In times of upheaval, I lean on touchstones–works of art that have shaped me and the continue to be sources of inspiration, influence, and solace. It might be rereading a favorite novel, a cherished poem, a movie, or (especially often) a favorite album with a good pair of headphones.
Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through The Looking Glass are books I read and again – throughout my childhood and well into adulthood. Multiple readings of Martin Gardner’s Annotated Alice profoundly changed my understanding of how art can work on multiple levels.
Lewis Carroll wrote two engaging and silly children’s story – full of the nonsense of the times. But he also wrote subtle political and social commentary. He made tiny but telling references to local institutions and affairs in his beloved Oxford, and to specific people in his life and the life of the dedicatee, Alice Liddell. He made games of mathematics, logic, and wordplay integral in the story, and built the story around universally beloved games.
That you can write a story that works on so many levels at once should be inspiring to anyone creating art. As I often tell students, the time we take in creating art is significant – time enough to build levels of references that are invisible to the casual listener/reader viewer, but give the work extra resonance and depth.
Inspired by Carroll, I recently created a choral work based on Carroll’s classic poem “The Jabberwocky” from Alice Through the Looking Glass. I had never heard a setting I liked, because they all seemed to play up the onomatopoeia and silliness at the expense of the wordplay and connection to the larger work. For my piece, I settled on a mirror canon (or a “looking glass canon”) as well as using the Shepard Tone – the auditory equivalent of an M.C. Escher optical illusion. The idea of combining a Bachian form with auditory illusions and a Carroll text pleased my Charles Dodgson-inspired love of nonsense and wordplay, as well as the music equivalent: “ludus tonalis” – the game of music. In all this, I was inspired by Douglas Hofstadter’s groundbreaking book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid – a book that uses Carroll’s characters to help convey the main ideas.
The formal creativity, the nonsense, the silliness and the multilevel thinking are things that made the Alice books must-reads for me as a youth and made them touchstones for me as an adult.
Touchstones is an ongoing series of posts I’ll be writing during the COVID-19 season, reflecting on the works of art that support me in times of upheaval. I encourage you to make a list of your own “touchstones” and if you like, share them with me to publish here.