It’s not often that one finds Lewis Carroll, St. Anthony the Great,
Hieronymus Bosch and the late Dr. Hunter S. Thompson mentioned in the
very same breath but such are the rarified quiddities of this inkster’s
inspiration.
The Butcher is shown here writing a footnote, two of
‘em since he’s ambipedextrous, an affectation rampant amongst Liberians
and Americans, both of whom share an affinity for feet over meters, the
imperious rascals! One of the most prodigal of these American metrophobes was the
journalist, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, who gained a considerable notoriety for "explaining it all in a popular style" to an otherwise unsuspecting American public.
Thompson’s most notorious national apologia was the jeremiad, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which detailed his quest for spiritual enlightenment in the nearest available desert.
Having no recourse to any secluded grottos, Thompson pursued his ascetic
devotions in the general direction of Las Vegas with astonishing
success, and like St. Anthony, he quickly attracted an entourage
of devilish phantoms in a variety of tormenting styles and sizes.
"We
were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert … suddenly
there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what
looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the
car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to
Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming, 'Holy Jesus! What are these
goddamn animals?'"
The well-gargled Flemish painter,
Hieronymus Bosch, whilst under the influence of an anachronistic
plagiarism, had already worked up a police identification sketch of some of Thompson’s assailants,
of which I have made the above drawing of a fax of a snapshot of a
xerox. This startling image of a group of out-of-town snarkhunters
taking in Wayne Newton at Circus Circus bears an
eerie and uncanny resemblance to both the turgid cerebral froth of
Messers Anthony, Bosch and Thompson, Esq., and a certain little stanza
of The Hunting of the Snark which we’ve been seeing far too much of around here lately!
As
your attorney, dear readers, I advise you to avoid eye contact with all
these suspect, hallucinatory inhabitants of weirdo drawings brandishing
their trippy, second-hand anapaests and uncomfortably reminding us that
when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. We are but amateurs of
the Snark, you and I, and as such, cuddly little fluffy things ill-suited to the rigors of modern life and all that other mental stuff.
Strange, creepy creatures are the bane of modern life and both Lewis Carroll and myself have seen fit to embellish this crucial stanzel of The Hunting of the Snark
with a surfeit of ‘em. Suitably alarmed, the Butcher has darted into a
convenient telephone booth and re-emerged in the guise of St. Anthony,
the father of Christian monasticism and more to our purposes, a
veritable bit of human fly-paper for all manner of hallucinatory things
that go bump in the night.
The attentive reader will remember that the very first stanzel of this Snark
involved a direct quotation from Mathias Grünewald’s version of St.
Anthony, a quotation which involved a fair bit of mirror-work and the
cramming of a very hirsute and oddly fey Saint into the sturdy
19th-century country-squire’s boots of the Boots, AKA Charles Darwin.
This saint-bashing mania of mine is shared with many other artists;
throughout the ages, we Bildervolk have mass-produced St. Anthonys by the bucketful. Even Henry Holiday joined in the fun, establishing an Antonine precedent for Fit the Fifth which even the religiously fastidious Lewis Carroll approved!
From whence comes this Antiantonimania? Are Salvador Dali (the Norman Rockwell of Surrealism), Hieronymus Bosch, Feliciens Rops and and even Gustave Flaubert
all victims of a sudden outbreak of religious fervor? Or is it all just
an excuse to draw legions of naked women and creepy circus sideshow
freaks mobbing a defenseless old man in a desert?
To be sure,
there is a certain visual, even Luis Buñuel kind of appeal to such a
proposition but nonetheless, dear reader, it’s just not very sporting,
is it? The genuinely Christian thing to do is to insist that all these
unreal phenomena besetting a very real person are promptly replaced with
a new and improved denful of very real phenomena besetting a patently
unreal person! The latter personage would be, of course, our Snark, and
I’m certain that you, the readers and thus the ultimate — and only! —
reality of this poem, will do a splendid job of standing in as the
former.
So, that’s all settled, is it? I’ll go and have a nice
lie-down while you slip into your new Snark-baiting role. Just study the
above drawing very carefully and do whatever Mister Bosch says. He does have an active imagination and if anyone asks you why this is so, hint vaguely that it’s just that Hieronymo's mad againe.
One can say what one likes about Lewis Carroll, or his secretive doppelgänger,
C.L. Dodgson, but one cannot say that either of them ever ignored the
intellectual and literary ramifications of what we now call common,
garden-variety Stupidity.
The above stanzel
is proof positive of all of the above blather, 100-proof positive, I
should think, with all its various pictolinguistic bits and pieces
denoting a thorough inability on the part of its protagonists to perform
even the simplest of arithmetical tasks.
We know that C.L.
Dodgson, in his capacity as a maths tutor at Christ Church, had many
opportunities to complain to his associate Carroll of the genuine
dunderheadedness of most of his pupils. Many of these young scholars,
being scions of the British upper classes, abjured all abstract thought
whatsoever and devoted themselves instead to the less mentally taxing
pastimes of drinking, gambling — and yes! — hunting!
Can
we venture to guess that Carroll, sympathizing with and perhaps even
assisted by the unlucky Dodgson, undertook an elaborate scheme of
passive-aggressive revenge, composing a cunning lampoon which in its
essence is nothing more than a verse epic dedicated to the Stupidity of
the Hunting Classes, a Victorian Dunciad, so to speak?
We know that the entire Hunting of the Snark
is predicated mostly upon the Clochetic Rule-of-Three, a shining
example of logical inanity. We know that this poem’s very title admits
of two, very opposite meanings: either a hunting for a snark, or rather, a hunting undertaken
by a snark! In either case, a nitwittery is produced since the Snark is
unreal and thus unavailable for hunting in any sense of the word.
Furthermore,
Dodgson’s fellow Oxonian, the inestimable Dr. Johnson, himself noted
that no man but a blockhead ever wrote but for money*, a pertinent
observation in light of the fact that Carroll wrote all his literary
works solely for his and his child-friends’ pleasure.
And so, in
the most approved clochetic manner, we will triangulate from all of the
above and arrive at the inescapable conclusion that the very Genius of
Stupidity thoroughly permeates every phoneme of the Snark!
We’ll then fritter all of the above’s wig by quickly dredging it in
Jules Renan’s oh-so-Gallic remark that he never understood the concept
of infinity until he contemplated the stupidity of the human race, in
particular, the blockheaded stubbornness of those sportsmen who persist
in chasing an infinitely receding prey!
The result is a
infinitely-toasted-cheese sort of thing of utterly mixed metaphors which
lets you, dear reader, off a certain hook entirely, for the fact that
you have followed this ungainly argument so far is
double-plus-proof-positive that you’re a Genuine Smartie and no Thickie
at all! Huzzah for good breeding and the finest education that Mummy and
Daddy’s pelf can buy, eh?
____________________________
*A
statement itself proved true by the Clochetic Rule of Three in light of
its triple-negative syntax! Darn these pesky liberals and their sin
tax!
I've been remiss in posting commentaries upon my GN version of The Hunting of the Snark and the reason is simple: with my illustrated novel and another lavishly illustrated, Cabellian-steampunkish book for Penguin/Random being prepared for publication, I'm stretched a bit thin … but you know, my heart belongs to Snark, so I promise to behave from now on …
Ladies and gentlemen, the
name of the game is Hunting the Snark and today we’ll try to find a Jubjub Bird, a beast just like the Snark but even better.
Finding one is child’s play, especially for a smart operator such as you. Simply lay your money down and watch the origami cranes closely,
the clue you seek is beneath one of them. Pay no attention to the young
gentleman with the fieldstone head and vacant expression, he’s a
Polynesian exchange student studying mid-19th-century British abattoir
practices and he has nothing to do with me, I assure you. The epithet of
shill worries him not, it's idle speculation and his empty head is
entirely innocent of such nefarious thing-um-a-jigs.
Using the
Clochetic Rule of Three (known to polite society as the Logician’s
Variation Upon Three Card Monte) the Butcher has already won a Jubjub
Bird, the lucky guy! Alas, his fellow gamester, the plucky Beaver, has
lost count. She is a flummoxed castorian, or in popular parlance, a mark, and as such, quite appealing to
homicidal beasts such as Jubjub Birds!
In fact, her
dizzy-headed state of pixilation is the only correct strategy to defeat
this nefarious, thimblerigged scheme! Dispossessed of all common sense,
proudly ignorant of all logical acumen, she blithely chooses the closest
origami crane — et voilà — all the fluttering, flying, flittering semioglyphs concealed therein are freed at last!
Yes,
dear readers, it’s all rather zenlike, most confidence games are. Truth and deception, sense and nonsense, all enfolded upon
themselves into origamic puzzles which, when upended, release into the
wild the crypto-Jubjubian fledgings of raw meaning.
And if all the above crosstalk wracks your poor brains, then beware the Jubjub, my son, and watch the telly instead, it do the Snark in different voices!
