A snark in the dollhouse …

The above page from the Dream Book of Mister Pyridine perfectly illustrates the fallacy of assuming that there nothing going on here, nothing at all, Officer …

The semi-bifurcated, oblate vivoid shown here, which the alert reader will remember as having first appeared disporting itself in the Bellman's Speech of Fit the Second, is itself a degenerated, inky memoroid distilled from certain examples (NSFW) of Hans Bellmer's infamous Poupées.

Dolls are homunculi of a passive sort (steady on there, Mr. Bellmer) and might be best described as the first attempts of children to create their own personal slavish Golems over which they might then exercise their burgeoning penchant for tyranny and absolute despotism. Any parent whose child has a penchant for doll-decapitation and delimbing will instantly know what I mean.

There is a deep teutonic juju at work in dolls, the same sort of thing-um-jig which spurs on certain poets to create vastly complex symbolic mindscapes upon which they can then, at their passive-aggressive leisure, wreak their aesthetically pleasing vengeance. Lewis Carroll's Hunting of the Snark springs to mind as a sterling example of all of the above, with the one caveat that the violence seems to have been directed more at himself than others.

All of which goes to show that you just can't trust anyone these days, eh? Gosh darn these modern times in which we live, where everything has to mean something else even more complicated. Why can't we all just get along with ourselves, huh, Mister Carroll?