Fit the Fifth, Page 30, Panel 1 … mens sana in corpore snarquo

They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;
They pursued it with forks and hope;
They threatened its life with a railway-share;
They charmed it with smiles and soap.

Forcible posthumous collaboration … it's not a pretty phrase and it's not a pretty sight. Sure, you could turn away, you could pretend you didn't see anything, you could tell yourself that this is just another episode in the Hunting of the Snark, and you could even shrug your shoulders and admit that its author, Lewis Carroll, deserves it.

Or maybe you'll just brush it off. You could tell your wife that you saw something on the net today, something horrible happening to somebody and you couldn't quite figure it out because you were in a hurry, you had googled the word snark, hoping to get some quickie cocktail-party-talking-points on the latest craze that’s sweeping the NYC chatteratti, but you landed up here …

Somebody ought to do something, somebody else should help out because you can’t get involved — who knows what kind of crazy people are involved in this, look at 'em! They seem to be high on something, and that girl, she’s half-naked! Probably some kind of some druid cargo-cult of home-furnishings shoplifters and they're chanting something about forks and hope, smiles and soap, some kind of wiccan juju, I bet. And that man at the far left, the Polynesian one with the glandular problem, and the other one holding the railway share from Moggs & Spicer, how do these kind of people get past Immigration?

Yes, it’s a bad scene so you better move along, somebody might get hurt and it's none of your business anyway. Instead, breathe deeply and say it slowly … forcible posthumous collaboration … forcible posthumous collaboration … when it happens to Henry Holiday and Lewis Carroll it's just a shame but when it happens to you — it’s a tragedy!

NB. If this week’s posting seems a trifle addled, I apologize … a congested brain-box, accompanied by gales of sneezing fits and a feverish inability to think clearly has rendered me semi-snarked. In addition, the current brouhaha over Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday (known here-abouts as the Boots) and the concomitant efforts in certain quarters to apologize to the unwashed masses for inadvertently exposing them to Science, the Enlightenment or even Copernican Cosmology has left me feeling vaguely … overly-evolved.

Fit Three, Pages 18 and 19 as a Spread … and by this Snark you may contemplate the variation of the 23 letters

Amidst the spread of these pages, we are lost in the gutter but shall look to the stars …

We are drawing the pictures of the pictures of the drawing …

We are reading the poem of violent death reduced to errant nonsense …

We are tyrannized by the nostalgic gigantism of the nursery room …

We are traveling steerage in a well-snark’d ship of fools …

We are the intralapsarians buoyed by the avuncular patter in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral of the very model of a modern Major-General …

In sum, we are hunting a snark … lest a snark hunt us.

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NB. A propos of all things Snark, we must take note of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, whose recent opinion regarding the judicial status and disposal of Guantanamo Bay detainees was a stern rebuke to the Clochetic Rule of Three. Whilst the chattering classes harrumph-harrumph and golly-gee-whiz over the audacity of this sudden effloresence of symbolic logic (and invariably describe the Bellman as a madman or worse), the more pensive amongst us will think how it must feel to have one's legal and corporeal fate rest upon the mercy of powerful, humorless men who have just been publicly ridiculed by a well-read, Carrolliphile jurist.

We hunt the Snark for sport lest the Boojum drive us mad in earnest …

Fit Three, Page 18, Panel 2 … ecce pistor!

When at length he sat up and was able to speak,
His sad story he offered to tell;
And the Bellman cried "Silence! Not even a shriek!"
And excitedly tingled his bell.
There was silence supreme! Not a shriek, not a scream,
Scarcely even a howl or a groan,
As the man they called "Ho!" told his story of woe
In an antediluvian tone.

Martin Gardner, in his indispensible Annotated Snark, cites Eric Partridge’s assertion that the Baker’s use of antediluvian is "one of those rare instances in which Carroll uses a standard word in a completely whimsical sense". Gardner also notes the opposing theory of antediluvian being used as a foreshadowing of the Baker’s tears-to-come.

However, you and I know that he’s speaking Adamic, the universal language spoken before the Flood and the dispersal of tongues at the Tower of Babel. This antediluvian language, designed to facilitate Edenic communication between discreet data points in a secure and lossless environment (think FORTRAN or KVIKKALKUL), remains the Baker’s preferred flavor of postlapsarian blarney*. If we waxed poetic, we might even say it’s the angelic language in which animals dream and children babble when the adults are gone to bed.

But we’ll wax not, as yet, for deep, deep, deep underneath the surface, the Baker’s very shallow. Bless his simple Adamic soul but he’s just a Chomskian idiot-savant suffering from untreated postdiluvian stress syndrome. He sees the sun going down and the world spinning round and he macadamizes a postmodern, postlapsarian, postdiluvian and postbabelian man of sorrows on the comeback trail.

As for the Baker’s curious epithet of Ho; it is a typical bit of Snarkolinguistic bandinage, an orientalist snarkwallah’s reference to the eponymous language spoken in eastern India and Bangladesh, a language whose word for man is ho.

The word, the language, the man — all together now — tally ho!
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* The reconstruction of the Adamic language is a wholesome pastime for the protosurrealist insomniac. Its a priori ontological perfection requires an infinite vocabulary in which every word is a homophone of the other. All conjugations in the infinitive, all declensions nominative, no prepositions needed since every speaker is every thing and thus consubstantial, no interrogatives since they imply a lack of faith, etc. Might we not conjecture that Adamic survives today as the uneasy silence between phonemes?

Fit Two, Page 10, Panel 2

He had bought a large map representing the sea,
Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be
A map they could all understand.

The original illustration by Holiday of this Universal Map is, to be honest, a bit trite. It's obvious that the poor man was trying to economize on india ink and pen nibs. However, as the 11th Commandment reminds us: thou shalt not speak ill of another artist, particularly when they are dead and defenseless (the precise state in which their work is best appreciated and appreciates best).

I felt that I could do better. I assumed the traditional artist's position of cogitation whilst supine on my charpoy. I puffed upon the hookah proferred me by the Assamese chorus-girl who also pressed my feet, the predominant organ of mentation in my species. I was, of course, familiar with the etymology of the word "map", which ultimately conjured up the hebraic motif of a cloth which conceals and a cloth which reveals, all of which I deftly distilled into "what's-behind-curtain-number-four" and "the-Freudian-Slip".

But still … it was obvious … too obvious, perhaps. All the better for my class of readers! Starting with a gratuitious insult to Henry Holiday I had mentally arrived at a hookah-puffing Jewish savant peddling obscurantism to a witless Bellman in a Cairene souk. In the distance I could hear the blood-curdling screams of native children conjugating French verbs. I paid them no heed! I bent over my drawing board, pen in hand, my thoughts feverishly coagulating in a vivid mental maelstrom of mixed metaphors and incongruous images! Two weeks ago I couldn't even spell "artist", now I are one!