Down the Rabbit Hole

Fred Allebach 4/21/02             Down the Rabbit Hole

Anon, to sudden silence won,

In fancy they pursue

The dream-child moving through a land

Of wonders wild and new,

In friendly chat with bird or beast-

And half believe it true.

Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly.......

Dear, dear! How queer everything is to-day! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I am not the same, the next question is, Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle!

Lewis Carroll

This whole thing has been precipitated by: being at Medford Leas (a retirement community where my parents live) and seeing some really old people, seeing my uncle Vern and how Vern, as he said himself, is “losing it.” He doesn’t have the confidence anymore, he just isn’t confident in himself, as his self is slipping away, evaporating. My own grandfather stopped going to dinner here at Medford Leas, and they came to check on him, to see if anything was wrong and he told the nurse, “I can’t think.” “The mind is a crazy thing”, says my Dad, after opening up new and different realities and not being able to sleep. I think of dimensions, I think of dementia, the beginning and ending of life’s journey. My friend Joel’s dad went, in about two years, with Alzheimer’s, Joel said he went psychotic, seeing people in trees, not sleeping at all. They had to put him away, his mom could not care for him, tremendously difficult, to tell his dad, to take him away. In the hall tonight we saw the Mad Hatter, an old woman, with a big hat, with a huge laugh and big teeth. This evening we ate with a woman who was lost, had a slender grip, her memories were hanging by a thread, “how long have you been here?” “I wish you hadn’t asked, I don’t remember, I think 6 or 7 years...” Our waitress had on huge platform shoes, and somehow I got roped into having to tell this old woman, and my parents, that they were “come and fuck me shoes”, it didn’t seem to matter, when marbles had already fallen on the floor.

Last night, upon walking with Mom, I set upon a joke, and became wide eyed, and asked her “do I know you?”, whereupon we had a huge laugh. Then I said “where am I?”, again laughter. I hit this so close, the whole fantastic aspect of losing one’s marbles, of play, of fantasy, insanity. How it is all related, all sewn together, drawn out of the same well. Who am I? What a question, one for philosophy class? Who am I? Where am I? Good fucking questions that seem normal enough, crazy enough, academic enough, that contain the potential for all good abstraction and insanity.

I’ve hit upon a theme of Alice in Wonderland, of aging, of losing one’s marbles, of imagination and childish play, of insanity, of psychosis, down the rabbit hole. It is all great and new, fun, invigorating, to play, to imagine, to be a child and this is not a losing of marbles but a bold expression of marbles and how they may be. Being a child is a glorying of the colors and shapes of the marbles. In middle age, one may hold to a focus more, the memories surround and in command the mind will sit, able to access the information wanted, able to play as well, the child stays within, we have the adult too, all the threads are there at our disposal. What am I saying? That imagination and play, suspension of belief, fantasy, are all basic qualities we have as human beings, this stuff is fun, valuable, creative, and a part of who we are, all of us. As we grow out of childhood, focuses tend to become more rigid, locked in, and the imagination gets shut out, or boxed in, held in ways where it grows misshapen. Here is where people get into pathos. Then there is bone fide insanity, major chemical issues, personal issues, where there is no guard, no filter, the unconscious is worn on the sleeve, people talk to themselves and answer back. Whatever this is, I don’t know, but it represents the same well out of which comes imagination and creativity and fantasy, this is where the marbles are, where the marbles come from. As we get older, there comes a slipping, not necessarily, but some slip, the marbles dull off, they don’t shine as much, they maybe even melt, or fall out of holes and are lost, never to be retrieved.  The marbles cease being able to be played with and gloried in for their beauty and potential, what happens to the marbles????? Not only with old age and losing it, what happens to the marbles when they get closed in, boxed in, are unexpressed, are made to be too rigid? What happens to the marbles if they are too free and are always loose all over the floor? It is a juggle, a balance, marbles want to roll and slip.

Today, Mom was talking to herself, whispering. I asked her if she had a little friend? She said talking to yourself is OK, as long as you don’t answer back. If you answer back she said, then you are losing it. So, what are the marbles? (My real marbles are not lost, they are here, not sold.) What is it that is being lost? What is this net of memories and recollections and ability to focus that makes it so we “have it”? Memory seems to be a critical thing here. If you can remember clearly, this gives a handle and a focus. Life is all in the moment, sure, but without being triangulated by the past and future, the moment is a ship with no rudder. Without the memory, and without the anticipation, the marbles all bang at random, with no direction. The memories give the context, the direction. I tell Vern a joke, I ask him later about the joke and he doesn’t remember. What do Vern and I have in common then? If he can’t remember what I say, we are all in the present then, that is OK, but it is so different.

Memory.....how interesting, this handle, this focus we have, all based on clear memory, clear access to memory. Yet we argue about how things were, we cannot identify things exactly from the past, fantasy, flexibility, ability to consciously suspend memory, suspend belief, maybe belief and memory are intertwined? Faith, we need faith, want faith, because of the potential that our memories, our identities will evaporate? Faith that there is some permanence in time, where our selves melt away, we want and need something to hold onto. And then we allow other people’s memories and belief, their details. We must listen to and honor the memories of others, or else not see out of our own boxes. More and more like Alice in Wonderland all the time, it seems, things just keep getting curiouser and curiouser.

Somehow, all of this marvelous consciousness, all these marbles, emerge out of youth, out of childhood, out of our inheritance as a species, we play, imagine, we grow and develop memories, contexts, sets of experiences, we “grow up”, which can be good and bad, growing up can incorporate the best of youth or it can deny it, and for better or worse, we arrive at old age, and a seeming coming full circle, back to youth, to childhood, we return from whence we came. Some adults can get that childish imagination. Mom asked, “is Kim childish?” I said “yes she can be. I am too, I can be too.” She told me then that’s why I am a good teacher, “you know what it’s like to be a kid, you are there.” Perhaps the more of the inner child we can free, the more well adjusted we are, and as a corollary, if the child runs rampant, that just shows there is no adult in the house to provide balance. Balance, of slippery marbles wanting to roll, roll, roll.

With the old age, the senility, the Alzheimer’s, there is no conscious choice of balance, no ability to choose a balance, to have any measure of control, of being able to guide one’s self through life, to navigate, to have a rudder. The wind then comes and blows the ship willy nilly and there is no coming back to the shore. A person may go insane for a bit, but then be able to get back to the shore, to put on a rudder, but with the senility, with the “losing it”, as IT were, that’s the final journey, to Narnia, with Prince Caspian, down the rabbit hole, and the people slip away, into realities we can imagine, but only they can live.

So where do I get to? Down the rabbit hole can mean different things, but one thing in common to all is that a special imaginary quality is opened when one goes down the rabbit hole, be it with play, with insanity, with senility, and somehow, these disparate things have something in common. There is a thread which runs through all of the latter, perhaps the same thread,  something that unifies, and makes it not so heavy to believe that insane, or senile, is so out of bounds, when play is so in bounds, so natural, so necessary. Maybe insanity is play gone south, misshapen play, and senility takes the form of play, as we return to childhood, go from the womb to the tomb. All the characters of Alice in Wonderland, God, it seems like they are living here at Medford Leas, that this is Wonderland. Humpty Dumpty saying, “words mean exactly what I want them to mean...” It’s curious, and curiouser all the time, no answer, just a view, a connection, a seeing, a way of putting a filter on things, the filter of Lewis Carroll, down the rabbit hole, rabbits, fantasy, and the real sense that there is not such a great line between fantasy and “reality”. The old saws we loved in college, “what is reality?”, “that is more apparent than real...”, turn out to be deeper and more mysterious than I expected, and I love that life offers me a sort of continuing revelation, that I may see all anew, once again, down the rabbit hole.