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Alice In Wonderland is well known for being both nonsensical and also logical. I love both the nonsense and the logic, like children do, because for them logic, and actually for adults too, represents a safe world, a world where there are answers, there's a correct answer, and you can move around within it, like within a square, and know what the angles are and how they bisect. When you get to the real world or the natural world or the world of the sea, everything changes constantly, and children are more aware of this than adults, because they are growing constantly, and I think Lewis Carroll was very aware of this when he had Alice grow tall and grow short, a bit like in a fun house of mirrors. But in fact that's the world seen from a child's point of view.
What was revolutionary I think about his work is that nobody had ever said "Oh my god, the world through the eyes of a child must look really crazy", and I think that is what is precious about his writing.I think it was radical for Victorians and it was maybe a first in the history of thought really. Because he was a teacher of mathematics Lewis Carroll did realize how sharply it contrasted with the logic and mathematics of the so-called adult world, but of course adults, while they use logic and mathematics are subject to this terrible evolution that's going on in themselves and their bodies, and the world around them, and ignore it by focusing on what they can mentally achieve.
In Wonderland and the Looking Glass, we become immersed in conflicts between the characters, they are very much talking nonsense and are quite concerned about the fact that they don't agree with each other and are in conflict. They're argumentative, and it shows conflict in a different light and perhaps the light of something more detached.
You see Alice being subjected to all these experiences, and she doesn't agree with a lot of them, so she's in conflict with them, but its a dreamlike conflict that is episodic and goes from one conflict to another without ever being resolved. But it still is a playful conflict, Lewis Carroll demonstrates that conflict can be very playful, absurd, if carried to extremes or even if trivialized and that's part of the wonder of his books.Its something that appeals to me as somebody who's written plays most of my life and dealt with conflict on the stage continually, sometimes very seriously, sometimes comically, with the realization that each dramatic incident I've ever written about, whether its serious or comic could also be acted as the other. For example the serious could be acted as a comedy, and the comedy could be acted seriously, and that's the kind of thing that I think Lewis Carroll was fully aware of.
In the Alice stories children, particularly, can see conflict happening in the action, but they also see at the same time that its very silly. This could be a good perspective for them in terms of understanding what happens in life and also a good perspective for us too! And of course children's lives are entirely spent in conflict from the time they open their eyes in the morning till the time they shut them at night. there's no minute in the day I don't think that the child is not in conflict with the adult world. From the time they don't want to drink their milk or go to school or go feet first down the stairs instead of head first, whatever - they're in conflict with adults.
And it must make the world seem very absurd to them, because it is spent entirely in conflict. Maybe they make it into a silly conflict just in order to be able to stand it. This gives them more perspective by seeing others (in the stories) wrestle with logic and nonsense at the same time, and they can also see that what's being said on both sides is really playful ultimately.
That's what we as adults see when we see a drama onstage, we get a perspective and we can see it could be a comedy, and we can see the tragic side of the comedy because we have a certain distance from it. And children are able to make that leap and have distance, and laugh at themselves as well as at the adults, within the conflict, and that is an amazing thing to see and to experience.
That perhaps is the key to understanding how not to be in conflict, its that one comes to a sense of one's own detachment and fullness of life. We are not emaciated by the conflict but we stay present to it and see through it, which is perhaps what the world at large misses.
Because we stop learning, we stop being beginners, I think, perhaps children do inherently know that its only through conflict that they can learn and grow, and treat conflict as a learning, growing experience and when we stop doing that and regard it as an annoyance, we stop being a child and stop learning and growing.
