There are times when I find myself truly nonplussed at the thought of explicating yet another stanzel of this Hunting of the Snark.
Some of you might think that Lewis
Carroll had a rough job of it, coming up with anapaest after anapaest,
all of ‘em having to do with Snarkery and all of ‘em in the finest High
Anglican-cum-Nonsense bon style.
However, this pate-addling task of devising pictures for verse upon
which one then devises prose easily beggars any of the rather picayune
literary horrors that Mr. Carroll might have endured.
Perhaps you
think that I have taken the elementary precaution of creating some sort
of "plan", a detailed system of references and motifs aligned with the
development of the entire poem, a conceptual blueprint with which I
could then research, prepare and execute each and every one of these
drawings.
Such however,
is not the case. In fact, it is the exact opposite of the truth. I am
utterly unprepared and thoroughly disorganized, quite honestly, I am
making it all up as I go along and I can’t help myself for I have no
plan nor strategy nor even a sense of direction about any of this Snark
stuff.
What brings all of this inner turmoil to mind is the
illustration shown above of the Beaver and Butcher lost in an immense
maze. They are cold, they are hungry, they are nervous and upset with
one another. And why is that?
The Beaver will tell you, very
indignantly, that it is because the Butcher won’t stop and ask for
directions. But how can he when I have never bothered to make any!
Yes, dear ladies, gentlemen and any other sort of readers, the masculine sense of direction is marvelously blank. There's no need to ask for directions when we know that all roads lead to Boojum!
Sorry about the hiatus, it's been quite busy for me of late … here's yet another episode of my GN Hunting of the Snark, currently stuck in Fit the Fifth …
Yet another visual metaphor to frighten the kiddies lost in our labyrinthine Hunting of the Snark.
The Beaver and Butcher’s above-mentioned debilitating monocurricular
monomania has put them entirely in my ink-stained hands and I have reduced them to metallic tokens in a children’s board-game.
Of course, all my readers are fully aware that monomania is the obscure yet potent Ursprung
(gesundheit) of that grand literary boojum, the cliché, ie, any lexical
monomania shared by any number of literate
chatterboxes. My readers are also aware that the cliché is the final
evolutionary goal of all literature, seeing as how all words are
essentially clichés designating common experiences and thoughts.
Luckily
for us (and Lewis Carroll), the Beaver and Butcher do not read much.
Nor do they need to, when one remembers that their Snarkomaniacal minds
are furnished with an infinite babelian library of literary clichés to
pass the time away with. Which is why, whenever they look about
themselves in perplexity, they invariably remark to one another that
they are trapped in a Borgesian* labyrinth.
Armed with such
potent clichés they can safely wander Mister Carroll’s Snark-Ridden
Garden of Forking Paths at all hours of the night. The Boojums of
English Nonsense Verse trouble them not, their lack of reality is
palpable! Yes, the Beaver and the Butcher can rely upon the succinct
verdict of Mr. J.L. Borges
upon all such Anglo-Saxon fictioneering, when he cooly remarked of
Carroll’s taciturn literary compatriot, the Tlönist Herbert Ashe, that
"in (his) life, he suffered from a sense of unreality, as do many
Englishmen".
Yes, indeed, Mister Borges, everything is going our way!
____________________________
* Borgesian … a clichéd epithet which renders any labyrinth instantly inert, lifeless
and suitable only for
cannabis-scented undergraduate bull sessions. Postgraduate scholars say
pshaw to all of the above, they smugly pat themselves on their back for
knowing all along that this entire business of words, clichés and texts
is a cunning dodge designed to sell ‘em something, such as soap or forks or smiles! The
inevitable commodification of literature and language is a subject
which makes me yawn politely. Frankly, if you wordsmiths can’t
de-commodify the tools of your trade, that’s your own lookout. I draw
pretty pictures for an increasingly penurious and untenable living, and
frankly, nothing has changed in that department since Lascaux.
Spare
a copper, if you can, guv’nor, for those proto-bohemian artists who
labored away in their dank garret-caves, wretchedly coughing like
prognathous consumptives while they daubed away at the world’s very first illustrated Hunting of the Snark.
They knew naught of hourly rates nor had they agents to negotiate with
the homicidal cave-bears which regularly feasted upon them. Their sole
tools were ochre and brush and with these ever so ‘umble means they
sketched out the chthonic beginnings, the very aleph as it were, of the
mighty labyrinth within which we are still wandering at this very moment …
