From the Empirical Archives: A Moment With Ingrid Taylar

A Moment With Ingrid Taylar

Originally Published in the July 2012 issue of Empirical

Empirical interviews Ingrid, a writer and photographer who has recently moved up the coast from San Francisco to Seattle, and examines her world of photography.

Empirical: Hi Ingrid. Your photography work in San Francisco, especially the bridges, is what initially caught our eye. How did you get started in photography?

Ingrid: I’ve had a camera in my paws since I was seven years old. We were expats in Europe, and my parents bought me a Kodak Instamatic to document my experience. That’s not to say that I took anything of significance, or even anything that verged on decent composition. But, because of that gift, it became the norm for me to carry my camera in one hand and my stuffed toy in the other.

Empirical: That’s a nice image. I think many of us started in similar ways. When did you begin taking photography more seriously?

Ingrid: I was a casual shooter for a long time, even with the film SLR my dad and I picked out after high school graduation. I had a 50mm lens, and I used that camera – a Fujica AX-1 – like a snapshot device. It was token usage of a powerful tool. There were two significant events that inspired me to go further with my photography. The first was my job with About.com, writing and editing their San Francisco website. The second was a simultaneous volunteer gig my husband Hugh and I started at a wildlife hospital in the Bay Area. That’s when I first realized the potential of my camera as an instrument of my personal passions.

Empirical: What was it about those events that made such a difference?

Ingrid: The old adage – write about what you love, photograph what you love – came to fruition through my lens simply because I finally discovered what it was that I loved to photograph. And that was … the San Francisco Bay Area and, in particular, the nature and wildlife of Northern California. I was on foot several days a week with my camera, covering neighborhoods and events around the Bay Area. Because of my immersion with wildlife at the hospital, my eye was also trained for the anomalous shapes and movements in that landscape – the wild things to which I’d always been drawn. It helps that Hugh has an extraordinary photographic eye, and through his lens, I began seeing much more of the marvelous in my everyday world …. my allusion to Bill Moyers who said that creativity is “piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.”

Empirical: That’s a beautiful way of putting it. We think it’s marvelous how you not only have an eye for angles, shapes, and color in architecture, but how you penetrate through that mundane into the world of nature. How did that develop?

Ingrid: Through my telephoto, I began to connect with my subjects in a way that allowed a relationship of sorts. This contrived intimacy with my home terrain and with my wild subjects got me addicted to the process. More importantly, photography drove my commitment to wildlife and wild spaces in ways that changed me and my perspective forever. I think it’s important to add that I consider nature photography a genuine privilege, and do my best to abide by good field craft and strict wildlife photography ethics.

Empirical: You mentioned, too, that you wrote an online column. Is that how you got your start in writing?

Ingrid: I started off writing a column for a natural health magazine, did various forms of writing throughout the years, including some technical and copy writing. My most recent full-time writing job was my work with About.com. When I left About, I transitioned into research work through the serendipity of an internet search. An author found my work through About.com and hired me as a researcher for two ongoing series of thrillers. I supplement that work with freelance jobs as they come up, I also maintain my nature blog, and I’m always working on personal writing projects on the side. You know, as they say in L.A. – “multiple projects in various stages of development.”

Empirical: What are your goals in photography at this point?

Ingrid: I regularly donate photos for environmental or wildlife causes – for auctions, fundraising events, or nonprofit publications. My primary motivation, outside of the pure enjoyment of shooting, is to use my camera as a conduit. I always hope I can translate even a morsel of what I see through my lens, to someone who might be viewing my images. If a photo can, in some way, inspire someone else to care about the subjects I photograph, then I feel I’ve accomplished something. I’m constantly honing my technique, and have numerous aspirations in terms of expanding my skills and endeavors.

Empirical: What kind of equipment do you use?

Ingrid: I use Olympus gear, for the most part. My constant companions are my Olympus E-3 and my walk about 70-300mm and 14-54mm lenses. This summer, I’ll be experimenting with a micro-four-thirds (mirrorless) camera and also a new wildlife lens.

Empirical: Can you walk us through some of your photographs? I love the Space Needle shot.

Ingrid: It’s called “Wolf Moon at the Needle.” I shot this as a Wolf Moon rose behind the Seattle Space Needle. This image is actually two exposures layered together – one exposed for the Needle, one for the moon. Nothing else was altered in terms of juxtaposition or size of the moon.

Empirical: As I said, I was immediately drawn to your bridge photography, including the Golden Gate shot. Can you tell us about that one?

Ingrid: Yes, I thought that was the bridge photo to which you were referring. I took a long exposure of the Golden Gate Bridge on a July evening. The slight haze in the sky reflected back some of the light below, and rendered the tones more golden. Shot from Fort Baker in Sausalito.

Empirical: Where did you find all those birds in the bird shot?

Ingrid: I call that “Shorebird Nation.” This was shot in the East Bay, at Arrowhead Marsh in Oakland. I sat at the far end of a dock as huge numbers of shorebirds were arriving to sit out a wind storm. Each arriving group landed behind the rest, nudging the whole flock forward toward me. Eventually, the dock got so full of birds, these shorebirds were just feet away from me and my camera, not bothered at all by my presence.

Empirical: There’s another lone bird shot here, too, with beautiful gold coloring around it.

Ingrid: I photographed this scene in Redondo Beach, in Southern California. This one Brown Pelican was perched on a breakwater during a vivid display by the setting sun. The sunset had the appearance (to me) of a volcano erupting behind the silhouette of the rock wall and the pelican, hence the name of the photo, “Pelican Fire.”

Empirical: We see that you like to get close. That macro shot of the drops on the leaf is spectacular.

Ingrid: That’s called “Conveyer Belt of Raindrops.” It’s one of my favorite macros, taken in a beam of sun, after a Seattle downpour. The drops pictured are, in fact, raindrops. I don’t use spray bottles or other artificial means of creating droplets.

Empirical: The reflected skyline shot is very creative. It took me a while to figure out where those textures were coming from.

Ingrid: It’s called “Reverse Reflected.” This is part of the Seattle skyline, reflected in a huge puddle on a waterfront pier. I flipped the image upside down, so the texture you see in the “sky” pictured here is actually the puddle and pier boards, and the “reflection” below is actually the real person, skyline, and sky.

Empirical: The sky around the volcano is amazing. What’s going on there?

Ingrid: There are spectacular weather days where lenticular clouds form above Mt. Rainier like flying saucers. This was shot as the sun went down, from a hillside south of Seattle. The colors are real, reflecting the remnants of daylight, sunset and the coming twilight. I call that one “Rainier and Its Lenticulars.”

Empirical: It’s a wonderful collection, Ingrid. Thank you for sharing them with us.

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From the Empirical Archives: Submarine by Christopher Woods

Submarine

Christopher Woods

PHOTO: US Navy Imagery

Originally Published in the July 2012 issue of Empirical

Open to the public for the weekend,

my father and I go to take the tour.

The mammoth hulk of a thing awaits,

men in their sailor whites at attention,

the day brilliant as we leave the deck

to venture below where the nuclear

organs of this deep diving machine wait

in silence for the order, the moment

for which they have been created.

My father, working with one lung,

sees the ladder we must descend.

If he thinks it might be difficult

for him to manage those rungs,

he does not say.

I say, go first, take your time.

I watch his careful descent

as he disappears below me.

I think of things leaving,

how the sub will soon

leave the dock for duty,

plunge into the wet deepness

of dark nothing we will never see.

But I know there are all kinds of nothing.

I grab the top rungs, begin my own

descent into the sub, the sea,

and, soon, life without my father

going first.

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From the Empirical Archives: Embargoed Brothers by Tim Weed

Embargoed Brothers: An American Off-Limits in Cuba

Tim Weed

PHOTO: anna 78/Flickr

Originally Published in the July 2012 issue of Empirical

A decade ago I was riding along the Havana Malecón in a white and blue ’57 Ford with a four-cylinder Toyota engine. The taxi driver overheard my companions speaking English in the back seat. “Where you from?” he asked in Spanish.

“Estados Unidos,” I replied.

“I thought so. The way they were talking, I thought I was in a film.”

We drove on in silence, the Ford creeping along the broad seaside avenue, the red sun dyeing the azure horizon beyond the flamboyant decay of the antique city. “It’s a shame our governments can’t get along,” he said after a moment. “I’ve always thought Cubans and Americans were like fruit from the same tree. Like brothers, you know?”

“Both proud?” I asked, recognizing the outlines of a familiar conversation.

“Yes, and friendly. Open-minded.”

Such encounters always make me smile. It’s a rarity anywhere in the world to be liked for being an American, and I have to admit: it feels good. It’s one of the reasons I keep going back to Cuba. Between 1999 and 2004, I visited the country frequently on a special educational license from the US Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). The longstanding US prohibition against Americans traveling to Cuba had begun to loosen a bit, and everyone you talked to–American and Cuban–was convinced that the embargo would be ending soon.

PHOTO: Natalie Maynor

Fast forward to today. The embargo still stands, and the Cuban people still love Americans. On a recent visit to Havana I shook the hand of an old man in a convenience store, beaming, affable, and drunk. “Cubans and Americans are just the same, except Cubans are hungrier,” he remarked. “Which is why I’m so skinny.” He lowered his chin to indicate his bony frame.

Many Cubans are skinny, because even with the government-issued ration books that keep people from starving to death, it’s impossible to put together a month’s worth of three square meals a day. Most people appear lean and healthy, hungry but not malnourished. Those who work in hotels, rental agencies, and other tourism-related businesses are better fed, even chubby.

Before we said good-bye, the old man asked for a convertible peso (C.U.C.), and I didn’t hesitate to give it to him. He may have been a drunk, but there was no question he needed it more than I did.

Whether the average Cuban’s nagging hunger is due more to the ills of a command-and-control economy or the stifling chokehold of the fifty-year American embargo appears to be an open question. A high-ranking officer at the US Interests Section–which serves as our unofficial embassy in Havana as the Cold War drags on in this strange time-warped corner of the Caribbean–recently assured me that the embargo doesn’t matter. “It’s not like they can’t buy their goods from other countries,” she pointed out.

True enough, I suppose. But think about the economic stimulus that might be created by allowing free commerce between this island nation of eleven million people and a market of 310 million of the world’s wealthiest people, whose nearest beach is less than ninety miles away. The hordes of high-tipping tourists alone would create a major shot of adrenaline for the Cuban economy. Barring a major shift in US politics, however, such an economic sea change does not appear imminent.

Despite it all, Cubans go on loving Americans. I find myself shaking hands with every taxi driver, every impromptu tour guide and street musician, every artist or fisherman or mechanic who takes the time to explain the make-do ingenuities of Cuban life. The Cubans you meet in the course of a day are so generous with their friendship, so eager to help, to facilitate and enlighten, that you feel you are in the company of close cousins, indulgent aunts and uncles.

PHOTO: Philipp Volmer

The director of an arts foundation in Havana recently explained the roots of the Cuban-American affinity. Before 1959, Cuba was more Americanized than any other country in the world. American corporations had satellite offices in Havana, and there was an undersea telecommunications cable that ran across the Straits of Florida. As a child in the 1950s, the foundation director remembers eating at the Woolworth’s lunch counter, living in a house stocked with the latest American laproducts, and watching Gunsmoke and I Love Lucy on TV. The streets of Havana are a living museum of vintage American cars, but the relationship goes deeper than that. Cubans of a certain age, he pointed out, almost feel like Americans themselves. This is one reason the “reunions” that take place multiple times a day when Americans travel to Cuba are so warm and emotionally charged.

On a recent trip I stayed in a casa particular, a government-sanctioned private home serving as a bed-and breakfast. This casa was a sixth floor apartment in a 1950s building, nicely furnished with the wellused American period furniture and appliances common in Cuban houses, with views over the pleasantly leafy Vedado neighborhood down to the Malecón, and to the blue Gulf waters beyond. My hostess, Olga, has lived here since 1963. A professor at the University of Havana, she loves to talk, lecture, tease, banter, and surprise you by offering ways of looking at things you haven’t thought of before. She’s expressive and gracious, often reaching out to touch you mid-conversation to stroke your chin or squeeze your shoulder. Her voice is deep and gravelly from too many years of smoking. As a teenager she participated in Fidel’s youth brigades, sent out into the countryside to educate the campesinos.

I asked if she remembered the Revolution. She did, of course, but it was the Missile Crisis she wanted to talk about. She still has nightmares from those anxiety-filled weeks, when the residents of Havana crouched in their living rooms expecting to be bombed into oblivion at any moment. “Kruschev didn’t understand one thing, though,” she said. “Americans and Cubans are the same. Deep in my heart, I knew Kennedy would never bomb us.”

*

Havana is glorious, mesmerizing, simultaneously joyous and sad. It’s one of the few world capitals I know where you can see the moon and stars at night. Exquisite architecture, much of it badly in need of paint and renovation, lines streets that seem poised to explode at any moment into violence or dancing. Strangler figs slurp the ground with roots that slouch lazily upon each other like boneless fingers, or time-lapse tribes of sleep-deprived worms. Finned American cars from the 40s and 50s combine nostalgia and menace, showcasing Cuban defiance and resourcefulness and taste. Little girls do surprisingly accomplished handsprings on the beach; highly talented musicians frequent every restaurant and square; boxers spar in run down courtyards; taxi drivers have Ph.D.s; and the waitress in your neighborhood paladar may well be a poet, a dancer, and a moonlighting doctor, all at once.

PHOTO: Nick Castle

Decades of privation have honed Cubans’ special talent for making the best of what they have. In Havana and elsewhere on the island, you’re always running into amazingly skilled people: mechanics, academics, doctors, artists, dancers, athletes, tour guides, inventors. In part this may be because there are fewer distractions, but it also springs from a pervasive cultural emphasis on creative excellence. People may be hungry, but they take pride in what they do. They spend many hours a day practicing it, and they do it well. This refreshing truth is another reason Cuba is such an inspiring place to travel.

*

On one level, Havana has remained frozen in time on January 1st, 1959, when the corrupt ruler Fulgencio Batista fled in his private jet as Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, and their triumphant revolutionary cohorts made their final advance on the city. Antique Fords, Chevys, Pontiacs, and Buicks still dominate the avenues, and elegant mansions, most subdivided into multi-family apartment buildings, are literally falling apart around their inhabitants’ ears. At the Museo de la Revolución, which houses tanks, warplanes, and the yacht Fidel and Che used to return to the island from their military training in Mexico, you can see bullet holes in an old delivery van used in an attack on the presidential palace that is now home to the museum, and more bullet holes in the palace’s grand marble staircase.

Hemingway’s house in the satellite community of San Francisco de Paula is just as he left it. His typewriter rests on a bookshelf, his spectacles on a side table, and the record of his daily weighing-in is scrawled in pen on the wall of the bathroom. On a recent trip I rode in a ’48 Dodge, beetleblack with a split windshield. The owner was a prodigious do-it-yourself mechanic, like many Cuban men. “It still has the original engine,” he said proudly, and that’s quite an accomplishment when you think about how much use it must have had over more than six decades. Most of the old cars have been switched over to Toyota engines. 

Hemingway's Study
PHOTO: Natalie Maynor

On another level, the entire country is a relic of the Cold War. Box-like Ladas, dented and street-worn but solid as war tanks, play second fiddle to the American classics, and ugly Soviet architecture–grime-soiled apartment blocks, abandoned factories and oil refineries–crop up in the most unexpected places, like the fruits of a latent Stalinist fungus attacking the ancient bones of the Spanish Empire.

One more thing that makes visiting Cuba special: the feeling that you’ve entered a kind of grimy, rustic time warp. Change is underway, though, and beginning to accelerate. The government of Raúl Castro has recently been easing the economic laws; Cuban citizens are now allowed to operate private businesses, and to buy and sell cars and houses. Compared to just a year ago, there is palpably more commerce on the streets of Havana. There is a new sense of animation and possibility. Young people wear fashionable stone-washed jeans, a burgeoning middle class patronizes a set of new stores and restaurants, and there are now as many modern cars on the streets as antiques.

Despite these changes, it’s important to emphasize that most people’s finances remain dire. The ration books only go so far. Meat, eggs, and other essential proteins are a rarity on the majority of Cuban tables. A tip of one convertible peso is standard for watching a car, helping with a bag, or providing access to something mildly forbidden at a museum or a cultural site. It sometimes feels embarrassing to engage in such transactions with Cubans, who are among the most dignified people I’ve ever known. But it is, at least for the time being, a necessity.

Many Cubans have long ago given up on making plans for the future. They live dayby- day, hand-to-mouth. “Sobrevivimos” is the common, stoical refrain: we do what it takes to survive.

“I’m going to say how I see it, and forget the consequences,” one young man in the countryside told me, having hitched a ride in a rent-a-car I was driving. “This government is not for us. It exists for one person only.” He made a familiar hand gesture, a quick stroking of an imaginary beard: Fidel Castro, also known as “tu tio,” your uncle. This young man earns a salary of twelve convertible pesos a month, about what it costs for one tourist to sit down for a restaurant meal.

*

If you visit Cuba, I recommend renting a car and setting out on the autopista nacional, the national highway vectoring eastward from Havana into the heart of the island. Driving the Cuban countryside is a beautiful and at times surreal experience. The scenery is achingly picturesque: tall palm groves fading into the green distance like something out of the Land of the Lost; little hardwood fincas painted blue or pink and surrounded by flowers; stunning Caribbean tableaux of well-tended cane fields and jungled limestone hills. Then you round a corner and come face-to face with the massive concrete buttresses of an abandoned Soviet factory, and you remember where you are.

PHOTO: neiljs

At least by outward appearances, not much has changed since the fall of the campo socialista in the early 1990s. With the demise of the Soviet Union came an end to ambitious infrastructure projects such as the autopista, most of which is still in excellent shape, in part because it sees so little traffic.

On a recent trip I spent a few days at that landmark of US-Cuba relations, the Bay of Pigs. In a small museum you can see some of the thinly disguised US warplanes that were shot down by the Cuban army, and you can stay in an ugly cinderblock resort run by the state. The food is terrible. A kind of malaise prevails among the workers in this and most other state-run resorts. They tend to be well-fed, harried, inflexible, and sour–the very opposite of most Cubans you encounter in the street.

But the seawater in the Bay of Pigs is limpid azure. Healthy coral heads teem with fish. There are sponges and waving sea fans, and polyps like miniature palm trees that shrink back into the rock if you wave your hand at them. It’s everything I remember snorkeling to be back when unbleached, untrammeled coral reefs were the norm in tropical regions around the world. Now they are rare, but it shouldn’t be surprising to find them in Cuba. Across the island there are unspoiled beaches, well-forested mountain ranges, and intact mangrove swamps serving as nurseries for new marine life. Chalk it up as an achievement of the Revolution understanding also that there are benefits to fifty years of political and economic isolation.

Cuba’s population is relatively urbanized; so much of the countryside feels, well, empty. Empty of tourists at least, once you get away from Old Havana, Trinidad, and the crowded beach resorts of Varadero. Will this atmosphere change if and when the embargo is lifted? Most Cubans I’ve talked to seem to have given up hope of that ever happening, and it’s easy to understand their perspective.

*

On a recent trip some friends and I visited Trinidad, a Unesco World Heritage site, for its remarkable concentration of colonial architecture. In Santa Clara, we stopped by the monumental black statue of Che Guevara that looms over the countryside like a throwback to the myth-making grandiosity of the ancient Mediterranean. We drove through Remedios and Caibarien, pretty colonial towns with spacious plazas that fill up in the evenings with strollers, hawkers, and various citizens eager to supplement their incomes with a few extra pesos.

PHOTO: neiljs

Cubans are fascinated by new technology the same way Americans are fascinated by Cohiba cigars and antique American cars. Our rental car was a compact Kia, nothing fancy, but the way people stared as we drove through towns in the countryside, it might as well have been a Rolls Royce. One friend in Trinidad was fascinated and even somewhat incredulous about the automatic locking mechanism in our little Kia, which, after a short test drive, he declared in awestruck tones to be “one of the best cars in the rental fleet.”

When the embargo ends, anything new–from iPhones to Hyundais–will be a huge temptation to Cubans. They will snap up such technology the moment they can afford it. This is likely to be particularly true of the Internet, which the state has thus far prevented from extending its tentacles as it has in virtually everywhere else, and which will provide for Cubans a craved-for opening to the rest of the world.

*

If you go to Cuba, it’s worth taking a drive out the great causeway or pedraplen, fifty kilometers out over the Caribbean to the Cayería de Santa María, a complex of hundreds of coral keys supporting a vast ecosystem of mangroves, reefs, and sugar-sand beaches. When the causeway was built, the government had apparently planned a Varadero-style development, but when I visited in 2002 it was a quiet paradise, with only two hotels and plenty of breezy Caribbean solitude. That year we spent an afternoon on one of the most idyllic beaches I’d ever seen, completely unspoiled, with the finest white sand imaginable, gently swaying coconut palms, and a vast natural basin of tepid seawater so clear you could almost breathe it.

These days the Cayería is a little more built up, and access to that unforgettable beach is now blocked off by an expensive members-only hotel. But it still seems removed from the rest of Cuba out here, a quiet Caribbean paradise of the kind that is increasingly difficult to find. It’s a good place to end a trip to Cuba, and to reflect on what the future holds.

PHOTO: Stephen Colebourne

When the embargo ends, how much will Cuba change? Will you still see the old Chevys and Oldsmobiles on the Malecón? The ubiquitous Ladas, the putt-putt cocotaxis, the ancient tractors and bicycle taxis and horse drawn caruajes? More importantly, will the Cuban people maintain their special character? Their resourcefulness, talent, and hard-won dignity? I think they will. Perhaps it will be easier to buy familiar products, and there should be a lot more variety in available food. But Cubans are too independent to become completely bewitched by our culture of McDonald’s and iPhones. Hopefully, they’ll apply the same ingenuity to this new bounty of capitalist exchange that they’ve applied to five decades of economic isolation.

Contrary to what some might expect, the Cuban Revolution is too ingrained to come crashing down the day Fidel dies. The Revolution permeates the municipalities and the ministries, from tourism to agriculture and education and beyond. It’s not just the Castro brothers, though it is important to understand that for most Cubans they and the Revolutionary compatriots they have outlived are analogous to George Washington and Paul Revere to Americans: founding fathers who have reached the plane of the mythological.

Cubans are proud of their Revolution. Does this mean they don’t bemoan their current economic state, and aren’t tired of so many years of non democratic, one-party rule? No. Most Cubans I’ve talked to, even the more “revolutionary” ones, long to see more freedom, more openness, and, emphatically, more economic opportunity. But that doesn’t change the way they feel about the Revolution itself. Not only what it has accomplished in health and education, but its heroic David and Goliath character–its proud history of standing up to the colossal enemy to the north. Fortunately for those Americans who want to travel to Cuba–and I hope that all Americans will soon have the unconditional legal right to do so–Cubans are good at making distinctions between a government and its people.

PHOTO: Natalie Maynor

Meanwhile, assuming there is a transition to Western-style free-market capitalism, it is likely to be gradual and incomplete. Perhaps Cuba will become a kind of miniature Caribbean China, with state control of social services and infrastructure and a vibrant, prosperous private sector. It is reasonable to hope that these proud people will keep hold of the undeniable progress they have made in health, education, and social welfare, even as they gain the freedom to travel, assemble, speak freely, and provide for themselves and their families. But in the end, whatever happens, Cuba will still be Cuba–like nowhere else in the world.

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From the Empirical Archives: Yvonne's Passing by Adrienne Parker

Yvonne's Passing: A Family's Experience With Midwifing Death

Adrienne Parker

PHOTOS: Adrienne Parker

Originally Published in the July 2012 issue of Empirical

As an active participant in the homebirth movement (five of my six children were birthed at home) as well as a lay birth midwife for several years, it seemed a natural and obvious progression that when faced with my mother’s death I would want to care for her at home. Birth and death are similar transitions through the very same door; one is an entering, the other an exit. This idea wasn’t new to me, I had been interested in home funerals for years and had a friend who cared for her adult daughter at home as she died and then kept her there as she prepared her body for cremation. The closer my mother came to this powerful life transition, the more I understood how important it was for me to honor her final life’s passage in this way.

Loving great-grandchildren spending time with Yvonne on the day of her passing

Loving great-grandchildren spending time with Yvonne on the day of her passing

I recently returned from training on Death Midwifery and Home Funerals. It was a powerful experience. The woman I trained with, Jerrigrace Lyons, has assisted approximately 400 families in caring for their dead. I am humbled and amazed at the gift of her undertaking (pun intended). She is a true trailblazer, a pioneer in the home death movement. Our training covered: legalities, the importance of having an Advanced Health Care Directive, who has the authority to care for the dead, filing a death certificate, body care and preservation, and green burial among other things. A Death Midwife assists those who are dying to prepare for their own deaths, as well as serving as a guide to families and friends in caring for their dead and preparing for a home funeral.

I understand that delving so intimately into the subject of death is uncomfortable for many people. We live in a culture that separates itself from death. We fear it and prefer to avoid the topic. But the fact of the matter is: none of us get out of here alive. Death is something that each and every one of us, at some point, will experience up close and personal. We may attempt to ignore death, to hide from it, but it will eventually track us down and catch our attention loud and clear. Another option, rather than hiding from death, is to consider it in a conscious and intentional way. We can befriend death and plan for it in the same manner as we plan our births, graduations, and weddings. Death is obviously a time of great sadness, grief, and letting go. But it is also a time of celebrating and honoring the lives of those we hold dear.

Decorations for a casket

My mother died in my home on February 11, 2012. Was it only four years before that the extent of her dementia could no longer be denied? I was at work when she called me in a panic. She had forgotten how to lift her feet and walk. I rushed to her side to comfort her and called the paramedics who took her to the hospital for tests. After an MRI the doctor diagnosed her as being in an advanced stage of Alzheimer’s. 

Just two years before, she was living alone in the house she had called home for forty years, where she had raised her three children as a single parent. She had created a comfortable home with a beautiful yard and rose garden. She was still caring for it all, managing her own affairs, as well as driving herself wherever she wanted to go. Old age arrives and change can happen fast. After she fell and broke her arm from tripping on her garden hose, she stopped driving, sold her home and car, and moved into a retirement community. She didn’t much care for it there, so she packed up and moved into an apartment, still living alone, with some help from her family. Soon our help and attention needed to be amped up, and eventually we moved her into assisted care. She died three and a half years later. She was confused, but she never forgot her family and friends. Sometimes she called me her elder sister’s name but she still knew it was me. Once she asked where her mama was and I told her that her mama had died long ago. She cried and thanked me for telling her because now she knew where her mama was.

In 2011, I had two intense dreams where I midwifed my mama through her death. I lost many friends that year and my kitty of fourteen years died. I deemed 2011 The Year of Death and built an altar that I placed in the Temple of Death at Burning Man. It depicted so much letting go, all of my losses and grief, along with my love and gratitude. I thought my mama would die in 2011 but she held on. On New Year’s Eve we celebrated her eighty-ninth birthday. In February she stopped eating and was drinking minimal water. We got her on hospice and moved her into my home. My brother and sister came with their partners. My husband was there, along with her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Two of my girlfriends came from out of town to help. A few friends came to say their last goodbyes.

We read her favorite verses from the bible. Her great-grandchildren crawled into her bed and sang to her. Friends brought flowers and food, washed dishes, and ran errands. We laughed and cried and gave her all the loving we could in her last moments with us. We said our goodbyes. We told her she could go. She was peaceful until the very end when she struggled a bit with her final letting go. Those last minutes were difficult to witness but I wouldn’t have had it any other way. She died surrounded by her loved ones.

My husband and brother went to get dry ice while her daughters, granddaughters, and great granddaughters bathed her body. We added essential oils and rose petals to her bath water in a bowl that one of my sons, a potter, had made. After washing her body and hair, we dressed her, changed her bed clothes, and covered her in her special blankets.

I’ve always acknowledged that death is a natural part of life, but nothing came close to this understanding as when my mother died in my home, in the arms of her family. She stayed in the parlor, for the next three days, for her wake. My grandchildren were with us every step of the way, making art and writing poems. One of my fondest memories is of my ten-year old grandson running through the room where she was resting peacefully. On his way to pick fruit from the mandarin tree in my yard, he leaned over and kissed his grandmother’s dead body on his way out the door, and then upon his return with fruit in hands, he kissed her again as he continued on his way, back to his creative project. We sat with her, holding her hand, arranging her hair, crying, laughing, loving. The love continues after death. It doesn’t die when the body dies.

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My husband and a friend picked up her cardboard casket from the funeral home which we placed on the dining room table. I went to the fabric store with my youngest daughter for fabric to line her casket. One friend painted the casket and another brought magazines to use for a collage. We walked downtown and purchased various art supplies, and then for three days we decorated her casket. The grandkids worked for hours, keeping at it from morning till night. We all participated in different ways. 

On February 14th, Valentine’s Day, my cousin arrived just in time to join the family who had gathered to transfer my mother from her bed into her casket. We covered her in roses and added a few other personal objects to accompany her on her journey. The folks from the funeral home came and transported her there for her memorial service.

My eldest daughter made a lovely slide show with music. A good friend who is a minister officiated her memorial. My mother was a Christian and I wanted the service to reflect that, to honor the relationship she had with her God without being overly religious. It was perfect. Many family friends showed up, including her doctor as well as a married couple, who were not only my mother’s age, but were her childhood friends since kindergarten. My brother gave her eulogy and I spoke along with a couple of her grandchildren and great grandchildren. After her service we wheeled her body to the crematorium. My grandson cranked the church cart up to the appropriate height and we pushed her casket inside the chamber. I pushed the buttons that signaled the crematorium to burn my mother’s body to ashes and we returned home to share food and connection.

My parlor seems so empty now, without my mama there. There is an empty space in my life without her. I miss her, but I know how blessed I am to have had her in my life while she was living, and also as she was dying, transitioning from this life into the next with such grace and intimacy. When my son spoke at her memorial service he talked about how she gave, and gave and gave. I experience one of her greatest gifts as being in how she died. Her death has inspired me to educate and help others in this process, that they may know the blessing of not only caring for a loved one as they die at home, but in the continuation of care as they lay in honor after death. And this gift extends to my mother’s great-grandchildren, a gift that they will carry throughout their lives. They were an integral part of her living and her dying–not only as witnesses, but as personal and powerful participants in the process of caring for their dead.

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From the Empirical Archives: Wonderland, Neverland, and Oz by Randall Auxier

Wonderland, Neverland, and Oz

Randall Auxier

A view of Lyndhurst, England, where Alice lived at the time of this imagined dialogue.
PHOTO: David Martyn Hunt

Originally Published in the July 2012 issue

Editor’s Introduction

I have taken my title from a certain theme that appears in what is published below. The following, in its entirety, is the content of a strange typescript I found in the papers of the famous scholar and archaeologist Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928). Her papers are held at Newnham College, Cambridge University. The typescript had no title. In the summer of 2008, I was researching a projected book on Jane Harrison and I took the opportunity of a conference in England to visit the papers. The arrangement of these papers and their provenance is very well described in two recent books by Mary Beard and Annabel Robinson.* [*Mary Beard, The Invention of Jane Ellen Harrison (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Annabel Robinson, The Life and Work of Jane Ellen Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)]. It is a sad story. The fast version is that for many years all of Harrison’s papers were in the possession of one Hope Mirrlees (1887-1978), an avant-garde writer, associated with the Bloomsbury bohemians. During her dotage, Harrison was cared for by the much younger Mirrlees. By the time Mirrlees died and the papers were obtained by Newnham, they were simply a disorganized wreck. There are all sorts of documents in this important archive that are impossible to identify. I copied for my own amusement and brought home the curious dialogue below. One cannot tell whether it was typed from earlier hand-written material (a habit of Mirrlees, who was then careless with the originals), as Mirrlees was organizing thousands of notes for a planned biography of Harrison that was never written. Or perhaps this dialogue was given to Harrison or to Mirrlees, by someone else. It is a mystery exactly how this typescript came to be among the Harrison papers at Newnham.

As you will see, the “dialogue” concerns Alice Liddell (1852-1934), the little girl who inspired Lewis Carroll’s two most famous books, in a conversation with William James (1842-1910), the famous American psychologist and philosopher. Naturally, I wondered whether this “conversation” could possibly be a historical report of some kind. I am not a historian, but I have been able to verify that William James and his wife (Alice Howe Gibbens James) were at Lamb House in Rye, staying with Henry James, the novelist, during the spring of 1910 (Henry was indeed sick). Jane Ellen Harrison knew James well, and she also read a number of William James’s works, but then it seems that everyone knew the Jameses, so that is no special help. But Alice Liddell, now called Mrs. Reginald Hargreaves, was then living in Lyndhurst, within an easy day’s carriage drive from Rye. That Alice Liddell and William James did meet and discuss Lewis Carroll seems to be confirmed by a letter from James to his close friend, the Swiss psychologist Theodore Flournoy (1854-1920), but whether this “dialogue” below reflects what was actually said is, I think, exceedingly unlikely. It appears to be a work of fiction. There were a number people in Jane Harrison’s circle with vivid imaginations who wrote incessantly, after all, including Hope Mirrlees, Henry James, and Miss Harrison herself.

Also, in terms of history, William James did meet Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung in 1909. Miss Harrison and Hope Mirrlees both had excellent German, and those in her circle discussed the theories of Freud without need of translations. By 1910, Harrison knew Freud’s theories of the unconscious, but then so did Hope Mirlees and just about everyone else who was soon to be swept up in “Modernism.” Jung, although he was still at the earlier stages of his career, is mentioned favorably by Harrison, and given the great impression Jung left upon William James, I have no doubt that James discussed him with many people, including his brother Henry. As for J.M. Barrie’s play Peter Pan: The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up (1902), which would mobecome a children’s book in 1911, I think it is safe to say that just about everyone in the south of England knew about it in 1910. L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was first published in 1900, and Baum wrote fourteen more Oz books between 1900 and 1919. I have found no mention of these writings anywhere in the published work, papers, or letters of the Jameses, but as with Barrie, the writings were wildly popular, and widely known by 1910. One can speculate that nearly everyone in 1910 or 1911 knew about all of these characters, but in the end, it is difficult to be certain. The point is that these references in the dialogue are possible for the date when it supposedly occurred. I am personally tantalized at the notion that Henry James overheard the conversation, jotted it down, and gave it to Harrison for amusement.

The one point that argues against the authenticity of this manuscript is that Henry and William James, and Jane Harrison, were extremely reluctant to talk about sex, even privately. This Victorian habit of reserve suggests that perhaps this manuscript is the work of some merry prankster or some later hand, one not so inhibited. The manuscript I discovered appears to be more or less complete. I have made no changes, but I have inserted the letter from James to Flournoy at the place I believe it belongs, in the order of events narrated. The dialogue begins without introduction or explanation.

*

“Mr. James, it is so good to make your acquaintance. I am Mrs. Reginald Hargreaves. We met once, very briefly, when you spoke at Oxford. I believe you knew my late father, the Reverend Henry Liddell, who was Dean in Christ Church and then Vice Chancellor in the University.”

“Yes, Mrs. Hargreaves, I remember your father well. Though he lived a long life, I feel he left us all too soon, and the world is much the wearier for want of his energy. Will you have some tea?”

“I will. Thank you very much. I came from Lyndhurst yesterday in the hope of speaking with you, Mr. James. I don’t wish to be of any inconvenience, so I will come straight to the point of my calling. Did you ever meet the Reverend Charles Dodgson?”

“I did not have the pleasure, I am afraid, but we knew a number of men in common through the exchange of the societies.”

“You mean the Society for Psychical Research, then?”

“Yes, that was principal among them. Have you an interest in the supernatural, Mrs. Hargreaves?”

“No, not really, Mr. James. I fear that my present problems are somewhat more difficult to discuss. I am embarrassed even to presume I might impose upon your time. I understand that your brother is quite ill, and that your own health has been rather poor.”

“I am a bit short of breath these recent weeks. Only a trifle, I assure you. Please go on. You asked about the Reverend Dodgson. I suppose we have all been delighted by his books for children.”

“Yes, that is part of what I wanted to discuss with you, Mr. James. It is not generally known, but I have had something to do with those writings. You see, my Christian name is Alice.”

“A name I like very much. My days have been blessed with Alices. There was my dear sister, and also my sweet wife carries that name.”

“Well, it has been a popular name I suppose, but what I am saying is that I am the Alice, in a sense, made somewhat notorious by Reverend Dodgson in his books.”

“A distinction of which you should be quite proud, I imagine.”

“Oh Mr. James, it is ever so much more complicated than it seems, to be the dubious beneficiary of so much praise and public attention, to be an immortal child. But yes, he wrote down the first story at my request. He had told such a fine story to me and my sisters on a summer day, and as children do, I demanded, good naturedly I hope, that he preserve it in writing. He did not do so right away. It was more than a year later that he presented me with the story. In the mind of a child, such a period seems an eternity. To be perfectly frank, I had forgotten my request, and even the story, in the main, during this long lapse. There had been a break between Reverend Dodgson and my family, in the time between, and I saw the Reverend not even once for most of a year. Perhaps the story was offered to my family, through me, as a reminder of better memories.”

“How can I be of assistance, Mrs. Hargreaves?”

“I know we have only just met, but please, if it is acceptable to you, call me Alice. I have heard, Mr. James, that no one understands psychology and philosophy better than you do, and my doubts and questions surround, well, the psychology of a philosopher. I would like to settle in my own mind some doubts recently preying there, unsteadying my nerves, and spoiling my happiness. I believed that you might be the only soul who can restore my health.”

“I am surely unworthy of such appraisal, and I doubt that I merit any of your optimism, but I am at your service. The philosopher in doubt is the Reverend Dodgson, then?”

“Yes, Mr. James. Although he is gone these ten years, I would gladly understand him better, if the modern science can cast any light upon such matters. He was such a dear friend to me in childhood, sort of an adoptive uncle, one might say. Apart from the break I mentioned, Reverend Dodgson was our family friend from before my memory. He was used to telling stories to my older brothers and sister, and as I came upon the right age he took a particular interest in me, although he was also very fond of my elder sister Lorina. Reverend Dodgson would take us all on excursions in the out of doors, on boating jaunts and other diversions. He was a delightful companion for all sorts of children. He was himself a child at heart, I should think. Perhaps you have seen Mr. Barrie’s play about the boy who wouldn’t grow up.”

“Yes, I did see it, quite recently in fact. Delightful.”

“Mr. Barrie’s Neverland reminds me of my childhood, as I try to remember it now, as though I were the girl, Wendy, and Reverend Dodgson was Peter Pan. I grew up, but he remained the same.”

“I understand. Perhaps ‘Lewis Carroll’ is the boy who never grew up, and Reverend Dodgson is the pirate swallowed by the ticking crocodile. I read Alice’s Adventures to my own children. Now I read the books of the American writer Baum to my grandchildren. It would seem that the books about your adventures began a fashion that continues–Wonderland, Neverland, the Land of Oz.”

“Yes, quite. . .”

“But my dear, you are sobbing. What has unsettled you? Reverend Dodgson seems to have been an ideal friend. I don’t see how I can help you understand him better than you already do.”

“I suspect, Mr. James, that I need a more general understanding than I now possess, owing to some disturbing rumors and inferences that have been growing recently, regarding my history and association with the Reverend Dodgson.”

“What rumors are these?”

“I have an acquaintance, a friend really, who has been telling me about the theories of an Austrian scientist named Dr. Freud. His books are all upon the lips of everyone who can read them, as my friend can, and she tells me that his theories offer, well, an explanation of my friendship with Reverend Dodgson. I admit that I care not at all for the theory, so far as I understand it. I do not know how seriously to treat all of these inferences and conclusions, but they are having an effect upon my social circles. I do like to play the hostess. People are whispering and I am at something of a loss to respond. And I have to admit, Mr. James, that I don’t know what to think, myself. Can you help me?”

“I see. Well, let me consider for a moment, Mrs. Hargreaves . . .”

“Please, call me Alice . . .”

“All right, Alice. Forgive me. The name is so familiar, I’m certain you understand.”

“Yes, of course.”

“It will take me some moments to sort my thoughts, and I will need a few more details. I have followed the writings of Dr. Freud for quite some time, and I met him not long ago. I cannot claim to know him well, personally, of course. If I express doubts, I want you to appreciate that my impressions regard only his theories. I have the utmost confidence in his character and in the aims he pursues with such vim and vigor.”

“I understand, Mr. James.”

“What have you heard, Alice? What are people saying that disturbs you so?”

“I must confess that, although I grew up amongst intellectuals, I have no facility with the theoretical aspects of your profession.”

“Just explain it in whatever way you can, Alice. I have greater appreciation for common sense than for nice theories, I promise you.”

“The Reverend Dodgson spent a great deal of time around children, especially girls, you know. He once told me simply that he was fond of all children, excepting boys. I know almost nothing of his adult companions, and I exchanged not a word with him in the last twenty years of his life. But when I was a girl, he drew sketches and posed photographs of me, and of other young girls that some, including my friend who reads from Dr. Freud, now adjudge, well, improper.”

ILLUSTRATION: Charles Dodgson/a.k.a. Lewis Carroll

“I dare not ask, Alice, after what I dare not learn. But I am myself something of a sketch-maker, so I feel that I do understand the eye and its fantasies. In what way are the images improper?”

“To place the matter delicately, Mr. James, in some of these depictions I was undraped. I am sure that you remember those days, when it was all the fashion to array our persons in the manner of the ancient Greeks, to strike classic poses, to extol innocence. The fashion is now stale, even comic, but then it seemed the very height of virtue and mental elevation to while one’s hours with the Graces and Muses and Furies.”

“Yes, Alice, I remember. It was much the same in Cambridge, my Cambridge, I mean, in America.”

“Reverend Dodgson had, of course, full permission from my parents. He said that had he even the loveliest child in the world, to draw or photograph, and found in her a modest shrinking, however slight, however easily overcome, from being taken nude, he should feel it were a solemn duty owed to God simply to drop the request altogether.”

“Of course.”

“My friend, however, says that Dr. Freud takes another view, seeing Reverend Dodgson’s desires of depiction not as the love of innocence and beauty, but as the vilest lechery. She says that completely apart from what my friend may have said or done, or even confessed to himself or his Maker, there is a motive force, and unconscious desire, indirectly expressed in his requests for nude models, for controlling their posing and drapes.”

“I do know of Dr. Freud’s thinking on questions of this sort. I am not altogether in agreement with him. But let us cut to the quick, my dear. Did you notice or experience any impropriety?”

“That is just my problem Mr. James. I have no memory of anything of that kind. I was but a girl. The world of adult motivations and inhibitions was unknown to me. If only I could remember, specifically, what he may have said and done, in those hours. Alas, I cannot.”

“Memory is a mysterious companion to our days, Alice. Msr. Bergson says that the longer we live, the less we perceive what is before us, and the more what is before us becomes a reviving of the past.”

“I am sorry, Mr. James, I am afraid I don’t know what that may mean.”

“My apologies, Alice. But again, why have you traversed this not inconsiderable distance to relate these doubts to me?”

“Oh, Dr. James, can it be true that we know so little of our own motives? Is it even possible that none of us grasps his simplest desires? Is there nothing pure and decent in this wretched world of men?”

“Mrs. Hargreaves, please, do take hold of yourself. I take another view of these matters than Dr. Freud. There is something, indeed there is much, that we might call our experience but would not class as precisely conscious. I don’t favor even the use of the term conscious, so diseased is the word with needless snares for the mind. But the so-called unconscious is only a misleading name for a domain of impulses, nervous energies, instincts, and, most important I would add, we are unconscious of our habits. Dr. Freud makes a raucous hullabaloo over a rather simple matter, that as habits are repeated and the pathways of nervous energy established, they require less and less effort to enact. With the conservation of effort comes not the absence of our need for thinking through an activity, but its spreading throughout the body as a series of coördinated movements.”

“I believe I understand, but perhaps you could offer a case?”

“It would be exampled in actions as simple as buttoning your shoe, Alice. The coördinated movements are really quite complex, far too fine for a small child, unteachable even to a great ape. But by means of their repeating, these movements become, as it were, unconscious. Dr. Freud is an enthusiast of rather fixed ideas, insisting that whatever is ‘unconscious’ has been pressed to the periphery of our daily functioning, or forced into mysterious channels beneath the depths of our awareness. He makes it sound all so very ominous. I think rather that such unconscious habits have proceeded to the core of our commonsense lives, constituting a hot center of our personal energy. A part of what makes Alice Alice is her manner of buttoning her shoe. In the case of Reverend Dodgson, the inclination and ability to draw, or to take fine photographs, over many years and through much repetition, became a way of seeing the world, a habit for beauty, if you will.”

“Oh, blessed thought. Mr. James, that is a wonderful suggestion, but how is one to judge? Surely there are men in the world whose gentle actions and soft words would be indistinguishable from Reverend Dodgson’s, but whose motives were baser.”

“Yes, that is impossible to deny, Alice. . . .”

“Mr. James, are you well?”

“It is nothing, my dear. I shall recover myself in a moment. I do begin to tire, and I must save some of myself and my strength to tend my brother who is unwell, as you know. I think that Henry and I must take turns being one another’s keepers.”

“I am so grateful for the interview, but Mr. James, so many questions remain to me.”

“You had taken a room in town. Are you able to stay and come ’round again tomorrow, say, at eleven?”

“Yes, Mr. James. I will call again then, and thank you ever so much.”

“Good day to you, Alice.”

*

William James to Theodore Flournoy

Lamb House, Rye, Sussex , April 26, 1910

Dearest Flournoy,
Yours of the 18th arrived several days hence, but I’ve found little opportunity of writing in recent days. Now the cruelties of April draw exorably to a close. H. is in a better spirit and Mrs. J. dotes upon him fitly enough to make me jealous. I leave in a few days for the ministrations of Moutier at Thiers, and then on to Nauheim to see what improvement I might enjoy from a good bath. I hope to make a stop at your station soon after.
You’ve caught on the wind some news of the unhappy Baldwin affr. You might save yourself some effort wondering over it. As I have the matter from one you know in Balt., I wld. imagine the suppt. of friends (even were the HonorableWilson himself to join their rank), will make small diff. to the outcome. The man had better sail for France with estimable haste. 
On that head, to-day I’ve had an unusual entreaty, from one Mrs. Rgnld. Hargreaves, the former Alice Liddell, and inspirer of the ‘Lewis Carroll’ Alice books, all filled with nonsense and logical puzzles, that we have several times discussed. She called at the house, all in a state of agitation having learnt abt. Freud’s wilder notions–motivations and clandestine energies forming their nefarious pacts in the dark unconscious. Why she believed I’d dispel her devils I don’t know, but a single interview did not satisfy her doubts, so I have invited her call again in the morning. I have resolved I shall place her under neuro-hypnosis–I know this will bring a smile, dear Theo. We left such business behind long since, didn’t we? I will be glad to give you a report on the result when next I see you. Love to Mrs. F., Believe me, etc.
WJ

*

“Good day, Mr. James. Your hospitality is deeply felt. May I inquire after your brother’s condition?”

“There has been an improvement, Mrs. Hargreaves. I believe he will be fit for punting in no time at all.”

“Curious.”

“Why curious?”

“Oh, that I had thought to mention the way Revernd Dodgson would take us punting on the Cherwall or the Isis. We would usually board at the Magdalen Bridge. Either we would hire a punt or Reverend Duckworth would steer his own boat.”

“Lovely outing, I should think.”

“It was, Mr. James. Simply divine. On one such day Reverend Dodgson regaled us with the stories he later wrote down for me. I was, I think, about eight years old. I wish I could remember it better than I do. I have the manuscript he gave me so much later, but I cannot now recall how the story there recorded may depart from what happened on that day. ”

“How so?”

“It seems to me that later events lend an order to earlier events that the latter may never have possessed, until, well, until the portents had been made manifest in the course of time. Do you not find this to be a character of your own memory, Mr. James?”

“Very much so, Alice.”

“Then, how can we trust our memories, in such a light?”

“Well, Alice, I have given some long thought to this matter, and among my conclusions are that the difference between my personal memory and yours may not be either as great or as absolute as the difference dividing our separate thoughts at this moment. When we remember, we may do so together.”

“How can that be, Mr. James?”

“I think, and I have observed, that forming memories is something more vigorous in the company of others and weaker in moments of solitude. There must be something in our registering of events that draws already upon the shared or common experience.”

“I see. And is memory altered by the presence of one companion in lieu of another?”

“Quite possibly. An old friend of my family was used to speaking of this social memory as a World Soul or an Oversoul. My new acquaintance Dr. Jung has suggested to me the term collective unconscious. I don’t favor the word, but I find sympathy in the idea that our memories are active and social and beyond our merely private affections.”

“Mr. James, I have wanted to understand a special philosopher, a logician really, most ardently, for many years now.”

“I would gladly help.”

“I wish to remember what I cannot. I cannot recall even the least impropriety in the manner or presentation of Reverend Dodgson, but I also cannot settle upon the conclusion that none existed. What can I do? Does your Dr. Jung have any help to give?”

“I had thought, last evening, Alice, that I might offer hypnosis to facilitate your memory. Have you ever undergone hypnosis, Alice?”

“I have seen it, in public performance, Mr. James, but I have not myself been subject.”

“It is a mysterious business, and no one knows precisely what, beyond the social power of suggestion, a state of hypnosis is. Further, you must be forewarned that what presents itself in the garment of fact, in such a state, may be made of the fabric of possibility, cut and stitched and rejoin’d.”

“I am willing to bear that in mind, Mr. James. Please do proceed.”

“I will need you to uncover your head and loosen your shoes, Alice, and to find an entirely relaxed posture of body and mind here on this couch.”

“As you direct, Mr. James.”

“I want you to close your eyes, Alice, and as far as possible, think only of vacancy. In a few minutes you will go off to a peaceful kind of sleep. Sit here quietly and think of nothing until I return . . .”

“. . . now Alice, I will make some suggestions, and you will describe what you are seeing. You remember the quadrangle at Christ Church. Can you see it now?”

“Yes.”

“What is the weather?”

“It is dreary, cold.”

“Who is there, Alice?”

“Mother, Ina, Edith, Harry, Jim, and I. We are walking to chapel.”

“Why to chapel?”

“Someone has died, an important man. I don’t know his name. Father must officiate.”

“Is Reverend Dodgson with you?”

“He is approaching from another way. He sees us, sees me. He has not visited in such a long time.”

“How does that make you feel, Alice?”

“I am quite upset, angry with him.”

“For neglecting you?”

“Yes.”

“What is he doing now?”

“We have gone into the cathedral. Father is addressing all the people. Reverend Dodgson is with us in our stall. He smiles at me, takes my hand and squeezes. I take my hand away.”

ILLUSTRATION: John Tenniel

“Why, Alice?”

“He broke his promise.”

“What promise?”

“He said it was our secret, but he told Ina, and she told Mother.”

“What was the secret, Alice?”

“About the Queen of Hearts.”

“Yes?”

“If I tell you, it won’t be a secret.”

“Then do not tell me Alice. Tell Reverend Dodgson why you took your hand away.”

“Reverend Dodgson doesn’t know. He can’t know.”

“He doesn’t know the secret?”

“No, and we mustn’t tell him.”

“Who knows the secret Alice?”

“Now Ina and Mother know it.”

“Who else?”

“I know it.”

“And who else?”

“Well, him, of course.”

“Who?”

“The boy who wouldn’t grow up, my secret friend.”

“Does your secret friend know Reverend Dodgson?”

“No, he has to hide from the Queen of Hearts, or she’ll cut off his head. I have to help him, to keep him ever so hidden.”

“Do you know where to find your secret friend?”

“Third star from the right and straight on ’til morning.”

“Can you fly there now, Alice?”

“Not Alice. Wendy. I have forgotten how to fly, until he comes again in the spring.”

“Alright Wendy, did you forget how to fly because you grew up?”

“I never wanted to grow up. I knew he would never visit and he would forget about me if I grew up.”

“And that is what happened?”

“No.”

“Then what happened, Wendy?”

“The Witch.”

“The Witch?”

“She is as dry as the desert and she has an eye that can see everywhere and she tells the Queen of Hearts.”

“What did she tell the Queen of Hearts?”

“The secret.”

“What was the secret?”

“What she saw.”

“What did she see, Wendy?”

“Not Wendy, Dorothy.”

“Alright Dorothy, what did the Witch tell the Queen of Hearts?”

“It was a riddle.”

“How did the riddle go, Dorothy?”

“There’s trumpets e’er the King to greet

And crumpets for the Queen to eat

And Strumpets for the Prince to meet

And all are in the castle

And the winery’s in the cellar

And the finery’s in the hall

And the bindery’s in the library

But no one reads the books at all

There’s a trellis for the gardener

Who is jealous of his partner

Who does sell us bread on Sunday

Just outside the castle wall

And the sky is clouding over

And the land is going under

Oh I wonder if the thunder

Does shake the walls asunder

At the castle on the hilltop

Above the sleepy valley

Where the restless river flows

Until it falls into the sea.”

A shed in the New Forest, Lynhurst, England
PHOTO: Ian Parkes

“And do you know the answer to the riddle, Dorothy?”

“Not Dorothy. Now it’s Alice, you silly kitten. You don’t know the game. You don’t know the secret.”

“I . . . I am afraid you are right, my dear.”

“You are just like Reverend Dodgson. You stammer just like him. You are not my friend.”

“I could be your friend, if you will tell me the secret, Alice.”

“You must promise not to tell, not even Mother.”

“I promise. I shan’t breathe a word.”

“Oh, all right. It’s the Queen of Hearts. You know she is really the Barber.”

“The Barber?”

“The Barber of Seville. She shaves everyone in Seville except herself.”

“I see. And who shaves her?”

“She doesn’t have to shave. She is a woman.”

“I never heard of a woman Barber, Alice.”

“And you never will. That’s why it’s a secret.”

“I believe I do understand. Alice, when I count three you will awaken, feeling happy and refresht, and you will remember nothing we said while you were asleep. One . . .two . . . three, and now you are awake.”

“Mr. James?”

“Yes, Alice?”

“I am so sorry. I cannot remember a thing. Have I been sitting here very long?”

“Only a short while, my dear.”

“Have you learnt anything that might settle my mind?”

“Alice, once you had a good friend who filled your days and your dreams with delightful nonsense. The imaginative powers wane as the powers of habit and reason, and the passage of time, set upon them. In later life none of us can quite believe what was so very real to us as children. There is no battle for your unconscious soul that I can discover, only a lost child puzzling at the habits of a responsible wife and mother. Reverend Dodgson never took a wife, I think, and never had a child. He was less a mystery to himself than those of us who married.”

“I see.”

“Alice, the friend you mentioned, the one who told you of Dr. Freud’s theories . . .”

“Yes?”

“Is it anyone I might know?”

“I do not think so, but she is a great admirer of your brother’s novels. The daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen.”

“No, I suppose I do not know her, but please do tell her this, since she has sent you to me. One who seeks  the causes of our happiness and misery beyond or below the exertions of the will, truly wants neither happiness nor misery, nor one at the other’s sacrifice, but only a numb automation. It is better to attend to the stream of our present consciousness than to the submerged stones roiling its surface.”

“I do not fully understand your meaning, Mr. James, but I can remember the words.”

“It has been a pleasure to make your acquaintance Alice. Please write to me when you think of it.”

“I shall, and thank you, Mr. James.”

Editor’s Afterword

Here the manuscript ends. I will not offer any commentary or analysis, since any reader can decide what does or does not strike home in it. But I did run across an interesting (and appropriate) comment from Martin Gardner, the great annotator of the Alice books. He is commenting upon the incessant incantation of the Queen of Hearts, “off with his head!” Gardner quotes Lewis Carroll saying “I pictured to myself the Queen of Hearts as a sort of embodiment of ungovernable passion –a blind and aimless Fury.” Then, recognizing the Freudian struggle of the Id and its censors, Gardner says:

Her constant orders for beheadings are shocking to those modern critics of children’s literature who feel that juvenile fiction should be free of all violence and especially violence with Freudian undertones. Even the Oz books of L. Frank Baum, so singularly free of the horrors to be found in Grimm and Andersen, contain many scenes of decapitation. As far as I know, there have been no empirical studies of how children react to such scenes and what harm, if any is done to their psyche. My guess is that the normal child finds it all very amusing and is not damaged in the least, but that books like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz should not be allowed to circulate indiscriminately among adults who are undergoing analysis.* [*Lewis Carroll, The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition. Intro. and notes by Martin Gardner (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1990), 82n.]

Henry James
PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons

Gardner’s view would not be agreed to by the majority these days, but remembering that the typescript above, depicting as it seems to, a world in which Freud was not the platform operating system of the mind, leaves us with some choice as to whether our own age is any less repressed or pathological than the unenviable world of our Victorian foreparents. Perhaps each age is insane in its own way, and glimpsing Lewis Carroll from the point of the transition, from his world into our world, is valuable in itself.

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