Non sequitur

Last night I saw Alice in Wonderland, the new Tim Burton and Disney collaborative take on the Lewis Carroll classics Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871).

Although I enjoyed it - mostly on the aesthetic and visceral level of 3D nausea-inducing delirium (no, I wasn’t high) - I realized that I’d never been a very big fan of the literary nonsense genre (e.g. Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Shel Silverstein). Of course, it’s fun to watch and listen to, to experience the edge of language and logic through a variety of non-sensical (and sometimes, extremely sensical) elements. After all, who-zle doesn’t like a foozle?

But I think my brain has an awfully hard time with the world when it doesn’t make sense. That is - ironically, in the case of nonsense literature - when the world is filled with too much sense, an excess of meaning, rather than the absence of it. So, as in most every case, meaning arises out of the various multiple associations between things. Nonsense literature picks up on these double meanings, triple meanings, witticisms, plays on language and the places where logic doesn’t quite work out - although it’s very well-toned, yuk yuk!

After the film, for all its visual wonder, all I could think about was how much I wanted the Cheshire Cat (voiced by Stephen Fry) to come hang out with me. He used to creep me out when I was a kid because he seemed pervy (see Disney’s original 1951 cartoon version of Alice in Wonderland) - but somehow, Burton managed to make him quite charming, not very vexing and even pretty helpful in a pinch.

So, I wanted the Cheshire Cat to come around, make some wisecracks, disappear in a puff of smoke, just kinda float around and, you know, wow my friends and neighbours.

There’s something very charming about that cat.

Even as I’m writing this, I’m thinking it. And even though I’m allergic to cats, I don’t think I’d be allergic to Chessur. He’s mostly smoke anyway and I don’t imagine he’d leave much dander lying about - as opposed to, say, the cat that’s sitting on my lap right now who I’m sneezing on. And even though this cat in my lap is purring, it hasn’t once smiled at me or floated in the air or presented me with a philosophical quandary. I think that’s the kind of cat that I’d be down with.

Or a robot to clean my bathtub. I’d call him “scrubobot,” or “bub” for short.