“You're lost little girl / You're lost Tell me who / Are you?”
The Doors
I would say, instead, that this Wonderland-ish book is an Arcane adventure per se, welcoming misteries and calling us to follow multiple and invisible Alices, daring us to enter in a voyage trough one impossible land, finding an improbable crew, looking for an inconceivable creature. Let’s pretend that these pages are like a sequence of doors, like the ones that in her victorian dream, Alice did not manage to open. As another famous contemporary strange girl, Emily, I would say, it is not for those who want to belong, instead, an invitation to be lost.
In its entrance portal, the cover, we can see though the open frame of an nonexistent mirror, where a sibilin hostess, asks us for the keys and magical words. Arcane symbols, alchemy, tarot, auxiliar animals, magical objects, surrealist and pop surrealist allies, desires and disguises dive into lucid dreams. The hostess has black lips and her blood flows floating red rose petals. She has a white deadly skin calling to an endless uncanny fairy tale, that asks for all who enter, to keep, instead of loose, our hopes in curiouser and curiouser games. The fall, the looking glass frames, the impossible doors and other enigma call us to pronunce the unspoken words in the rhythm of a neverending dream. A“Secret garden”, “Her tears are poison”, a “Trapped heart”, a “Little madness” and a “Lost girl” name some of the invitations each page reveals to the brave and adventurous reader.
In each door, or card in this arcane game, we can enlist the help of a sequence of talismans and enigmatic keys. Operating with colors ressembling the alchemycal labor, the cover invites us to a journey within. Arcane, here, also opens connections with the major arcana of tarot and the ancient paths of iniciatic travels and rites of passage. Here and there the images are filled with hidden symbolism. In tarot each card represents a "mystery”, a knowledge which can only be attained through "initiation”, as the opening to a new experience, a rebirth. It follows that each card tarot brings a wisdom to be awake into a knowledge that becomes a truth of our heart.
Impossible or metamorphic bodies are constantly defied in challenging postures. Their doll like quality are in transit between the animate and the inanimate, conscious and unconscious, in a continuous transformation driven by the coupling of life and death. Like the literary Alice who learns who to balance the bites of her two sides of mushroom, the creatures of Natalie Shau are in a permanent duel between extemes: prison and freedom, eroticism and innoncence, purity and danger, delicacy and violence, joy and terror, excitment and melancholy, sorrow and passion, delight and nightmare, love and the powers of darkness. This struggle is also evient in the permanent dilemma between the birds and the cages, the locked room and the magical garden, bloody and metamorphic creatures, in the dynamics of successful transfomations and unfulfiled desires.
It also sugests affinities with alchemy’s opus in its quests for the Elixir of Long Life and the Philosopher's Stone, a mystical substance. The transmutation of base metals into gold, was directly linked to a metaphor of spiritual grow guided by hermetic principles. It also guides the individuation path in Jungian terms. In Lost in Wonderland the search of transformation and rebirth is also present in symbolisms and the game of colors. White, red and black make reference to three stages of alchemical labor and its spiritual significance. Nigredo (blackness) is the stage in which the matter is dissolved and putrefied. Albedo (whiteness) is the White operation, the stage in which the substance is purified. Rubedo, (redness) as the final stage, in the culmination of the art or the alchemical marriage.
In parallel, along the journey in this book we met sourceress women with their auxiliar animals, evoking totemic forces, while blue, white and red flowers echoes magical transformations. Symbols of death and rebirth flies with uncanny butterflies. Among her priestesses, fairy tale heroins and dreamers we are invited to find our Alices, in a labyrinth of projections or a map for the forest where things have no names. But here we can follow another path in this labirynth calling Lucy and Mina in Copolla’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula where white, red an black plays with boundaries between life and death, as blue and red, with light, darkness and desire.
This journey also drinks in the source of surrealist heritage, when Alice was captured from the nursery room to the forest of symbols, into the realm of metamorphosis and the oneiric power of unlimited becoming. Surrealist Alice is not just a child, she stages a modern myth, incarnating a girl who travels deep worlds and seems to move between dream and awaken states. Alice became a symbol that mixed freely ancient quests and bestiary and contemporary rebirths. Alice becomes a source of effervescent possibilities. Surrealist muses move between the child and the old woman and her sexual mysteries, their transit through hidden worlds. The fact is that surrealism showed how Alice could be transformed and how many other stories live within a story, if not loyalty or seek a return to the original, but a commitment to what we create from it. Alice fertilizes worlds, proliferates travels, travels between new realities, open to become at every moment. Surrealism showed how art gives way to a movement where the imagination travels through marvellous becomings. Not what Alice was, but what can be.
The constant presence of animals in Alice inWonderland and her meetings with a rabbit, cat, hare, dormouse, dog, catterpillar, rat, Dodo, monkey, goose, beaver, owl, crab, birds, eagle, lory, lizard, frog, fish, pig, flamingo, ostriche, turtle, griffon, lobster, squirrel, duckbill, ferret. (found on Tenniel’s pictures – should I concentrate in the main ones present on the text?). This lost wonderland I have in nap is fulfilled by unspoken animals, with possible magical and shamanic proprieties, wich embody archetypes, or symbolic manifestation of interior forces and energies. This inventory of animals can also be associated with the 4 elements if we decide to follow this path. In this book they are in the number of 22, like the major arcana in tarot. They are: Flamingo, rabbit, butterflies, cat, sheep, dog, fish, deer, octopus, crow, eagle, birds, parrot, pigeon, horse, wolf, bear, elephant, beatle, spider, swan, snake.
Nathalie Shau
The magic objects present in the whole book are also in number of 22 freely interconected with Alice and her journeys in multiple arts. Some of them became a contemporary vocabulary avaiable nawadays for new stories, journeys, dreams and pictures in one endless conversation with the literature and its mise abyme of kaleidoscopic reinventions. Follows a list of found objects in this book: Empty Frames, mirror, clock, doors, cup, teapot, masks, candle, flowers, keys, keyhole, furniture, doll, toys, cake, snow globe, origami swans, chandeliers, bell jar, religious icons, Jewelry and pearls. Like peaces in one dreamy board, they can answer our questions in one improbable oracle.
When Alice spotted the most beautiful garden ever seen trough the magic little door she devoted her journey in persuing her quest. This garden has a connection with the Temenos, a sacred space that Jung related to the magic circle where mental alchemical operations can take place and in which an encounter with the unconscious can happen and safely be brought into the light of consciousness. But when Alice asked the Cheshire Cat how to get out of wonderland, the cat answered that all depended on where she was going. "It does not matter much where," said Alice. I recognize that the first time I read the book, long back in my childwood, I wandered: Why Alice answered that since she repeated few times that she was looking for a plan to get into the garden? Puzzles dive into myself like russian dolls. To read, to travel and to live: the art to loose to find oneself. Playing a puzzle of to be or not, Alice finds the transformation is the only constant. Who is Alice for you? Asks this book.
where magic and insanity sleep together.
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