Clisby Carr

...the KA of Alice Liddell Clisby Carr

It so happened that, on no particular day, the KA of a particular child-friend of Charles Dodgson, alias Lewis Carroll, escaped from the psyche-and-person of Alice Liddell, the second of three sisters, as helter-skelter she skedaddled from the nursery in order to become her own person. However, in that moment when this young girl fled her nursery, she had somehow-and-curiously exorcised the KA of Lewis Carroll's 'Alice' - which is, the immortal part of every fairy-creature. And once that Ka-of-Alice had been set free, it began to make its own mischief in this world; for whenever this KA enters someone's psyche, it also takes possession of the body - in exactly the same way as an unquiet spirit possesses the medium during a séance. One answer to the question as to why my story is 'a satire of sorts' is that its tangled tale presents a series of ironic perspectives: it begins as a conventional narrative and ends with a folder of clinical notes by an educational therapist - to which is appended the libretto for an unperformed, Victorian operetta. One such an underpinning irony is that the narrator (a self-obsessed academic) fails to register what is happening to himself when, by focusing exclusively upon the Nonsense of Lewis Carroll's Alice, he further-deconstructs his own fragile psyche; and by fixating on the paradox of adolescence (in adults), he experiences a form of psychological displacement. In short, this fiction is nothing other than a celebration of the profound absurdity of our common Being. Such a narrative is dramatic, subverting conventional expectations and propounding its sophisticated stupidities, while at the same time it constructs, through a tangle of correspondences and associations, the impossible configuration of a Piranesi prison or the illogical complexity of a drawing by Escher.