Douglas Mercer
July 25 2024
Our little group has always been and always will be until the end.
Famously Germany is the nation of poets and thinkers, in those dark and mysterious Northern forests lay profundity like a deep bass swell; on the other hand the reputation of England was that of a practical down to earth people mired in everydayness, a nation of shopkeepers; yet England has the one true child of nature in Shakespeare, and a poet of the laurel wreath like Keats. What is even more interesting is that in England a style of thought and writing which is diametrically opposed to the banal or the mundane was created and reached its perfection: English Whimsy. This is a sand castle in the sky approach, a Quixotic search for the lark or the silly; an inside out way of thinking that turns right side up or upside down, where behind can be in front, and one might as well talk backward as forward, where the rules like the roof are liable to fly away if you are not careful. Or vice versa.
That quintessential banker and man in the three piece suit (T.S. Eliot) had his cats with their name ineffables, his mystery cat which breaks all laws and disappears or levitates like that; and when you think he’s half asleep he’s totally awake; Eliot called them “old possum’s book of practical cats” using “practical” with irony; he knew that to pretend to be dead (and to pretend in general-it’s fun to pretend-Nirvana 1993) is the best disguise, just as Shakespeare turned things on their head by saying that the man who counterfeits dying whereby a man lives is to be no counterfeit: but the true image of life itself. It’s a rehearsal for death, as it were, and this singsong illogicality is as English as England itself, in England’s heart of hearts (Hamlet-1603), is as English as pudding pie. As he approached his madness Nietzsche said his world was becoming metaphor.
But the master of English Whimsy is of course Lewis Carroll, he put illogical metaphor and illogical nonsense on the map, and patented it; no one has done it better. The deep irony is that Carroll himself was a deeply conservative man and, what is more, a deeply conservative mathematician; the alternate geometries, and the imaginary numbers and the infinite infinities that were swirling about in his day he found either dangerous or amusing and certainly wrong. He was a devotee of Euclid and did not want to add any flying buttresses or grimacing gargoyles to his pristine cathedral; and the Alice books emanated as a satire on the New Math, a send of up with hyperbole; but of course the satire was lost and the whimsy remained; he let the cat out of the bag, as it were; or pulled the rabbit out of the hat; it was inadvertent it was, he set about to spoof or lampoon or puncture the pretentions of a school of thought and ended up being its emblem. Which only goes to show that one must be careful what one wishes for and about what one dreams. For one day wishes will be horses, and some of us will ride.
It is not too much to say that the Alice books give the most penetrating analysis of the nature of reality ever written. It tells of a mental space where all the rules of external reality are suspended; but this secret world is really the real world, what is the world but a dream Carroll asks, and what is the creator but a dreamer? Indeed, the creator is an artist or a dreamer, but it is not a realist but a surrealist, and when the insubstantial pageant of the world resolves and dissolves into dew, then the world of the dream is the only domain there shall be. What the alternate geometries of Reimann and Lobachevsky revealed was the dirty little secret of reality itself, that it was not so real after all. They did not call these geometries hyperbolic for nothing. For what after all is hyperbole? It is a stretching out or an exaggeration often used to say that something is greater than it is, but also used as means of satire—to send up.
What the alternate geometries proved at bottom was that the configuration of nature was not a necessary but a contingent fact, that means it is a construct of the creator and as such arbitrary, it goes according to its own say so, and the rules are ad hoc, not per se. To those of Carroll’s mindset this is unmooring, pulls the rug out from under their feet, ungrounds them. But what it means is that the world is more whirlpool than rock, and that what it really is is a work of art (see Poe’s Eureka), and the creator had an infinite number of possibilities on his palette when he painted it, that is it could be contrawise, that’s logic. Which is why we get the paradoxes and the loops and the circular reasoning. It’s why it was shown that no formal system can prove its own postulates. It’s why you get a principle called uncertainty, it’s why like Eliot Schrodinger has his cat, things behave randomly at the lowest of levels; it's why they say if you say you understand Quantum Mechanics you don’t, as if they were Zen masters flying in flights of fancy, and no hardheaded physicists toiling in white coats in the laboratory.
But it was a wise Greek who said that it is uneducated to not know when a proof is required and when one is not; but poof says that magician, alerting us to language and word play. But thankfully the lessons lessen and one day Achilles will overtake the turtle, proving that everything is the same. It may seem very strange but to assume the opposite is stranger still.
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They say that Lennon was obsessed by Carroll, and his word play (In His Own Write). He used the cadence of three blind mice over and over and “see how they run” appears multiple times in the songs (Lady Madonna, I Am The Walrus). For the song Cry Baby Cry he used Sing A Song Of Sixpence (nursery rhyme) as a template (a pocket full of rye).
The King of Marigold was in the kitchen
Cooking breakfast for the queen
The queen was in the parlor
Playing piano for the children of the king
Mar/gold. Mar (sea, mar is mirror imaged in the word grammar, gold is god). We have the King and Queen figure of the Alice books, the King is the cook in the kitchen, the one who is making breakfast, the sexes are switched as up will be down and vice versa. The queen is playing piano (art, music) and she does it for the children.
The king was in the garden
Picking flowers for a friend who came to play
The queen was in the playroom
Painting pictures for the children's holiday
The King is associated with nature or paradise, his rule will be a benevolent one; the idea of play is introduced, that is paradise will be play; and the play is doubled when the queen enters the playroom and creates art for children for their holiday (vacation, vacate: void). A holiday is also a sacred part of the calendar in ancient times dedicate to the gods. Carroll was obsessed with the purity of children (child of the pure unclouded brown/and dreaming eyes of wonder); All the children sing! (Lennon). Holden wants to be the one who saves the children.
The duchess of Kircaldy always smiling
And arriving late for tea
Kirkcaldy (Scottish Gaelic Cair Chaladain) is a town and former royal burgh in Fife,on the east coast of Scotland. The play of supernatural soliciting Macbeth is set in Scotland. The smile is the enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa, or the Cheshire Cat, the duchess is associated with the word “late” ie, last or final, and not on time, long is the time (Holderlin, 1800) but it will arrive. The choice is yours, don’t be late-Nirvana 1993.
The duke was having problems
With a message at the local Bird and Bee
Bird is always word, birds fly in the air, language is breath or air, both circulate through the ether. Bee is being. Thus at the heart of word and being the Duke is getting distortion and twisting and no closure and the message that was sent and transmitted is not being received, the duke is not receptive, or does not “catch” it.
This arriving late and non-comprehension is resolved in the song of the children.
At twelve o'clock a meeting round the table
For a séance in the dark
With voices out of nowhere
Put on specially by the children for a lark
Midnight is the witching hour (Hamlet—1603) when graveyards yawn, in the dead waste of night (Hamlet—1603) we get some supernatural soliciting; a séance is table rapping, the voices come from nowhere (nothing, from out of the blue); and the voices (multiple voices, he do the police in different voices-Eliot 1922) are put on by the children for a “lark.” A lark is whimsy, it is play. It is also what Romeo and Juliet spar about, one thinking it the nightingale, the other the lark (the herald of morning, the bird of dawning, Minerva’s owl will here be flying at dawn not dusk). It is the children who put on this play, children whom Heraclitus went to the temple of Artemis to play dice with (game of chance), time is a child moving counters in a game; the royal power is a child's.
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Notes
See How They Run is a 2022 movie about the filming of the play The Mousetrap (Agatha Christie wrote mysteries, Mousetrap is the play within the play of Hamlet, referencing telescoping realities). In the movie there is an inspector Stoppard (Tom Stoppard, who wrote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, a play about a play which goes on within the play). The inspectors go to the Savoy Hotel (Savoy Truffle), that is names and ideas congregate around each other like metal filings to a magnet. Agatha Christie's play was originally entitled Three Blind Mice.
This is a brilliant figure. The word "child" in Greek is ne pios, referring to a child who cannot yet speak, hence a very young child indeed. This mere-infant is randomly moving pieces on a checkerboard, and Heraclitus intuitively feels that this randomizing activity is the "ruling power" of the world. The Greek word basileia does mean Kingdom or Royal Power, but there may be another interpretation, which I offer tentatively. In the ancient chess/checkers game which dates far back to ancient Persia, the termination of the game by stalling the king is called checkmate, which is understood to be shah + mata or king dead. Could this fragment mean that the child who moves pieces continually without knowing what he is doing, will eventually arrive at a checkmate? Perhaps far-fatched to us, but a theoretical statistician would have no problem with this at all.
English Whimsy
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Douglas Mercer
- Posts: 10963
- Joined: Tue Mar 28, 2023 7:29 pm
