“But when you have to turn into a chrysalis…and then after that into a butterfly, I should think you’ll feel it a little queer, won’t you?”
“Not a bit,” said the Caterpillar.
“Well, perhaps your feelings may be different,” said Alice: “all I know is, it would feel very queer to me.”
“You!” said the Caterpillar contemptuously. “Who are you?”
§
It starts, I suppose, as it always does—with an impulse of curiosity. Chasing a rabbit down a hole. A white rabbit. A rabbit hole. A wonderland.
My life feels composed of this narrative but in different forms—patterning, repetitive—a cycle of discovery and questioning, wonder and riddles. Andrew in Wonderland and its Through the Looking Glass counterpart were two short, memoiristic novels I wrote and published nearly a trio of years ago. I claimed they were about coming to terms with the chaos of college—finding myself dropped in a realm of education held at the seams by vague tradition—a picturesque but odd, conformist institution. What madness university could muster I recounted through the lens of an amalgamated Wonderland, reflecting the visions and frustrations of my then-present reality.
But given the revealing nature of time’s great rotations, I see the books now for what they truly were: a space in which to explore and accept myself—to explore and accept my sexuality, the madness of my being. A means to slay the conventional Jabberwock, the one roaming around inside me. I don’t know that I assigned the creature any explicit symbolism in the books, apart from the archetypal beast that must be slain so the hero can advance—though it’s the strongest metaphor I can think of now when I recount all the parallels I infused in them. It was a fear of the truth—that black slithering thing with the glowing eyes and the thorn-tipped wings. And once slain, beheaded by a vorpal blade—and I crossed to the last square of the chessboard, just like Alice before me—I won a golden crown and the title of “king” of Wonderland. The crown, as originally dreamt by my past self, symbolized my little English degree, the culmination of the four years’ journey—so when I finished scripting this unusual retelling of my history, I thought the dream state would end. Finis. I thought I’d lose Wonderland or leave it behind.
But because it is me and not a degree in which it’s rooted, though I can’t say I live as submersed in that state of wonder as I once did, still I know now I can never wholly escape it, that parallel world layered onto my reality. I’m forever falling down the rabbit hole, forever wandering those unmappable landscapes and learning from its creatures—be they friends framed, caught between the flickering lenses of my imagination, projections of Wonderland’s denizens sewn into their eccentricities—or wisps of my own conjuring, given life in solitary hours, in the oft unquestioned spaces at the corners of one’s eyes. Call it a quirk, a maze of the mind, an oddity. Call it absurdity, if you like. The veils between my afternoon daydreams, deepest nightmares, and external reality stand invariably thin, it’s true; but whether casting its luminary film over a neon nightscape, a Neo-Georgian university, or a golden afternoon, Wonderland has proven a strength to me in all its irregular cleverness and irrationality.
And yet—I’ve had to keep it sharpened, that vorpal blade. Monsters, it would seem, don’t always stay slain. The narrative started itself over again, see. It wound round back. Coil and spring. Parallels, patterns, spiraling footpaths. Time passes here in the turning of pages, in the running of caucus races ending right back where you started, nothing gained but nothing lost. Cocooned in the boundless solitude of my room, straining to conjure that once bright veil of wonder—candles burning, pages turning, spirits yearning; there is dreaming, there is waking—and still no one can stay the reversal.
The “Drink Me” bottle has all but run its course. Stretching back to size, time and circumstance kept me pinned—arms and legs sticking monstrous out of the doll house I’d settled myself in—with an excess of time to reflect. One long tumble down the psychological rabbit hole, arms outstretched to catch what debris I could find. Scattered pieces of dreams, caffeine-induced scribblings, gin-swayed ramblings—laid out on the floor among candles and teacups like every writer’s murder board—outlining my episodic pace of life. In moving so often, I can’t help but feel like my own Alice, encountering some new nonsensical tableau at every turn, translating in whimsy what this cold world seeks to solidify in systematic preference, in emotionless algorithms and superimposed suppositions.
In penning the original Alice tales, Lewis Carroll countered the dominance of moralistic children’s literature in the Victorian age, creating stories rooted in nonsense, caught between the wonder of childhood and the oftentimes bizarre customs of adults. Many have sought to interpret Carroll’s inventions with their own personal hypotheses, whether positive or negative, ascribing it subtexts of drug use, puberty, psychoanalysis, political allegory—the list is quite extensive and near-preposterous at times. In the end, we can accept only what we know for certain: that as a mathematician and logician, Carroll amusingly turned such practices on their heads, filled the stories with personal references and jests—but ultimately wrote the books for the endlessly curious minds of children. The rest is merely there for us to delight in; and part of what makes Wonderland so delightful is this lack of definition, creating an open invitation for its interpretation and reinvention.
Tim Burton’s live action film, for instance, provided a narrative framework that rooted itself quite firmly in my psyche from a fairly young age. An Alice on the cusp of adulthood escapes into her subconscious to slay the prophesied Jabberwock, unlocking the courage to confront her Victorian society and refuse a proposal of marriage. In a similar fashion, my own life has felt possessed by a kind of duality—a conflict between order and chaos, between convention and curiosity, between a childhood submersed in rigidly structured religion and a continually growing awareness of my own counteracting sexuality. These worlds, existing simultaneously, held one in each of my outstretched hands, seemed never allowed to intersect—until I found a way to build a kind of bridge, formed out of words, and most often set in Wonderland. Here absurdity could be used liberally, symbolism lavishly, and queerness could blend unsuspectingly amid the mushrooms and muchness, the size-shifting bodies and numerous eccentricities…
A court bedecked in powdered wigs and pumps might mask a fickle religious assembly one moment and personify queer culture stereotypes in a shallow entourage the next. A campus could become a giant chess board, mock turtles and gryphons philosophically vague professors. Smiling cats and smoking caterpillars become late night confidants, friendly literary discourse a mad tea party of sorts; tart-stealing knaves turn to old lovers, myself called to the witness stand—king, queen, and court all having a finger to point, a point to make, a trial of righteous outrage, sentence first verdict afterward, jury box filling with squiggles and squabbles, lizards and dodos, my head still crunching up against the ceiling, my body filling the room… The cards fold, the dollhouse tumbles open, the chess board turns to a battlefield—drawing the champing jaws of the Jabberwock, the vise that would seek to contain, to swallow with fear’s mouth of flame. But the blade of truth goes snicker-snack, and with the beast beheaded, however numerous or repetitive the challenge, what remains of Wonderland, or what remains of myself, will continue to blossom still, however scarred or faded.
My wandering will continue—realistic, nonsensical, or otherwise—searching for beauty in all its terror, solving the riddles of my current purposes. Others seem to believe it’s within their charge to define such broad strokes for you, but I think they forget these are mysteries we ultimately solve internally, as individuals. Wonder isn’t taught; it’s learned. Sometimes that’s the beauty of its nature—to blossom without a rhyme, without a reason. Purest when in and of itself, though often corrupted. Which is why Wonderland calls for revisitation and conventions for conquering. Art would never die as fast as if you let them live.
And this concept of Wonderland is different for everyone; it’s transmutable—morphable—feral. But I find it’s not the mad tea parties that make the most of a difference—not the frivolous games or the ambitious stratagems or wily wordplays—but the honest questions, the simple acts of curiosity, of wandering a garden and looking up to find the mushrooms have sprouted taller than your head, and have you any idea why a raven is like a writing desk?
Wonderland, being for me the double-reality, the realm of the subconscious, the ever-exploratory land of peculiarity or queerness—exists much less prevalently now than it did in college. Partially because I was so invested in it while writing my duology, and partly because life has dulled a bit in creativity, in the pulse of its freedom and spirited abandon. Though it threads always beneath the surface of my reality, no matter how faintly, perhaps I have learned all I need from Wonderland, for a time. Perhaps in its provision of a path that made exploring my creativity and my sexuality something I could visualize, communicate, and eventually realize, it has melted back into the underground of the mind. And though I continuously seek it—striving always to uncover the tangible layers of fantastical and spiritual wonder that thread throughout the surface of our world—the transformative power that Wonderland carries seems something that emerges of its own will, not when I’m actively looking to restore it. But this also suggests it will return—in some expressively chaotic form or another. I may have fallen out of one rabbit hole, but it remains only logical that I will inevitably fall down another.
I realize this all must sound a shade or two absurd, but I promise you I’m not whittling life away in some kind of psychological illusion. I’m merely scoring notes of the fantastic in my life’s tempestuous opus. For the fantastic often sings truer than the realistic—and as reality is my instrument, I intend to play it.
I wrote a muted variation of these thoughts four years ago, when a friend of mine asked for words to accompany a photo he’d taken of me—and another edition, written a year ago in deeper hue and honesty, given to an artist capturing the stories of queer individuals across America. Though unable to fully express the enduring conflict between the creative, physical, and spiritual forces in my life, I wanted this essay to at least give the abstract pieces of both my creative past and present, a collective, if still slightly metaphorical, perspective.
Identifying the wonder in my surroundings doesn’t require so much conceptual pomp and poetry, I know that. But in drawing these parallels, I’m able to strengthen my sense of place as a creative individual. And for all the others who are mad to dream, who have no qualms dancing wild and free beneath the stars, running pell-mell on life’s checkered lawns, finding the moon has turned to a cat’s smile, or who feel like strange, misfit characters because of the irregularities in your dreams or in your heart, then I dream this place for you as well— And though the great riddle of Wonderland may yet still go unanswered, as long as the dream is dreamt, you have a home in my mad, mad kingdom.
Yours,
Andrew
a literary labyrinth 