The New Black

I was watching The Matrix, well to be perfectly accurate I am watching The Matrix but there’s no need to be picky about temporal tenses, after all I’m already past the relevant bits. Anyway, the point is this: I hereby move that Alice and Wonderland is the most important book of the twentieth century.

Notes on the previous statement:
- I’m including Through the Looking Glass when I say “Alice in Wonderland”, firstly because I’ve never even seen them bound separately and secondly because it’s easier for me.
- I am perfectly aware that it was written and published in the nineteenth century. I am aware that its author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, pseudonym Lewis Carroll, died in 1898. I am aware of these things and I don’t care.

Alice In Wonderland became the Bible after 1950. When I say that I don’t mean what men in silk shirts with frosted hair mean when they say that pink is the new black. Or maybe I do, maybe it’s just a different timetable. See, when they say that they mean that for the next six months pink will be as ubiquitous and important as black has always been and will always be. Those people are always wrong, and, at least at the moment, I think I’m right but I might be trying to say the same thing they’re trying to say. That is: the Bible is the Bible, it’s the constant, standard base of western understanding; even right now, when I claim that Alice in Wonderland is the Bible, I know that the Bible is still the Bible, but for a little while, for its brief period, in is its own realm, Alice in Wonderland is the new black… then again, two thousand years isn’t forever so I guess the same can be said of the Bible.

Alice in Wonderland is quoted like Proverbs, its themes are mirrored like Genesis, it’s mined for lessons like the New Testament, for insight like Revelations, for truth like, well, all of it. It’s permeated the culture so completely that people don’t have to read it to except its lessons, or to know its contents, they know ‘down the rabbit hole’ and ‘through the looking glass’ as they know ‘parting the Red Sea’, they know the Hatter, the Dormouse, Queen of Hearts and the Cheshire Cat. It’ll pass out of the culture eventually, just like everything else, but something happened ninety years after it’s publication that changed it from a charming but nonsensical children’s book to a handbook for processing our world.

I’m Jewish so my first thought was, of course, the Holocaust (we’ve become a terribly predictable people) and I watch a lot of VH1 Classic do my second thought was drugs. They might both be wrong but here’s something: we became suspicious of the way things seemed, started to regard reality as feeble, or cruel, or deceptive, or impetuous, events were determined not by reason but by whim, things that were impossible became easy, things that were inconsequential became vital, children knew more then their parents or at least believed that they did, thousands of people became inhuman, a million more agreed with them. That was gibberish, I’m sorry, let me start again. The white Rabbit… Harvey… Frank… the Trix Rabbit… there’s something about rabbits and insanity or the unseen existence. I lost it, I’m sorry, if I get it back I’ll update. I knew what I was talking about forty-five minutes ago but it’s gone now. That makes me sad; it had seemed so important…