... okay.  I can rail against it and be a petulant, ungrateful little brat about it, or I can just accept that something crucial is about to happen and conserve my energy for when it actually plays out.  Someone important is going to need those energy stores, and I have the feeling that it's someone very, very important to me. 

It feels like a test, of everything that has come before, of everything I have learned over the last three years.  And I hope I'm up to the challenge.  I hope I have the skills to fight this battle—and maybe even the Vorpal sword one of us will need to slay that Jabberwocky. 

 

NOTE:

Just as I was finishing this piece, getting ready to post it, my phone popped up with a push notification from my Facebook fan page.  Earlier in the evening, I posted asking for suggestions for what to write about for a new blog post.  This is what I see when my phone got my attention:

THAT is how my life works. 

 

Someday when my crying is done, I'm gonna wear a smile and walk in the sun.

For months I've been toying with what to write next. 

I always knew I wanted to do something else from the Junkture stories.  I went to Mardi gras and Mobile earlier this year to do research for the next book, Mantissa.  (That's Alex Wheeler's first wife's backstory, if you're interested.  If you don't know who I'm talking about, read my first novel Persona Non Grata.)  Most of it would be totally fiction with bits and pieces of my youth and stories from friends' lives as well. 

There's also the story of Talia Wheeler, Alex's current wife.  Sequentially it happens just after Persona Non Grata but is told from Talia's point of view.  I knew a lot of it would reflect my real life in the aftermath of separation and the process of divorce.  I haven't had enough closure or distance to be able to delve into it quite yet.

I had a dream in the spring that was the catalyst for an entirely new story.  The details were swirling in my head, and I did hours and hours of research.  While utterly fiction and having nothing to do with Junkture, the tempest that is Sass and Bounder was strongly influencing how these characters were evolving.  This was true the first time we were together and even moreso the second time. 

I was stuck, though.  I couldn't quite see these new characters.  Queen Frostine was asking me regularly where this book was—she knew the gist of the story and wanted to see it come to fruition.  Even Hammer was intrigued by the idea. 

"It's all in my head," I would answer.

When Bounder and I broke up in July, I was on my way to Mobile again.  I needed time to think and wrap my head around what was happening.  The day after it finally happened, I drove out to Dauphin Island.  I sat on a mostly-deserted beach in the rain, listened to music, and cried.  I purged a lot of emotion that day, giving it to the wind and the rain and the withdrawing tide. 

And somehow over that tempest, I heard the names of the new characters.  Layla and Michael. 

From that point, they had identities.  I could hear and see them, knew how they acted and moved.  I borrowed Lady Hammer's laptop and wrote what would become the first draft of the first chapter on Sunday.  It took a few days, but I eventually got into the groove and the energy needed to write this story.

Like all writers do, I'm writing what I know.  Even though the story itself borders on paranormal romance (but is as about as genre-specific as PNG—which is to say, not at all), the emotions of Michael and Layla are effectively Bounder and me.  Like I did for the first book, and like I do for Muchness and Light, I am drawing upon my very real life to drive my writing. 

But just once I would like to not have to live a traumatic relationship just to get a book out of me. 

"Most women gain twenty-five pounds when they break up," my editor said.  "I'd say emotional writing is much more productive."

I agree, but it's hard to relive the good and the bad just to reframe the sense of emotion.  It's hard to see the texts and emails and then remember what was occurring in the midst of that.  It's as difficult to the middle-of-the-night "I miss and love you" messages as it is to see the "This is too hard, I don't think I can do it" ones.  It breaks my heart all over again to see all the times we were messaging simultaneously that we were listening to the same song, or to see when he'd text me that he was on his way to come and kiss his girl. 

In some ways, it leaves me even more confused about what happened.  He was there, plainly and constantly, and then suddenly not.  I knew when and why I think it happened, but I don't know how.  It seems like there was literally one moment in time when something shifted and everything fell apart.  If I mapped it out on a storyline, I can see the day that's pinpointed as the climactic turning point.  But there are still details I'm missing. 

I have to accept that I may never have that insight.  Writing Original Sin is kind of my way of making sense of it all, though our specifics are differently complicated than Michael and Layla's.  I get to build the monument to this as I see fit. 

"This is what your lightning strike was for," Hot Pocket said. 

She's probably right.  And I will take the lessons I learned from writing Persona Non Grata—step out of chronology, limit the emotional punch, break down the specifics to only what you need—and write this story as best I can.  The energy for it is abundant right now, and I'm let it flow openly and unabashedly.  If it's anything like my actual relationship with Bounder, it will come quickly and then be gone, leaving something entirely new in its wake. 

Where the clouds pull apart and the moon changes faces, in the quiet, secret places, are you there? Are you there?

I am kind of petrified of the dark. 

I always have been.  I went to sleep every night with my light on until I was in my early teens. 

It's not the darkness, per se, that's frightening; it's what may be lurking inside those shadows that scares the bejeezus out of me.  Too many horror movies when I was far too young to be watching them did nothing to help allay my fears.  Rousing in the middle of the night, I always imagine I see some indistinct, humanoid shape in the corner of the room.  And if I have to go into the hallway or (God forbid) the basement at night, it's always Pinhead that's waiting at the end of my path. 

But the darkness itself... well, that's kind of a different story. 

I love being comfortably in the quiet shadow.  I feel like I can bend and twist the shade into the cover I need, be it a lot or a little.  It's always been the place I was most free to dismiss my misgivings and shortcomings, to release my inhibitions and let my own inner light pulse dimly or brilliantly, as the moment demanded. 

To take away so much of my most used sense forces the others to compensate.  While I may be myopic in shadow, sound and touch become much more keen.  Music and sensation feel electric, and I am wholly entranced by that feeling. 

But that darkness also holds a silence that's begging to be heard.  The stillness contained therein demands a certain consideration, and I am enduringly willing to let that hold my attention, to envelope me in its secrets and dreams and fantasies. 

Inevitably, though, the light returns.  The daylight isn't by default a terrible thing.  It is beautiful and comforting in its own right.  It can also be harsh and terrifyingly revealing.  But I can't hide in the light.  There's little room to be covert when you're illuminated.  Somewhere, between the dark and the light, is the place I am most balanced and most erratic, feeling the tug of two different kinds of truths, their constancy pulling in opposite directions and holding me firmly in momentary stasis. 

What an idea. A crazy, mad, wonderful idea.

The wonderful Jay A. Hansen posted a Jack Kerouac quote today, as his Facebook status:

                 The only people for me are the mad ones. The ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time. The ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars….

This started me thinking about madness.  And if I start thinking about madness, I'm going to think of Alice in Wonderland.  And if I think of Alice, I'm going to write a blog post....

Alice deals a lot with madness in Alice in Wonderland (Tim Burton, 2010).  She overhears Lord Ascot accuse her father, Charles of having lost his senses for wanting to open trade routes to the East.  When Alice recounts her recurring dream of falling down a dark hole into a world filled with strange, unexpected creatures, she asks Charles Kingsleigh if he thinks she's "gone round the bend."

                Her father felt her forehead, looking just like their family doctor when he was checking a fever.  He made the doctor's "bad news" face and said, "I'm afraid so."  Alice's eyes widened, but he went on.  "You're mad.  Bonkers.  Off your head.  But I'll tell you a secret...all the best people are."

Of course, Alice believes her own self to be mad when she first sees, and then chases after, the watch-checking White Rabbit at the garden party.  But even as she falls down the rabbit hole, surrounded by strange and curious things, she doesn't question her own madness; she simply assumes it's another dream.  Having dreamed of Wonderland/Underland for so long, much of what she perceives as being a dream state seems perfectly acceptable, almost reasonable, to Alice.  She comments only that it is "curiouser and curiouser", and not quite as familiar as she had imagined.

The concept of madness, as such, doesn't come back into the story until the Cheshire Cat takes Alice to the home of the March Hare, for the tea party with the Dormouse and the Mad Hatter.  The latter character, of course, is presumed to be "mad as a hatter" because of mercury poisoning common to his profession.  While he's off-kilter, certainly, he is predominantly lucid in his actions and his interpretations of Alice and Underland. 

When Stayne, the Knave of Hearts, intrudes on the tea party in search of Alice (conveniently shrunken and hidden on a teapot), he calls the Hare, the Dormouse, and the Hatter is favorite trio of lunatics.  In an effort to protect the possibly-right-Alice, the threesome do their best to oblige the Knave's misconceptions, throwing teapots and singing ridiculous songs.  The Knave growls at them that they're all mad and leaves.  Alice is safe thanks to the feigned lunacy of her new friends.  The Mad Hatter agrees to take tiny, apprehensive Alice to the White Queen, transporting her by way of his hat:

                She couldn't help thinking the Knave was right about these three.  They were all quite mad.

                And yet...she had no one else.  Mad or not, it seemed she was stuck with them.

The Mad Hatter is inadvertently captured by the Red Queen's minions, and Alice infiltrates the castle of Iracebeth to rescue her friend.  Twice we see the Hatter maniacal and in a tizzy of self-recrimination at the thought of creating chapeaux for the horrid woman whose Jabberwocky wiped out his entire Hightopp clan of milliners.  When he's at his seemingly maddest, it is inevitably Alice who recognizes it and pulls him back from the brink, usually to save him from a terrible fate. 

Alice escapes, but the Hatter is once again imprisoned by the Red Queen, sentenced to beheading at dawn.  The Hatter sits in his cell, unresponsive and staring "blindly into space."  When the Knave and his guards taunt the Hatter and his accomplices, the Hatter is described as having madness in his eyes as he seizes Stayne, doing his best to choke the life out of him.  The Cheshire Cat and the Mad Hatter hatch a plan to fake the beheading and escape to join Alice at the White Queen's castle.

Alice finally chooses to accept the role of the White Queen's champion and slay the Jabberwocky. 

                The Hatter looked bemused.  "You still believe this is a dream?  Do you?"

                "Of course.  This has all come from my own mind."

                The Hatter thought about that for a moment.  "Which would mean that I'm not real."

                "I'm afraid so," said Alice, shaking her head.  "You're just a figment of my imagination.  I would dream up someone who's half mad."

                "Yes, yes.  But you would have to be half mad to dream me up," the Hatter observed.

                "I must be, then," Alice said.

The maddest of characters in Alice in Wonderland are the ones who are most in touch with what really matters, while the truly foolish are the ones who make and enforce the rules.  The Hatter is mad because of the horrible injustices perpetrated against himself and all of Underland.  He often seems lost in lunacy when he's actually most rational, faking madness to save an ally from certain doom. 

And if they are each half mad, does that make them whole?

In the end, Alice finds a way to mesh her dreams with her own, beautiful madness.  She recognizes that there is wonder in being mad, in finding the driving force that ultimately fuels her dreams. 

Maybe Kerouac had some of the same madness in mind when he wrote On the Road.  The people he loves are the uninhibited, thoughtful risk-takers, who sublimate their own madness to create their own dreams.  Kind of like Alice. 

There's a thin line between creativity and madness, and it might just be found down the rabbit hole.

There is no prince, Aunt Imogene.

In the 2010 Alice in Wonderland film, Tim Burton introduces a small but wonderful character, Aunt Imogene, played by the incomparable Frances de la Tour, best known for her role as Madame Olympe Maxime in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.  Imogene is Alice and Margaret Kingsleigh's aunt, an old maid whose manner of dress is both inappropriately young and far too dated.  We see Imogene early in the film (and its novelization), just after Alice has seen the White Rabbit and is trying desperately to flee Hamish's public proposal in the gazebo.  Alice bumps into Imogene, quite literally, and complains of seeing a rabbit in a waistcoat.

             "I can't be bothered with your fancy rabbit now," Imogene said, patting her ridiculous curls.  "I'm waiting for my fiancé."

            This was strange enough to distract Alice from the rabbit for a moment.  "You have a fiancé?"

            A sudden flash of white darted past her and she whirled around.  "There!  Did you see it?" she cried.  Her gaze searched the tangled shrubbery frantically, but everything was still again.

            "He's a prince," Imogene simpered, ignoring Alice's last question to go back to the story of her fiancé.  "But, alas, he cannot marry me unless he renounces the throne.  It's tragic, isn't it?"

            Alice gave her a skeptical look.  "Very."  Perhaps Imogene had lost her mind.  She certainly sounded madder than Alice right now.  Alice smiled and nodded politely, backing away from her aunt.  Imogene had her hands clasped under her chin and was gazing off into the distance, waiting for her imaginary fiancé to appear.

It's interesting to me that Aunt Imogene can take on such a grand role in such a short amount of time.  She is the embodiment of the decaying dream, a recurring theme throughout this version of the story; Alice's father's dreams of eastward expansion of trade routes, her sister's ideal marriage that's really not, and Victorian society's expectations that Alice marry up to be successful in life, are all crumbling at the onset of the story. 

We don't know if Imogene ever really loved a prince, and it's ultimately irrelevant.  Her prince is the last remaining hope she has for fulfilling the expectations of others.  She is trying desperately to hang on to the lucid dreams of her youth, now yellowed and faded but dressed up in garish blush. 

Alice, of course, escapes her own potential fiancé by falling down the rabbit hole on her return visit to Underland.  She has her adventure with the Mad Hatter, her strange and sexually-charged encounters with Stayne the Knave of Hearts, and the battles of ego with both the Red Queen and the White Queen.  After Alice slays the Jabberwocky on Frabjous Day and bids her farewells to her friends, she returns to the garden party at the Ascot estate. 

One by one, she gives her youthful, unabashed truths to the party-goers of note.  She declines Hamish's proposal, she tells her sister to butt out of her life, and she warns her brother-in-law against infidelitous behavior.  She rids herself of Lady Ascot's judgments of her, she establishes herself as an adult (and as her father's daughter) to her own mother, and she engages Lord Ascot in a continuation of her late father's business dealings, defining herself as confident, competent, and capable. 

In the midst of her parade of proclamations, Alice pauses to address her aunt a final time:

            "There is no prince, Aunt Imogene.  You need to talk to someone about these delusions."

The irony, of course, is that Alice has just come back again from a world of delusions that have shaped her since her childhood.  Alice is able to let the delusory events happen and wash over her and pass away without being caught up in them day after day.  Aunt Imogene, however, has been mired in her dream for so long that she can't see how her life has become stuck in her own psychic muck. 

One of my favorite songs ever is "The Side of the Road" by Concrete Blonde.  Johnette Napolitano sings over her banjo, "It's hard recognizing a dream that's gone dead."  That's exactly what's happened to poor Imogene.  She has never been able to wake from her dream and either carry it forward to fruition, or to let it fade into the twilight. 

I'm not one to advocate giving up on a dream, certainly; sometimes your dreams just have to be delayed until a more appropriate time.  But then there are the dreams that you have to look at in the harshest of lights, to see that they will never come to pass, no matter how much you doll yourself up for them.  When that time comes, you just have to put your party dress away, take down your pin curls, and wash the bright pink muck off your face, ready to face a new day and grab a new dream.