Lewis Carroll plus William Blake plus Aldous "Turpentine" Huxley minus Jim "Tuneless Yodeler" Morrison equals the above stanzel, which we'll call "The Deadly Door of Perception" for ease of reference.
We've been inkily slouching towards our Snarkian Gomorrah of Fit the Eighth for some time now and while the Baker plunges into his liminal, yet oddly minty fresh chasm, it's time for us to review a few facts about the Snark and Life in general.
Discovering the Meaning of Life is mostly a matter of using one's common sense, of which there's such a short supply on hand that we can safely say that for most of us hairless, bipedal, ex-arboreal monkey-people, common sense has been rudely vacated by Nonsense. The hairless ex-monkey most commonly regarded as the finest purveyor of Nonsense by his fellow simians is, oddly enough, Lewis Carroll. I say oddly, for the fact that Carroll's assessment of the Meaning of the Life was mostly Nonsense is, upon careful examination, plainly common sense.
Bereft of his ancestral, arboreal habitat and thick, warm pelt, shivering in the perpetual English sans banana or even breadfruit, the Admirable Carroll reacted as any sane primate would: he kept himself cozy by mentally relocating to what we now call the Carrollian Multiverse, a warm and dry place where everything made sense to its Creator and no one else.
The other inhabitants of the Carrollian Multiverse, simian or not, lived well-adjusted and productive lives, secure in the knowledge that their world lacked any substantial meaning beyond such odd snippets of semiotic white noise as the number 42 or the overwhelming prevalence of the letter B in their names. Potemkin Village semiotics, the experts call it, and it's a handy thing to have about when parsing over the Meaning of Life, Snark-Hunting style.
If only you and I had the metaphysical cojones to take this challenge and jettison our own simian cerebelli, but no matter, for any readers still bothering to follow my well-sedated argument will now put down their bucket of filthy water and filthier squeegee and pound the argument's windshield in an incoherent rage: what about the Baker? He faces his imminent annihilation. What's the meaning of that?
The annihilating chasm that the Baker is about to plunge into is our world, the world where common sense glibly peddles the Nonsensical axiom that everything must mean something just because it looks that way. Stung by a spasm indeed, our monkey-brains have been and always will be, by the door of perception.
Makes perfect sense to me.
