It is the White Rabbit who leads Alice down the rabbit hole. It is he who woke her up from her daze since the hot day had made her sleepy.
By ignoring the reality of our existence we are feigning sleep while awake and carrying on with life as if nothing is happening. The death toll from devastating flooding in Libya's eastern coastal city of Derna has risen to 11,3000, according to a recent UN report.
Fires are causing people to have breathing and lung problems. Hurricanes are devastating whole islands, like Hawaii and coastal shores. And yet we sleep, allowing billionaires to convince us that as long as their profits are intact we will be okay.
Capitalism, that may have served us well in the beginning is now a rapacious greedy entity eating our very life. We have devastated Nature to the max and Nature is rebelling.
It is the White Rabbit which Alice runs after and searches for endlessly in Wonderland, a symbol of her quest for knowledge. Just when things seem rather desperate the rabbit appears yet again, and Alice drives on through.
Symbolically this means we need to overthrow the warm fuzzy mantle of what was comfortable and face life head-on, we need to dance and shout and act MAD to move the powers-at-be to change their course before it is too late.
Artists more than ever need to be vigilant and vocal. No longer preoccupied with just abstract aesthetic values but speak and shout on behalf of the world and life.
Lewis Carroll constantly asserts the essence of nothingness: ‘If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?’
Yes the other side of earthly existence exists like a two faced coin, but we won’t really learn of it until we are dead. Nothingness awaits, but until then, we have a duty to fight for the survival of the earth, for the sake of those humans yet to come.