Reading With Alice

"Oh, much better!" cried the Queen, her voice rising to a squeak as she went on. (Alice Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll)

There is a scene in Alice Through the Looking Glass which I have carried with me my whole life. Perhaps it is my primal scene as a writer because I am still stuck there: stuck with Alice in the wool shop with the White Queen who has turned into a sheep who is bleating all sorts of strange and peculiar things I am still trying to work out. What is the sheep saying to me, to Alice, who has always been another version of myself for ‘Alice’ was the name my mother wished to call me. But I wonder what the Queen means when she says ‘much better?’ What or where is Much Better and how do you get there? After all, getting somewhere or anywhere at all, certainly getting anywhere logical or straightforward is Alice’s main frustration in Wonderland. She can never find a direct line through from one question to another, one place to another. So how can she better herself?

Fig. 1. The Book Bag.

This question of ‘better’ or bettering is my perpetual writing project; it is where I write from as I try to work out what is ‘better’ or ‘much better’ as a writer and why. This, I believe, is what art is for: a sense of self-improvement or progression, a pilgrim’s progress, which only I —- or my internal White Queen —- can know the value of in the end.

“Oh, much better!” cried the Queen, her voice rising to a squeak as she went on. “Much be-etter! Be-etter! Be-e-e-etter! Be-e-ehh!” The last word ended in a long bleat, so like a sheep that Alice quite started.

She looked at the Queen, who seemed to have suddenly wrapped herself up in wool. Alice rubbed her eyes, and looked again. She couldn’t make out what had happened at all. Was she in a shop? And was that really—was it really a sheep that was sitting on the other side of the counter? Rub as she could, she could make nothing more of it: she was in a little dark shop, leaning with her elbows on the counter, and opposite to her was an old Sheep, sitting in an arm-chair knitting, and every now and then leaving off to look at her through a great pair of spectacles.

“What is it you want to buy?” the Sheep said at last, looking up for a moment from her knitting.

“I don’t quite know yet,” Alice said, very gently. “I should like to look all round me first, if I might.” (Alice Through the Looking Glass)

Fig. 2. The Alice Award.

And then there is the scene just a few scenes before where Alice finds herself on a train travelling the wrong way without a ticket. Somehow the shop and the train have merged in my imagination. In both spaces the signifier and the signified are wildly at odds. The Queen is now a sheep but behaves as though she were still a queen; and the passengers are ‘people’ even though Alice identifies them as a Beetle and a Goat and a Horse. Somewhere surely there must be people making sense of these encounters? Perhaps the drive to write emerges from a need to make sense of nonsense. I wish to move forward not backwards; to order and govern some sort of plot; to tailor some kind of narrative rule or order. But I suspect I will always be in the role of Alice trying to put right the wild disorder of the world by writing up my own set of cardinal points. By building my own lonely set of railway carriages.

Still, there is something liberating about permitting characters to appear and disappear willy-nilly, and a train carriage is a useful metaphor for the writing project because of its neatly ordered caterpillar-style segments: what you might call an achievable form. My latest book, The Green Lady, has several train journeys which appear repeatedly in my dreams as versions of ‘The Writing Dream’. In my dream, I can hear the sound of typing next door to me in the connecting carriage, but I am separate from that typist and her clickety-clack, which is also the sound of the train hitting the metal tracks, the sound of forward movement, of locomotion, the writer’s progression.

Train journeys also occur in my forthcoming work, Pond Life, through David Lean's magnificent film, Brief Encounter, a film built from the exquisitely structured screenplay by Noel Coward. There, the screeching, smoky train signifies the impossibility of the lover's romance plot which is never consummated because it must remain a fantasy in order to survive as a perpetual possibility. The train journey also stands as a metaphor for any writing project which can only ever move along into the next carriage (progression being fundamental to the writer's sense of hope) hoping that in this portion of the journey, this carriage, the fellow travellers, the readers will be sympathetic companions.

Fig. 3. The Segment.

Amongst all the motley disorder of Wonderland, Alice is looking for some sort of harmony: a chorus of voices, a song, some shared experience with communal reference points. I suppose the writer is also looking for this: a way of joining up with a set of people she imagines as readers whose individual responses may be unique but with whom she travels - companionably - in the same carriage. Readers build communities, and writers too, but the writer's essential business is a lonely one and so she is grateful not to be told she is on the wrong journey with the wrong ticket or no ticket at all. In the end the experimental writer (and you might say any writing is experimental) must make her own brand of ticket and bring her own cushions and picnic. Settle herself in. Because there is always someone who will tell her she has the wrong sort of ticket – that pesky Guard putting his head through the window of her writing carriage.

Tickets, please!" said the Guard, putting his head in at the window. In a moment everybody was holding out a ticket: they were about the same size as the people, and quite seemed to fill the carriage.

"Now then! Show your ticket, child!" the Guard went on, looking angrily at Alice.

And a great many voices all said together ("like the chorus of a song," thought Alice). (Alice Through the Looking Glass).

Illustrations by Sabrina Durmaz. Artist Diary:

Preparing to Draw:

These illustrations came after three weeks of waiting to draw. When Sally sent me the article at the beginning of the month, I had a vision of doing a checkered charcoal and walnut ink piece with many layers and textures. It had become a great endeavour in my mind: allotting a respected time and space. The perfectionist was speaking. No time nor space was ‘right’. In striving for ‘better’, I had departed the meaning of the piece: that moving in non-linear ways, a dotted journey was a worthwhile route.

Materials:

These are not of charcoal or walnut ink – they are pixels from a screen and a plastic pen. But there is another world of materials that don’t meet the page – the comfort of a couch, music, air-conditioned respite from the summer heat, a full belly from dinner with friends – these are the materials which created these drawings: the materials which allow the guard of the ‘best’ to melt. ‘Better’ in a soft verb-like tone does not ask for the ‘best’.

The Drawings:

The illustration of the marching book-ended girl (Fig. 1. The Book Bag.) comes from many people. She is the reader who carries words on her consciousness, leaving pages behind in conversations or blog posts. Sally is one such reader. Sally, who may have been Alice: “Alice, who has always been another version of myself for ‘Alice’ was the name my mother wished to call me.” She is the Alice, who is journeying toward, neither forward nor straight. She carries the words that confuse her, her own memories. She is an imagined subject that I am conjuring in my own story-imagination: a messenger, a missionary – generating purposeful motion, so no place is still and defined. And, with no place defined, the ‘destination’ is not an ending.

The last illustration (Fig. 3. The Segment.) imagines this subject in layered space. The colours are intended to differentiate dimensions: the red, for the sheep’s shop, the blue for the train. All the while, Alice has been patient and curious. Yet, she is not waiting. A non-linear journey – with no ticket or route – cannot facilitate waiting. Unless the wait is a lifetime.

Practising Future Selves

I have felt this way about my future: waiting for the right moment to be my realized self. The self that draws without thinking or writes by simply sitting in front of a computer. But these imaginations are not so much fictions as they are delusions that depart from making anything in the material world. They distract from practise. Practise is the boarding of one segment. Each segment of the train must be boarded without a fixation about where it will go, but that it is its own place, with chairs, windows, and other characters. A room; a moment.

Sabrina Durmaz is a History and Studio Art undergraduate student currently studying at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, USA. She is still working on her future self, but some of the materials she would like to include are author, creative writing teacher, illustrator, animal carer, interior designer (or professional room organizer), garden helper, amateur book binder, tea-brewer, herbalist, and many other things. She would like to do verbs, and not be a noun.