hush

On Tuesday, one of my sister’s friends rang for her while she was out. I asked if I could take a message, and after giving me a name, she hesitated briefly and asked if I was Cuilan’s older sister.

“Yup, that’s me.”
“Oh! You probably don’t remember me, but - ”
“I do actually, we met last year at my sister’s graduation dinner, right?”
“Yeah! She told me you were coming back! So what are you doing now? Are you on holiday?”

Surprised - pleasantly so, though slightly disoriented - to find myself in an actual phone conversation with a non-family-member in Sydney, I told my sister’s chatty friend that it was actually still termtime, sorta, for me, and that I was here working on my dissertation. She enthusiastically asked me what it was about (despite the fact that she’s a science student), and listened as I rather self-deprecatingly told her, flaky as it may sound, it was on the Alice books. To my further surprise more questions ensued on what exactly I was doing and what my findings were so far, and so I told her a little about my crazy fantasy/insanity parallel idea, and the tea-party in the books, and madness in the 19th century.

“Hey, it sounds really interesting,” she said. “You shouldn’t laugh at your own thesis, if you don’t believe in it, no one else will!”

It was like a shot right to the heart. In that instant, memories of all these people who had been like, the Alice books? Really? (especially my mom’s well-meaning but rather deflating how do you write 20,000 words on Alice in Wonderland?) flashed rapidly through my mind, and I realised this girl, whom I’d only spoken to once before in my entire life and who didn’t even know me, had put her finger bang on the thing that has been bugging me the most - do I really buy my own hypothesis? It’s been an uphill climb partly because of the paucity of criticism relating to Carroll, and partly because, as I only came to realise that evening, I have been far too timid to believe that I can assert something no critic has ever said before.

Matt spoke to me about this way back in one of our earlier meetings. “I think there’s a link there,” he said, of my harebrained, spur-of-the-moment notion, “and I think it’s good that it hasn’t really been explored.” Slavish reliance on critical opinion belonged, he added, to a lower level of academia, and at this point I really should be way past that.

So I thanked my sister’s friend warmly. We continued to chat a little longer, about random things like the USyd library, and she asked if I could get my sister to ring her back once she’d returned. CALL EMILY, I wrote in caps on my notebook above my list of Alice quotations, and underlined it twice.

I don’t think you’ll ever read this, Emily, but thank you.

hubristic

There really isn’t anything for deflating pride quite like receiving your dissertation draft back from your supervisor, with “rubbish” scrawled in the margin next to one of your paragraphs. It wasn’t all bad; there were some ticks, some “good”s, but still. Even when you know that bit was kind of rubbish, that’s just harsh. And heartbreaking. And shattering. Ah, the time-honoured slap in the face tactic…

Courage, a trawl through JSTOR, a thorough reread of Alice and a visit to the USyd library - all long, long overdue. I really have to get it together.

dreaming as the summers die

Long had paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die.
Autumn frosts have slain July.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.

This is so frighteningly haunting. I don’t really know why, and I can’t put my finger on it; it’s the last stanza especially, something about the word phantomwise, the thought of Alice moving unseen, in his dreams, under skies, lingering at the forefront of Carroll’s mind, haunting haunting him - perhaps it’s the new understanding I’ve acquired of their relationship, the knowledge that they suddenly broke everything off before Wonderland was published and that he hardly saw her after that, that when they did meet, it was cold and distant - it’s tragic, and terrifying, and I haven’t been able to get the last stanza out of my head since I read it again a few days ago. I can’t imagine living with that sort of pain, with a ghostly phantom in your life, a remnant of your past which you know is never, ever going to go away… it just - sends all these chills down my spine.

These books are creepy. Terry Pratchett has said before that he hates them, that they scared him as a child and made him uncomfortable, and the more I work with them the more I understand why…