Shakespeare and Alice

I once read a novel called Mythago Wood in which a forest was a sort of otherworldly zone from which mythical figures occasionally emerged into the everyday realm. The main character saw this happening and kept trying to cross the barrier that kept ordinary humans out of the mythical space, which turned out to be a tough go. The idea of the forest as a sort of zone of the unconscious is a familiar one to most of us, so the existence of a patch of woods next to our local arboretum may help explain why walking there is often such an imaginative exercise.

Then, too, I've seen a number of Shakespeare plays produced in the arboretum in the past, which probably helps explain my penchant for peopling the park with his characters. I once had the idea that it would be fun to have a free-roaming theatre company enact scenes in various parts of the park instead of on a fixed stage, so that playgoers would stroll from one scene to another. Since the idea occurred to me, there's been no looking back. I'm sure this would entail a lot of logistical headaches, but just think how much fun it would be.

You might stage the beginning of A Midsummer Night's Dream in the parking lot to represent Athens, then move the bulk of the action to the park itself, with lovers, fairies, and rustics continually stumbling onto one another under the trees. Think how magical it would be on a summer's night to eavesdrop on the fleeing lovers in one leafy corner of the park and overhear Titania quarreling with Oberon in another, as the fireflies winked and the moon rose over the trees. I've been living with this idea for so long that I sometimes stage scenes in my head when I'm walking, picturing the mortals waking up in this particular grove, Puck flitting about behind that oak over there, and the rustics enacting Pyramus and Thisby using that low wall as a prop.

And why stop with A Midsummer Night's Dream? There's an open grassy area in back where I occasionally imagine Richard III stumbling about, calling out for a horse. That quiet corner with the arbor would do admirably for Friar Lawrence's cell, while the gazebo works for Juliet's balcony and bedroom. A patch of hilltop trees sheltering a shaded path translates in my mind into the gloomy corridors of Macbeth's castle, and over there, behind the hedge, is Ophelia's pond. That bowl-shaped meadow is plenty big enough to represent Agincourt and the meeting of Henry's army with the French. The garden, with its series of outdoor rooms, is the perfect spot for staging Much Ado About Nothing, while Julius Caesar could meet his murderers on that narrow walled court down by the roses.

Probably, the nature of the park itself--an open space of trees and fields shaped by human hands and filled with paths--situated next to a small but thickly wooded forest--contributes to my tendency to see it as a stage. It's part nature and part human and has, as a place set apart for no purpose other than leisure, a bit of a liminal feel. Your mind wanders as your eye roams over broad vistas punctuated with many intimate spaces, and there are numerous ways to explore aside from staying on the main path. Paths into and out of the woods provide access to a deeper imaginative realm. It's a writer's and an artist's dream.

The park tends to be well populated these days (see my post "Is That Really Necessary?") and much noisier than it used to be. It strikes me that the increased noise works to decrease the park's liminal qualities, making it harder to imagine Athens, Rome, Verona, or the English countryside. It's more of a neighborhood circus many days than a "thin place," but if you cultivate mental self-containment, it's still possible to have stolen moments of reverie, which gives walking there a sort of fitful charm.

I often encounter rabbits in and around the park, which takes me in a different but related direction, making me think of Alice drowsing on her river bank on a summer day--a subtle reminder that the world of the imagination is never far away, if indeed, there is really any distance at all. (Alternately, it's a reminder that any time spent in a public space these days, from the park to the shopping mall to social media, carries the possibility of falling down a rabbit hole--but let's accentuate the positive.) With the busy outside world surrounding the arboretum on all sides, the park still manages at times to fill the important function of providing room for imagination and untrammeled thought. For that, I thank it.

The Queen of Tarts

I went for a walk after the rain this afternoon, looking for signs of spring. From a winter landscape of brown and gray, green grass and yellow daffodils are starting to emerge. I even saw a few tulips and was imagining how things will look in a week or so, when the redbuds and weeping cherries are in bloom. After the walk, I went to see Alice in Wonderland, and maybe I'm color-starved, but I was more struck by the use of color in the movie than anything else.

The predominant colors in the film are red and white, the colors of the two opposing queens. Despite patches of color in Underland (aptly named), much of the landscape is blasted and black, a picture of nuclear winter. Although the Red Queen is the wicked one, it's almost a relief when Alice makes it to her palace, which is colorful indoors and out, an effect heightened by the lavish use of red in the costumes and decor. Red is a color of appetite, and I could almost taste the Queen's missing squimberry tarts, which I imagine as a particularly luscious kind of raspberry pastry.

Alice spends most of the film wearing blue, which goes with her dreamy youthfulness. In the Red Queen's palace, though, she gets clothes done up from red curtains that are much more fashion-forward and fun than the pale blue ones. When she escapes the palace and ends up in the castle of the White Queen, her clothes become pale and silvery again. Like the White Queen herself and her surroundings, Alice looks ghostly and ethereal.

All of this makes me think of alchemy, which Jung explored as a symbol for individuation. In this system, the substance to be refined begins in blackness. You might say this is the wasteland, the period of darkness and unconsciousness, the wintertime of the soul. It's hard to move from the blackness to the state of albedo, the whiteness. This only occurs through repeated trial and error as the individual moves ahead and falls back again and again. In albedo, the person gradually attains objectivity and inner peace as he or she integrates more and more of the material of the unconscious.

All of this is on the way to the rubedo, the redness. The rubedo is the heart awakening, the point at which individuation really begins. The heat for the reddening is supplied by emotion, so that the person feels the change in a concrete way as a newly kindled passion for life.

Alice starts out in the desolation of the blackening, but the rest of the process is out of whack. She proceeds first to the Red Queen and then to the White. As beautiful as the White Queen is, there is something chilly about her and her surroundings. It's hard to imagine living for long in her palace; the most appealing scene is the one in which the Queen and her household walk outside between two rows of what appear to be blooming cherry trees; the pink blossoms are a welcome touch of color.

The White Queen, who could use some reddening, is too ineffectual to defeat the Jabberwocky herself, and it falls to Alice to be her champion. She slays the monster, which results in the banishing of the Red Queen and the restoration of the White. While this goes against an alchemical reading, it is true that Alice has to drink the blood of the Red Queen's champion in order to return to her ordinary life (the blood itself is purple and looks more like grape juice, but close enough). Alice returns to the upper world stronger and ready to chart her own path.

This was a Disney film, so I guess a dampening down of the fire was inevitable. This is a sanitized family movie, so you're only going to see so much libido, though Tim Burton did include subversive touches: the White Queen is a little scary in her own way, even passive-aggressive, and the Red Queen has a commendable appetite for tarts. She is, after all, the Queen of Hearts (though maybe too passionate about the wrong things), and she does give Alice a styling set of new clothes.

Alice begins and ends the movie wearing blue, a color signifying spirit rather than passion. I would have liked to see her sailing into her new life wearing that red party dress snipped out of curtains, but I realize that's asking a bit much of Disney.

On a final note, I'd like to say that although I'm not the one who ate the squimberry tarts, I would have been if I had found them.