"I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity."
— Edgar Allan Poe

I read 200 pages about alice liddell today, and Lewis Carroll, aka Charles Dodgeson. (alice was the muse who inspired Carroll to write alice in wonderland)... there are rumors about him being a sort of victorian pedophile... his obsession with photographing little girls, and the abrupt end to his relationship with alice liddel that has remained a mystery to this day. His diary was carefully edited after his death by his family. All of the pages that fall between their first boat ride till the conflict between Dodgeson and the liddell's are carefully cut out.

Particularly interesting is the freudian analysis done by a student named Goldschmidt attending Oxford uni in the early 1900's, it's completely fabricated, but its pretty interesting none the less.

Goldschmidt published his views in a four page article in the New Oxford Outlook entitled "Alice in Wonderland Psycho-Analysed." The hyphens and capitals testify to the awkward newness of such a concept. His theory was that the opening section of Wonderland was a kind of cryptic message from Lewis Carroll's subconscious. The incidents were signs and symbols that could be decoded in the face of modern psychoanalytical understanding, to reveal the inner workings of the author's mind.

The fall down the rabbit hole was a symbol of sexual penetration, the doors surrounding the hallway represented female genitalia. In selecting the little door in preference to the big, Alice (or rather Dodgson in the guise of Alice), was choosing to copulate with a female child instead of an adult woman. Ergo, said Goldschmidt, he was a paedophile. He continued:

It is difficult to hold that his interest in children was inspired by a love of childhood in general, and in any case based on a mental rather than physical attraction, in view of two facts: that he detested little boys...and that his friendships almost invariably ended with the close of childhood. (Phillips, ed., 331)

what i did today.

MARIANNE MUELLER

MARIANNE MUELLER, STATEMENT
in: NY Arts Magazine, June 2009

I am interested in a way of looking at the world, not in an idea. I am not looking for something, I rather find things. I am looking for situations where my innermost is mirrored by the outer world.

To me, the world is physical. There is chair. Like an apparition, it transfixes my gaze, and slowly it turns into an image. Is the chair looking at me? It displays itself to my eye. I walk around the chair. It doesn't talk to me, yet it somehow seduces me. I go back to the starting point and take a picture of the chair. One more time. I am looking at the chair through my camera. The chair requires something else. And then suddenly something happens: It feels as if the camera and the chair interact all on their own. I let them, since I know what my camera needs. I fell somewhat beside myself. This is probably the state that I am looking for when I take pictures, a state of intense dedication and abandonment, of mutual penetration. I want touch.

I am waiting. I am looking at all the images on a roll of film – the chair, mountains, bodies, houses, mishaps, fortuitous chances, souvenirs.

I am working. When I edit my images, I feel de-centered. I don't exist. My hands react to what my eyes see. I am merely a filter. Chronology fulfils a purpose in my work – not in the sense of a linear understanding of time, but because everything closely relates to everything else. It all leads back to the first idea. A roll of film is a secret entity. It is the trace of lived life in all of its primal disorder. Intuitively, I try to grasp it, yet it remains elusive most of the time.

Much later, there is the will to bring the images together, to create relations, correspondences, distinctions and distances. Combining images is a method to stabilise meaning.

"Combine" explores a way of looking at the world that manifests itself once you leave behind the orders of chronology, subject matter, and memory. I depart from my own archive and its structure and start to combine images taken in various contexts. There are mirror effects, doublings, contrasts, a kind of caleidoscopic effect disrupting linear time, its parallels, its sequential logic. An abstract fiction starts to emerge from my visual vocabulary.

It’s all about reduction. "Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is." Wallace Stevens.

Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water-rats;
There we've hid out faery vats,
Full of berries
And the reddest stolen cherries.

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

-yeats