Fit Three, Page 21, Panel 1 … And did those snarks in ancient time, walk upon England’s mountains green?

("That's exactly the method," the Bellman bold
In a hasty parenthesis cried,
"That's exactly the way I have always been told
That the capture of Snarks should be tried!")

Oh, you silly, mad, impetuous boy of a Bellman, of course you’ve heard it before! Your sense of exactitude may be lacking but as we shall demonstrate, that is mere subterfuge! In fact, our Bellman has a cunning plan … designed to cloak the manicheaen dichotomy of his cryptognostic brainbox with something completely different!

The Bellman’s memory of the Baker’s Snark-Hunting Method (see last week’s verse) has been divided, like William Pitt or George Bush, into two portions to conceal his heretical, dare we say, even paganistic proclivities …

The outer, more orthodox memory is derived from childhood memories of Sunday morning sermonizing at the ol’ vicarage, to wit, Hebrews 12 : 17 …

"For ye know how that afterward, when he would have inherited the blessing, he was rejected: for he found no place of repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears."

However, there is another, more pertinent memory lurking in the wings, a happier memory of family sing-alongs around the parlour piano, to wit, some verses from that favorite Victorian ballad, The Mistletoe Bough …

They sought her that night, they sought her next day,
They sought her in vain when a week passed away.

Nothing much to see here*, folks — until one remembers that the mistletoe is an ancient element of that paganism which was uprooted entirely by the orthodox Christianity which the Bellman supposedly espouses with his first, hebraic memory!

Say it ain’t so, Bellman! Deny, if you can, that what we have here, in this Snark Hunters’ recipe of "seeking-thimbles-care-forks-hope-railway-share-smiles-soap" is nothing less than a Celtic pagan’s verse charm, an Old English galdor in fact, cleverly concealed behind some monotheistic prattle! But he cannot deny, he cannot say it ain’t so, he stands silent.

And so, it is with heavy heart (and light kidneys) that we must unmask the Bellman and show him as he really is — an unrepentant henotheist! All this versified fancypants talk of seeking Snarks is just old-fashioned pagan charm-making — by jove, it’s plain witchcraft! Deny it all you can, Bellman, but shame on you, the fictional creation of a clergyman’s son, for your heathen ways. You and your cabal of backsliding, snark-worshipping, Anglo-Saxon cryptoskálds are found out at last! Go now, skulk in your sordid oak groves …

… How on earth did they find me out, you wonder, from whence comes this prosecutorial zeal? By Belenos, what is this, the Spanish Inquisition? — ha, ha — nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

________________________

* There are those quibblers who will insist upon the The Mistletoe Bough's publication date of 1884 rendering null and void all manner of thoughts concerning the influence of Old English poetry upon Lewis Carroll, and in particular, the general, pre-Christian, Northern European penchant for conflating linguistic structure with cosmological structure. I do not know whether the ballad has an older antecedent (I suspect it does, simply because I wish it so) but I do know that Carroll's fascination with linguistic world-play is undeniable and has deep roots in English culture. In addition, I cannot for the life of me remember to whom I must attribute the above Biblical and balladic Snarkological theories to … various pseudonymic postings upon the Lewis Carroll forums to whom I owe great thanks.

There are also those inquisitorial types who will point out that the premise of all of the above theorizing is the precise opposite of last week's theorizing upon the same critical Eighth Stanza. To them I must reply, with all the hauteur and superciliousness I can muster at such short notice — belgium, man, belgium!

Fit Three, Page 20, Panel 2 …swept away!

" 'You may seek it with thimbles — and seek it with care;
You may hunt it with forks and hope;
You may threaten its life with a railway-share;
You may charm it with smiles and soap —' "

Do not mistake this infamous stanza as a magical refrain or prescription designed by Lewis Carroll to assist the B-Boyz in their Snark hunt, nothing could be further from the truth. Such misthinking is an anthrosemiotic bogeyman put forth by certain academics & philosophes of the Sir James Frazer ilk, Cheapside tailors peddling "ready-made suits" for their naked and the dead.

Consider instead the internal Mind of this poem (yes, there are such boojums), which lives a life independent of its creator, its inhabitants & even its readers. All works of art have these primeval Minds, each according to its national character. The Mind of this poem, being English, roams the midsummer nights daubed in woad, speaks in runes at high tea, shares small beer with the Mind of the Domesday Book and Prospero’s Books in the Mermaid Tavern, and dosses behind hedges with the Mind of Bradshaw’s Railway Guide, a direct descendent of Achilles’ Shield presently down on her luck.

Before you can voice your objections, I must interject — pshaw! Be unperplexed, dear reader! — the Snark and the Mind of The Hunting of the Snark are not the same bestiole. The latter is a deliberate fiction bandied about by Lewis Carroll. The former is the Art behind the fiction — a magic which the Muses have excused from the lie of being truthful.

Oh, ye of too much faith! Can’t you see that all your seeking and hunting and threatening and charming, that all of your sacrifices are meant for you, you alone, that they serve only to distract you from the truth? We heap up our sacrificial relics at the feet of the Mind of the Snark: the thimbles, the cares, the forks and hope, the railway shares, the smiles and soap, all that Victorian bourgeois clutter mouldering in our mental attic — for ourselves only!

Pack up your smiles and soap, abandon all forks and hope, ye überliterati! Repent and understand at last that the Hunting of the Snark is a robinsonade (the mysterious island from whence all Nonsense springs) and that the Mind of the Snark is its pagan god-chieftain at whose feet we pile gifts useful to no one but ourselves.
_____________________

NB. Thanks to Doug Howick for unearthing The Head of a New Zealand Chief … the etymological plot thickens and in my ‘umble opinion there is much more than meets the eye in this illustration’s cutline. And if you cannot discern the difference twixt Art and Fiction, well, that’s your own lookout.

Everywhere man is born free & everywhere man is on holiday

Dear readers, this Snark Hunt must pause for a week whilst we regain our strength by taking the waters (and beers) at Festung Schnark-Sud, ie., the family grange in Virginia. To those who need a quotidian dose of thinkery, I recommend Adam Robert's superb blog. To those with an etymological infestation, Goofy is your man. And finally, I recommend the occluded 'pataphysician, nnyhav, for all other cogitations and flanneries.

Please note the above photograph; some folks say that the peacock is a common cinematic stand-in for boojums. Yow!

Fit Three, Page 20, Panel 1 … what is it men in SNARK do require? The lineaments of Alimentary Desire

"He remarked to me then," said that mildest of men,
" 'If your Snark be a Snark, that is right:
Fetch it home by all means — you may serve it with greens,
And it's handy for striking a light.

It is an undeniably Gradgrindish Fact that of all the commentaries which I’ve made on this Hunting of the Snark, the most popular by far was the Assamese Snark Curry. Obviously, my readers possess the good taste to delight in the pleasures of both the chase and the table.

The flavor of Snark, being animal, vegetable and mineral all at once, lends itself to all manner of cookery and here at Chez Snarque, we dine on snark in every season and think nothing of it — it is the original slow-food and since the Snark is a beast easily found everywhere, its carbon foot print is the lightest imaginable! The following recipe perfectly captures the flavor and ambience of freshly-caught snark in its South Asian incarnation — you won’t be disappointed!

South Indian Snark Fry
• Fetch to home by any means possible (palanquin, scooter-rickshaw, forkéd stick) approx. 2 lbs. Snark fillets. If your fishmonger has no Snark, use any skinless, boneless, firm-fleshed fish fillets such as tilapia, cod, catfish. Perfectly fresh soft-shell crabs are widely considered to be the best approximation of Snark.
• 2 tablespoons of ground coriander, 1 teaspoon of salt, 1 teaspoon of ground black pepper and as much ground red chili (cayenne) as you care for
• A half-cup of grated onion
• 3 cloves of garlic, grated
• Two tablespoons of vegetable oil
• Sufficient flour to dredge the fillets, a mixture of one-half all-purpose plain flour, one-half corn meal

Combine the spices, grated onion, grated garlic and oil in a non-reactive bowl, then place the snark fillets inside the bowl, making sure that the fillets become thoroughly coated with the mixture. Let stand (refrigerated) for at least an hour or two. When ready to cook, gently dredge the coated fillets in the cornmeal-flour mix, taking care that the onion & spice mix remains on the fillets. Fry them in a pan with sufficient oil at high heat. The crust should be golden brown and if done speedily will not be at all greasy. Serve immediately.

You may indeed serve it with greens such as a simple garden salad. You may also fetch it home in the company of a thoroughly chilled crisp India pale ale. You may even use it for striking a light along with some lime pickle. But if your Snark fry be a Boojum, then just softly and suddenly vanish away … and let that Boojum do the washing-up for a change!

Onward, with forks and hope — to the table!

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.

_________________


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 19, Panel 3 … Family & Kinship Patterns of 19th-Century British Yahoos: Avuncular Boojumery?

"A dear uncle of mine (after whom I was named)
Remarked, when I bade him farewell —"
"Oh, skip your dear uncle!" the Bellman exclaimed,
As he angrily tingled his bell.

Yes, yes, yes, that’s all very well, dear reader … aren’t you clever to have remembered that Lewis Carroll’s devoted colleague, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, was named after his dear uncle, Robert Wilfred Skeffington (gesundheit) Lutwidge.

I also know that you have made arrangements to force your attentions upon some local chorus girls and impress upon them the coincidence of the Snark’s origins; how Lewis Carroll commenced that poem’s composition in the town of Guildford on July 18, 1874 — the precise time and place where Dodgson himself was playing the role of "dear uncle" whilst nursing a terminally ill, tubercular nephew.

But there’s more. While going through an old dustbin the lid flew off and you emerged clutching the proof positive of an avuncular trifecta : a dog-eared account of dear uncle Robert Wilfred Skeffington Lutwidge being fatally wounded by a lunatic armed with a large rusty nail, the point of which had been recently sharpened in anticipation of its lethal purpose.

Enough of these dear uncles and these dear readers! It's this defective pen of mine, it will not draw uncles properly — curse these cut-rate penmongers! This hand-me-down drawing of a telegram of a newspaper clipping of a photograph of a simulated second-hand uncle will have to do for now … at least until that time when all our "dear uncles", like laughter, are doomed to disappear. 

Fit Three, Page 19, Panel 2 … my object all sublime, I shall achieve in time, to make the boojum’s fit the crime

"I skip forty years," said the Baker, in tears,
And proceed without further remark
To the day when you took me aboard of your ship
To help you in hunting the Snark.

The story so far … there once was a Snark … but it will be a Boojum, alas!

The Baker is suffering from what we now know to be angst. Once upon a time we would have pinned the label of big, fat crybaby upon him but these are dangerously litigious times for us thought-criminals.

Boojum-angst was first used as a legal defense by the Baker’s legal counsel, the Barrister, AKA Martin Heidegger, in his seminal brief (naughty boy) : Sein und Zeit. He excused the Baker’s regression into a second childhood with the then-novel defense of angst, which he explained as an objectless and generalized dread occasioned by the growing presence of Nothing. The boojum, a nonexistent being, fit this description nicely and the Barrister won an acquital for his client on the grounds that he was an idiot anyway. We shall see more of the Barrister’s weasel-skills in Fit the Sixth.

From whence comes this fashion to label all things boojum in the German language? Angst, schadenfreude, strafe (straffen), weltschmertz — all of ‘em teutonic and hardly a laugh in the lot. May we quote the poet Heinrich Heine (finally getting some good reviews in the notoriously anti-Heine NYT) on this subject :

"… the Germans have the curious custom of always attaching a thought to whatever they do.”

Schnitzel for thought, indeed! All it needs is this mustard-like condiment, from the cupboard of the truly inspired and genuinely missed American illustrator, Edward Gorey :

"I have a dumb theory that a creative piece of art is only interesting if it purports to be about something and is really about something else."

Milord, the defense rests in its usual, pretzel-like position. Like the Baker, at play in the ontic fields of the lord, to all the above charges of unlawful boojumizing and multiple neologizing we shall plead : ignorance, madam, pure ignorance. Or in the very best Clochetic-cum-Orwellian manner : ignorance, madam, double-plus pure ignorance.

Fit Three, Page 19, Panel 1 … having placed in my mouth sufficient boojum for three minutes’ chewing

"My father and mother were honest, though poor —"
Skip all that!" cried the Bellman in haste.
"If it once becomes dark, there's no chance of a Snark —
We have hardly a minute to waste!"

Achtung bibliophiles! Avoid any authors unwilling to suffer their own characters’ fate. Eschew the likes of Samuel Beckett and whomever was behind the Book of Job, spurn the fictions of Dante and the Marquis de Sade, and turn instead to more generous raconteurs such as Lewis Carroll. Carroll’s sudden referral to childhood in this stanza provides some therapeutic respite to the Baker’s boojum-anxiety complex.

The Baker has responded positively to this authorial auto-suggestion and has infantilized both himself and his parents into an easily digestible and perfectly oedipal size, as we can see above in this fine drawing. I will not tell you which of the several nursery room objects are the Baker’s parents, I’ll leave that to you to work out! Just place one after another into your mouth whilst cooing and gurgling.

The more indolent reader might be wondering how this authorial auto-suggestion works. In short, the Baker "hears" his author’s narration and description, etc., as a voice inside his head. Naturally, he has told no one else of this phenomenon. Please note that I have chosen to provide the Baker with the physiognomy of Lewis Carroll himself and thus created an epistomological escape hatch (or trap door) of sorts for the Baker, bless his farinaceous heart.

With all this in mind, the Baker is enjoying a rich and satisfying internal life these days. He goes through the motions of a Snark hunt with his fellows whilst simultaneously believing himself to be a 42-year old Oxford mathematics don plotting the destiny of a hermetic and even pseudo-gnostic Snarkian Multiverse (similar in nature though larger in scope to Le Garage Hermétique de Jerry Cornelius) which revolves and devolves and evolves solely and utterly upon a nonexistent entity which only he can comprehend — and which only he, the Baker, will apprehend!

The infinite melancholy of a long-ago summer’s day in Guildford, compressed into the infantile desire to say-that-which-is-not and to-read-the-thing-that-is-not … this Snark could be bounded in a nutshell and still count himself king of infinite space! It’s all child’s play for the talented Mr. Carroll.
___________________________

NB. The erudite Bradshaw of the Future has returned to his etymological Snark hunt and has bagged several splendid specimens, worthy of your perusal! The antecedents of Snark ramify themselves endlessly, it seems, but I know that BOTF will not be put off by their unusual habits and foreign customs, so alien to our modern ways … sniggering in public, sniting on the bus, snirting other snarks in mixed company, etc. Just look the other way and don’t make eye contact, you know how they are …

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!
___________________________________

* 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 Three, Page 18, Panel 1 … on le nomme aussi BOUJUM par erreur

They roused him with muffins — they roused him with ice —
They roused him with mustard and cress —
They roused him with jam and judicious advice —
They set him conundrums to guess.

The very mention of that hateful word Boojum had sent our Baker into a swoon and he now reclines artfully upon his hot-buttered-charpoy, just so. His duenna, a woman whose two-faced duplicity beggars the imagination, intercepts the stimulating nourishment which rains upon him like pennies from heaven. The ice, greens, jams and muffins, all of ‘em will vanish into her outstretched apron to reappear in a day-old half-baked no-goods shop she runs on the side. The Baker is left with only a conundrum to guess. Naturally, the conundrum is to guess what the conundrum is.

Oh, these Boojums! Is there no deviltry that they will not stoop to? Great god, save the earth from ever bearing such monsters! No history has proved that there were any such. Through the efforts of the authorities, no one will be exposed to them any longer.

To-say-the-thing-which–is-not and to-draw-the-thing-which-is-not is the Way of the Boojum! That way leads to the Dark Side! Fortunately, our Baker is a simpleton and his foolish mind is the hobgoblin of more consistent ones. Like those buxom Greek girls locked up in bronze towers by their upset daddies, he has no need for conundrums, he just wants to have fun!

_______________________________

NB. A thankful tug of the ink-soaked fetlock towards the perceptive Mr. Adam Roberts at the Valve.org, whose learned and latinate Snarkiana commentary upon the Way of the Boojum is pure catnip for all snarkistes! These English conundrumists need not worry what it is that cannot be roused by muffins, ice, mustard, cress, jam or judicious advice? They know! ‘Tis a sleeping dog whose master shouts — obey, cur!

Fit Three, Page 17 … look on my snark, ye mighty, and despair!

The Baker, immer très über-courant, now practises psychogeography upon himself! Psychogeography — the urban flâneur’s deliberate mapping of his internal world upon the external world through which he flânes — it’s all the rage! The Baker’s zen-like state of internal vacuity is no impediment to the above process, he simply reverses the procedure. When one’s mind is entirely given up to all things snark, causal logic is a mere bagatelle.*

On the sand, half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown and wrinkled lips once proved a disquieting muse to the snark-hunter P.B. Shelley. The uncertainty of the poet crystallizes into the philosophical banana-peel of Romanticism upon which Surrealism eventually slipped and fell (cogitatus interruptus in medias snark).

The Baker knows none of this for his cerebral cortex is being overwhelmed by a shocking revelation of the secretive, amorous gigantism of the inanimate world towards the animate world … the love song of a rubber glove for its plongeur, the melancholy and mystery of a street lusting for a solitary Turinese pedestrian … an entire world whose very mind is as solely and entirely snark as his own!

Oh, gentle Baker, forever parsing the Snark’s enigma of arrival … when this riddle is solved, your tale will come to a devilish end …
_________________________________________

* There are those psychogeographistes who insist on navigating their way, for example, through a suburb of Utrecht with only the aid of a street map of central Rome. None of this is to be confused with mere confusion, a paltry condition unworthy of the true snark hunter and smacking more of those be-boojumed unfortunates whose wives insist that they stop and ask for directions.

The Preface and Fits One and Two in their entirety … that he was born it cannot be denied, he ate, drank, talked snark & died

My Hunting of the Snark as it exists so far — the Preface and Fits 1 and 2 — can now be downloaded in an easy-to-read PDF here.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch …

Whenever asked what the Snark meant, Lewis Carroll always replied : I don’t know*. Huzzah for these cheeky Victorians and their tautological transparencies in which the meaning is the meaning, they never cease to baffle the small-minded and delight the light-hearted! But I digress …

Should we ask the Snark what Lewis Carroll meant? The Snark’s reply is, of course, the entire text of The Hunting of the Snark, excluding the Preface. Since the Snark and Carroll are ultimately the same, the Carrollian answer of one word and the Snarkian answer of 5,065 words are ultimately equivalent, an astonishing feat of commutative compression and expansion!

This business of looking into the wrong end of the telescope is the essential premise of protosurrealism, that obscure school of art which has been previously defined here as the 21st-century application of 19th-century answers to 20th-century problems. The protosurrealist telescopes his postmodern Surrealist past into the Victorian intellectual’s expected future, and as his past becomes his future, his nostalgia becomes his anticipation! Nothing is wasted!

The excellent and truly well-read nnyhav has rightfully pointed out the similarities between protosurrealism and ‘pataphysics. The difference lies in purpose : the latter was a strategy of defiance towards the pre-War culture of Europe and a precursor of Surrealism, the former is exactly the same things but 100 years too late.

Protosurrealism, like Pierre Menard writing Don Quixote, has no history or future, it’s always now and its now is always then. For this poor Snark whose very purpose in life was unknown to his creator, what better habitat for him than the pre-anachronism of protosurrealism? At last, the Snark will have a refuge where he can dwell on his comforting memories of the future and look forward to the past he will never have.
_____________________________________________

* I might reply that the Snark means : 'Pataphysics, Adlocutio, Alberto Savinio, Alexandra Xie Kitchin, Alfred Jarry, Andrei Vyshinsky, Aristotle, Arnold Bocklin, Assamese Curry, Atlas Press, Augustus Caesar, Bathing Machines, Benjamin Péret, Blaise Pascal, Boojum Tree, Book of Revelations, Buddhist Stupas, Carl Reiner, Charles Dodgson, Clochetic Rule of Three, Coconino County, Comte de Lautrémont, Constantin Brancusi, Dante Alighieri, Dora Maar, Douglas Adams, Easter Island Moias, Edgar Allan Poe , Edouard Manet, Eileen Agar, Elmer Fudd, Epistemology, Eric Satie, Etymology, Eugène Delacroix, Exquisite Corpse, Flann O'Brien, French Language, Friedrich Nietzsche, George Herriman, George Orwell, Gilbert and Sullivan, Gin-Driven Ink-Pens, Giorgio de Chirico, Golden Eagle Beer, Goon Show, Gustave Flaubert, Hans and Jean Arp, Hans Bellmer, Henri Michaux, Henry Holiday, Heraclitus, Heinz Edelmann, Hieronymus Bosch, His Master's Voice, Igor Stravinsky, Italo Calvino, Jacques-Louis David, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Jean Benoît, Joseph Bonnet, Joseph Welch, Juan Miro, Karl Marx, Kiki de Monparnasse, Krazy Kat, La Guida di Bragia, Leonardo da Vinci, Lord Byron, Louis Aragon, Récamier, Man Ray, Mark Antony, Martin Heidegger, Matthias Grünewald, Max Ernst, Mel Brooks, Michelangelo, Nautch Girls, Nectarines, Old Scratch, Omnium, Orientalism, Oscar Dominguez, Paranoaic-Critical Method, Peter Greenaway, Piero di Cosimo, Plato, Poutine, Procris, Protosurrealism, Père Ubu, Railway Surrealism (Anglo-Italianate), Raphael, Raymond Roussel, René Magritte, Robert Walser, Salvador Dali, Scholasticism, Sebastian Brant, Shakespeare, Sigmund Freud, Sir Alma-Tadema, Sir John Tenniel, Socrates, Stephane Mallarmé, Sylvie and Bruno, The Globe and Mail, The Isle of the Dead, The Line of Beauty, The Number 42, The Rake’s Progress, The School of Athens, The Ship of Fools, The Snark as an Ontological Argument for a Godless Universe, The Temptation of St. Anthony, The Third Policeman, The Yellow Submarine, Théodore Géricault, Turin, Une Semaine de Bonté, V.I. Lenin, Valentine's Day, Vincent van Gogh, W.H. Auden, Walt Whitman, William Hogarth, Witold Gombrowicz and Yves Tanguy.

Some readers may call all of the above just logorrheiac-name-droppings rife with an surfeit of posthumous collaborations (AKA plagiarisms), shot through and through with half-truths, quarter-truths, and even eighth-truths and of course (my personal favorite as an independently impoverished artist), a brazen contempt for the clearly stated wishes of the hapless author, expressed by indulging in a particularly vicious (and Flaubertian) brand of semiotic and typological miscegenation hitherto only seen in the utterly depraved final days of the Roman Empire!

But you can’t say that because I said it first and now I got dibs on it! Plus, all those big words — they could put your eye out!

Fit Two, Page 16, Panel 3 … old Snarks for sale, old Snarks, prim Snarks, silly and grim Snarks for sale

"For, although common Snarks do no manner of harm,
Yet, I feel it my duty to say,
Some are Boojums —" The Bellman broke off in alarm,
For the Baker had fainted away.

Utter bedlam has broken out amongst the B-Boyz at the mention of the B-Word! The Baker, mortally wounded by the tusks of the dreaded Boojum, languishes in the arms of the cytherean Beaver, who tenderly nibbles the ear of her farinaceous Adonis. The Billiard-Marker, wracked by hunger pangs, is searching for the hidden compartment within the Baker with which he transforms stones into bread for the crew’s sustenance. The Banker is auctioning off the Baker’s personal effects to pay off his creditors; he is demonstrating a telescope made of copal to the Bonnet-Maker, who ignores him entirely, the latter is measuring himself for a strait-jacket. The Boots’s evolutionary solipsism has taken a turn for the worse, the frightened Butcher wrings his hands in despair at his monarchical frenzy. In the lunatic sky of the Desierto Pintado, startled doves take flight, fleeing the preternaturally sinuous lineaments of the bioglyph upon which the Bellman’s magic lantern rests.

Only the Bellman retains his wits! He has seen this before, this nesting of parody within parody, reference within reference, this rake’s progress towards the inevitable bankruptcy auction of all one’s semiotic inheritance and then — off to bedlam! Oh, shun this Boojum of Infinitely Regressive Reference, this Snark’s Progress to protosurrealist ruin!

Fit Two, Page 16, Panel 2 … truly, my Snark, thou art still the son of morn in weary night’s decline, the lost traveller’s dream under the hill

"The fifth is ambition. It next will be right
To describe each particular batch:
Distinguishing those that have feathers, and bite,
And those that have whiskers, and scratch.

The Bellman continues his Indictment with the accusation of Ambition, tempered with the observation that all Snarks, like intestines or the Carolinas, are further divided into two parts*.

First, you have your biting Snarks, those goody-two-shoes who brush their teeth every night and limit their ambitions to lime jello with their salisbury steak dinner. Their purported bite is as gentle as the nibblements of curious goldfish upon a giggling baby’s bum, a mere trifle. They are the auspicious Snarks, the best of Snarks, the heppiest of Snarks, no ill wind will ever ruffle these li’l ainjils’ feathers.

Then there are those other scratching Snarks, addicted to back-room jobbery in used woolen underwear and race-track skullduggeries. They are Snarks fallen from grace, they loathe hairnets, electrolysis and the consumption of soup and cotton candy. We see an example of this latter Snark in the above illustration. He is lost in his own private pandemonium, shuffling to a distant armegeddon in his mismatched, postlapsarian slippers, forkéd tail and second-hand wings. He has been consumed entirely by the itch of Ambition, an old itch for an Old Scratch!

____________________________

*An odd inconsistency which seems to have escaped most Snarkologists. The Bellman commences his Indictment by specifically stating that there are 5 Snarkian qualities The feathered-whiskered speciation that follows the 5th Indictment is obviously another distinct, yet unannounced 6th Indictment. In light of the Bellman’s demonstrated inability to enunciate the number 6, might we conjecture that the number of this particular beast is 6? One's pursuers certainly cannot hunt what they cannot count, or so goes the Snark's reasoning. Using the Clochetic Rule-of-Three, we might even bandy about the number 666, a number of apocalyptic import which might well presage the lethal approach of the dreaded Boojum!

Fit Two, Page 16, Panel 1 … most of life’s evils arise from man's inability to sit still in a bathing-machine

"The fourth is its fondness for bathing-machines,
Which it constantly carries about,
And believes that they add to the beauty of scenes —
A sentiment open to doubt.

Given : Only with one’s bathing-machine can one bathe properly and thoroughly.
Given : The divinely-ordained, absolute and ineffable perfection of any place cannot be achieved without a bathing-machine.
Ergo : Cleanliness is next to godliness.

Not a surprising sentiment coming from the pen of an English clergyman’s son but it is an accurate depiction of the Snark’s true character and motives? Read on, MacDuff …

Given : The Snark’s sentimental attachment to bathing-machines does nothing to improve the beauty of scenes.
Given : The Snark’s sentiments are open to doubt.
Ergo : When in doubt, do nothing.

A Fabian approach to the hunting of Snarks but will the poilu tolerate it? History warns us otherwise! Je me souviens Cannae …

Given : The utility of a bathing-machine lies solely in its property of not allowing an observer to know what is inside it.
Given : The Snark’s chief happiness is the transportation of its bathing-machine from one place to another.
Ergo : Ignorance is bliss.

And there you have it, another Clochetic validation of the platitudinous proverbs with which we usually stave off our lexical and cognitive horror vacui. I have illustrated all of the above palaver with another infamous platitude, one of the Comte de Lautrémont’s most infamous bromides: the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing machine and an umbrella. I think the bathing machine lends a certain banality to the whole thing, don’t you? Even surrealism (and especially protosurrealism) has its sentimental, even hackneyed picture-postcard moments!
________________________

NB. The Poetry Foundation was kind enough to ask me to illustrate an essay on the "World’s Longest Poem". Thanks to the auspicious medium of the Internet, you will find that my illustration, the informative and witty essay and the genuinely long poem all form a seamless and truthful whole, a sphere of infinite circumference whose center is everywhere. You won’t be disappointed!

Fit Two, Pages 14 and 15 as a Spread … Que voyez-vous? Une snarque. De quelle couleur est cette snarque? Snarque.

Frodo had his Mordor, Batman had his Gotham City, J. Alfred Prufrock had his Floors of Silent Seas and I have … pages 14 and 15. But we are too far removed into our Hunt to retreat now and it is this I fear, that the elusive prey we seek may yet prove the end of me!

For it seems that the appearance of the Snark is always deferred somehow, always lurking on the very next page after whichever one you are reading right now. And when you have finished reading the very last page of this Snark, then I, the artist, and the author Lewis Carroll and the entire Fellowship of the Snark itself, we will softly and simply vanish away, leaving behind only you, the reader. Safely alone at last on the final page, you will turn away from the text and images and see yourself as you truly are, having fulfilled your destructive destiny — as the annihilating Boojum!

Don’t look so surprised, please, and no sudden movements, I’ve suspected you for some time now. It’s quite simple if you think it through, dear reader, the only logical solution to the Snark’s ever-retreating, ever-concealed identity is … you!

From whence come these paranoid thoughts? From a surfeit of the very blackest possible india ink? An overdose of Police Gazettes and Dr. Mabuse films? I know not … this snarkery is such a rum business, methinks I’ll need a whiskey-priest soon enough!