Hamlet and Alice
Certain works of the imagination have gone very deep into the modern psyche. One such work is Hamlet. If I had to choose just one of Shakespeare’s plays I would probably pick one of the late comedies. But it is Hamlet that haunts me, as it has haunted others, and I have never got tired of it. The same can’t be said of Othello, or Romeo and Juliet , in spite of their magnificent language. To be fair I have seen them both several times including their musical versions. They are claustrophobic to watch, because they show a beautiful relationship destroyed by the evil manipulations of others and there is no redemption. In addition the characters in these plays are simple, uncomplicated people, and therefore less interesting than Shakespeare’s more complex characters. In terms of a love story I would much rather watch Antony and Cleopatra, a richly sensual play about mature love. This pair of lovers also have to die, but their lives have been so full that they have little to complain about at the end. In real life, of course, Antony and Cleopatra were shrewd political operators and may not have been as romantic as Shakespeare makes them.
Most of Shakespeare’s best plays lead to redemption and open out to wide, even infinite vistas. King Lear is both more horrifying and more interesting than Othello, dealing as it does with the dilemmas of old age, but Lear himself is transformed by his experiences and gains a new understanding, whereas poor Othello can only look forward to hell. The play King Lear is almost unbearably ghastly as it plumbs the horrors of the unthinkable - and shows that the unthinkable can happen to anybody if the right conditions are in place. What stays with me is the line “thou must be patient” - probably the biggest understatement in all literature.
Macbeth, the fourth of the “big four” tragedies (Hamlet, Lear, Othello and Macbeth) is always watchable. I once saw it in French, which was very weird. There just isn’t anything French about Macbeth.
Hamlet , more than any other of the plays, resonates with people of our era because it shows the predicament of a sensitive and cultured individual under pressure from a hostile world. Hamlet knows what he is supposed to do but he doesn’t stand a chance of success because he isn’t like the people who surround him.
You don’t necessarily choose the books that have the most effect on you. I recently wrote about the devastating effect on me of Peer Gynt, which I certainly didn’t choose - it chose me. Another book in this peculiar category is Alice in Wonderland. As a child I read it, of course, but it was not a particular favourite. If anything I found it a little intimidating. That can be said about many of the great children’s classics. The Wind in the Willows is another example: adults love it more than children do. As for Mary Poppins, I found her harsh, but I read the books because they were there as something to read. Most of the great children’s classics were not really written for children, but were passed off as children’s books because in them things could be expressed which were not acceptable to the conventional adult mind.
When I was a child during the war there was no supply of new books coming in, no radio, TV or films, and as for computers - they were not even a twinkle in anybody’s eye. So we read the same few books over and over again. In the end I was reduced to reading boys’ books, grim Victorian tomes with tiny print, which described in detail how white explorers were tortured by cruel savages, or the gruesome consequences of being shipwrecked in the tropics and dying of thirst, or the horrible deaths that animals can inflict on people who enter tropical jungles. What is it with boys. These books destroyed any interest I might have had in the tropics until I was well into middle age. I also read and re-read Arthur Mee’s wonderful Children’s Encyclopaedia.
Fantasy was always congenial and for some reason it is Alice in Wonderland that sticks in my mind. There is something strange about this book and the effect it has had on Western culture. Alice is everywhere, even in The Matrix. When I was a child I felt a certain coldness in the book, but this has long ceased to bother me and what I am aware of now is its precision. Lewis Carroll wants to get every detail right. The book has a lapidary brilliance like a scene viewed from the wrong end of a telescope. Much of the interest people feel now is because of the connection with hallucinogenic drugs, but there is more to it than that. As with Castaneda, Lewis Carroll has seen an alternative reality and wants to share it with us.
Of course Alice’s alternative world is very dark in some ways. A rich seam of madness flows beneath its calm Victorian surface. But our world is so very much darker and not nearly so charming. I enjoy Victorian fantasy worlds which is perhaps why Alice is always lurking somewhere in my mind, like a computer program which was never quite shut down. Scenes appear in my mind’s eye which may or may not be in the book. It is rather nice to have this loony Victorian scenario playing somewhere or other in my mind and I would miss it if it went away.
It started many years ago when I did a 7-day fast, which was a very interesting experience. As I was fasting as a means of spiritual purification I was very surprised to find myself at the pool of tears in Chapter 2 of Alice in Wonderland, whichthe organisation I was with at the time regarded as a deeply unspiritual book. What I saw was a vast room with sash windows which looked out on a languid, yellowish scene of late afternoon. From wall to wall there stretched a lake of tears, shallow, tepid, yellowish tears which seemed to have been shed by some Victorian lady lying on a sofa, although I couldn’t see anybody. The feeling was one of a paltry self-indulgence in a scene of endless tedium.
At the time I didn’t question this vision as so many other things were going on. It was much later that I compared it with the pool of tears in Lewis Carroll’s book. In the book those tears were shed by Alice when she was much larger, but then she shrank and had to swim in her own tears in the company of various other creatures. This alteration in her size would explain the gigantic size of the room with the sash windows. If Alice, the dodo, and all the other animals were there at that time in the pool of tears they would have been too tiny to be noticed.
Every so often I get flashes of Alice’s world, but usually they go by so fast I hardly register them. Not long ago I saw Tweedledum and Tweedledee in brilliantly coloured costumes with geometric designs standing by a hedge in the sunshine together with a dark figure who was probably the Red Queen.
My most recent flash was especially interesting , as I noticed that it came in the form of a rectangular box in the upper right hand corner of my eye. It was as if part of a picture had been cut out and slotted into my awareness. Although tiny, the flash showed unspoilt green countryside in brilliant sunshine with a steam train running through. The train was brightly painted, and half the normal size, as if specially built for some nobleman to run on his estate. And hanging out of the front, by the engine, was Alice, enjoying the ride.
I remember plenty of trains from Victorian children’s literature, including the one in Alice through the Looking Glass. But I don’t recall Alice riding with the engine driver.
I find this all very mysterious. I can understand that the book must have had some deep psychological impact on me, and it seems to have come alive somehow in my subconscious mind. But this seems unnecessary, as I have no desire to try to rewrite Carroll’s book or to copy him in any way. And anyone looking for visions with some spiritual meaning will not be looking at Alice. What possible significance can there be in a vision of Alice riding on a train? Do visions always have to have significance? What’s it all about? And before you say anything, I’m aware that certain young people think that because I’m interested in children’s books I must be retarded. Naturally I don’t agree with this view. I don’t think Alice is a children’s book at all - it’s only pretending to be.
I have come to believe that I am looking into a real world, one of the countless trillions of parallel universes that adjoin ours. Writers, artists, and anyone who is at all sensitive can tune into them without necessarily realising that they are actually real. Lewis Carroll must have transmitted his vision with exceptional power for his books to have had such an effect on so many people. As he made clear right at the beginning, when Alice falls down the rabbit hole, other worlds can be accessed through certain mushrooms or other psychedelic drugs. (Or, as in my case, by fasting). And as someone recently pointed out, the caterpillar on the mushroom who talks to Alice is destined one day to turn into a butterfly. So the results are transformative. Anyone can visit Wonderland, if they truly want to, with or without drugs.
There is another possibility: that Lewis Carroll may have been a member of some secret spiritual group who knew about the Mystery Schools of ancient times and their initiatic practices, many of which are echoed in Alice in Wonderland. This possibility is discussed in The Secret History of the World by Jonathan Black, and it would account for the book’s enormous power.
(If you want to try a 7-day fast and have not done one before, please make sure you are supervised, as I was, as it can be dangerous. I can’t guarantee you will see Alice, though).
April 2009
