JOHN LENNON DREAMSITE: THOU ART JOURNAL - Page 3

"Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass" of mathematician, writer and photographer Lewis Carroll have been the books that mostly influenced John Lennon.
Humor and poetry, nonsense, puns, riddles and nursery rhymes offer the perfect blend of tenderness and universality, significance and lightness, which mark also John Lennon writings and lyrics.

Caricatures and characters; humanized animals and animalized humans, fables and social satire; jokes and absurdities. The language experiments sounds and double meanings; words, syllables are mingled in an exhilarating way. Commonplaces, habits and repetitiousness are constantly jeered at.

'Through the Looking Glass' means going beyond the within and without appearance, beyond ourselves, to a place where we feel somehow as if we were invisible, hide chameleonic abilities and live with feelings and ideas... as absurd, cynical and pitiless ones as the characters met by Alice.

Alice symbolizes continuously expanding and contracting Conscience. Like Alice, we all feel sometimes big, sometimes little in front of people and facts, and we have to face conflicting thoughts, the Tweedledums and Tweedledees of our restless mind. They are "brothers" who always quarrel; they live in the woods, seem contrasting, but are the same...the ayes and noes of our Mind...Alice is surprised by them, sometimes annoyed, although she understands them both.

`I know what you're thinking about,' said Tweedledum: `but itisn't so, nohow.'
`Contrariwise,' continued Tweedledee, `if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't.
That's logic...' 'You like poetry?'
'Ye-es. pretty well--SOME poetry,' Alice said doubtfully.
'Would you tell me which road leads out of the wood?'
'What shall I repeat to her?' said Tweedledee, looking round at Tweedledum with great solemn eyes, and not noticing Alice's question.
`"THE WALRUS AND THE CARPENTER" is the longest,' Tweedledum
replied, giving his brother an affectionate hug.
Tweedledee began instantly:

`The sun was shining...

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"Alice Through the Looking Glass" (free download zip file, 62Kb):