Dear Mr. Dodgson:
Because of your presence, I imagine a green tea forest razed to the earth. All those lovely green jewel tones sipped and internalized. Now what remains? An open expanse of the brownest dirt, sprawling and dipping as far as my imaginative gaze reaches, and memories. Memories of color, of warmth, of the way leaves harnessed the light until they glowed inside out. Now the sun spills chaotically without visionaries weaving it into order, into beautiful spiraled webs, into golden ratios.
You kept seating charts, liked order, and dare I say thought kindly on fate with its steady hands and gossamer threads so fine only a select few can see. But: in your most famous piece of art, you wrote of chaos. Where hid the mercury-madness? In the misconduct of Wonderland or the order of society? In which place did freedom breathe? Did mathematicians decimate the reassurance you found in counting and multiplying when they added imaginary numbers? Did fiction swing into reality with such brute force that both shattered, blending in a way now impossible to separate?
So many lessons cast over countless green tea leaves. I now understand Orpheus and Eurydice. That wasn’t a couple you were striving teach, but that was the best part of your lessons. Sitting out for a century or so, all of your wisdom was served in tiny cups with mismatched saucers, the way lessons taste best. Your stories are sprawled upon a table stretching endlessly with broken clocks and the very best butter.
We count impossible things like we count imaginary numbers to see if the world feels less dismal. Orpheus let Hades—a trick of his mind, like a shadow in a foreign place—manifest so he could traverse a nightmarish path of healing. In his imaginative gaze, over his shoulder Eurydice smiled, following, and when he glanced behind, in a dark rush, he confirmed every worst fear struggling inside. She was never there at all. To save her was never in his musically gifted hands. Music can only resurrect a soul in a living body, and her living body had gone irreversibly cold. How helpless to have a talent that bends trees, but not time. How human heroes are.
To be truthful, I think the white rabbit with the clock pasted to his paw bothered you. Time clouded his mind, you recognized. But broken clocks were a thing of beauty that didn’t belong; you understood. In a field of broken clocks . . . that is where brilliance hides, the impossible lives, and where the curious minds that adulthood dims stay aglow.
For what is real, what is a dream, what is the difference? What is a thought, what is an emotion, what does it matter?
All that matters are the branches of the web stretching out to touch one another to turn the whole thing golden. All that matters is that, somehow, a brighter understanding—of everything we see, all matter, all manner, all stories—can be found.
Warm wishes,
Juliana
Little fragments of Juliana Amir’s work are represented in beautiful magazines such as Fantasia Divinity, Enchanted Conversations, and Dime Show Review. Her favorite number is eight.