Compulsion

I’ve written before about sitting down at my desk faced with a blank A4 piece of paper, pencil and rubber and no idea what to write about. A common enough feeling for writers of all types. But until I started to look up stuff about compulsion I had never heard of the opposite of this concern.

Hypergraphia is a behavioural condition characterized by the intense desire to write or draw. Hypergraphia is not mere journaling, nor is it the careful crafting of prose. It is a flood, a torrent, a demand from the brain to put words to paper without pause. The writer may fill pages upon pages, notebooks upon notebooks, barely stopping to eat or sleep. The compulsion is not always cathartic; sometimes, it is simply uncontrollable.

Alice W. Flaherty

Alice W. Flaherty, a neurologist and author of 'The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain ', describes it as a condition driven by abnormal activity in the temporal lobe, often seen in epilepsy, mania, or intense grief.

The above was taken from an article in Psychology Today written by S. Fenella Das Gupta Ph.D., MFT. She goes on to explain that:

Hypergraphia exists on a spectrum. At one end, it is a deep, reflective practice, allowing words to give shape to emotions through a rhythmic pulse. For some, grief is turned into poetry, essays, and even books, giving purpose to their pain. In this way, hypergraphia becomes a bridge, not just for the writer, but for others who have suffered in silence. On the other, it is an overwhelming force, entangled with mental health struggles such as bipolar disorder, severe anxiety, and sometimes psychosis.

The article discusses the underlying problems in some depth and I don’t feel able to précis this enough to do the subject justice.

I would like to continue by looking at how Hypergraphia has affected people. For instance:

Hypergraphia was one of the central issues in the 1999 trial of Alvin Ridley for the imprisonment and murder of his wife Virginia Ridley who had died in bed of apparent suffocation and who had remained secluded in her home for 27 years in the small town of Ringgold, Georgia, United States. Her 10,000-page journal provided evidence that she had remained housebound of her own will and was instrumental in the acquittal of her husband.

Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov famously said "The only thing about myself that I consider to be severe enough to warrant psychoanalytic treatment is my compulsion to write ... That means that my idea of a pleasant time is to go up to my attic, sit at my electric typewriter (as I am doing right now), and bang away, watching the words take shape like magic before my eyes." He wrote or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards.

Other artistic figures reported to have been affected by hypergraphia include Fyodor Dostoevsky and Robert Burns. 'Alice in Wonderland ' author Lewis Carroll is also said to have had the condition having written more than 98,000 letters in various formats throughout his life. Some were written backward, in rebus, and in patterns, as with "The Mouse's Tale" in Alice.

Eleanor Alice Burford, whose pen-names included Jean Plaidy, Victoria Holt, Philippa Carr, Eleanor Burford, Elbur Ford, Kathleen Kellow, Anna Percival, and Ellalice Tate, described herself as a compulsive writer. Naomi Mitchison wrote over 90 books of historical and science fiction, travel writing and autobiography, has been described as a compulsive writer.

Compulsion

my Oxford English
defines the word as
an irresistible urge
to behave in a certain way

but what I need is
a word to describe
resistible urges
that I hardly ever resist

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.

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Wonderland: Imagination and Words

When I think of ‘Wonderland’, I plummet down a dark hole with Alice into a curious land of the small, the tall, talking animals, and other strange oddities. This is the world forever etched in Western culture conjured up by the Rev Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll (1832-1898).

Alice and the Pool of Tears (Illustration: John Tenniel)

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland c 1890 W.B. Conkey Company, Chicago

Dodgson was a multi-disciplinary master of his imagination creating an upside down world the Victorians believed in and escaped into. His brain was filled with juxtaposition working in diverse languages of words, numbers and the visual. His wide skill-base included not only that of a writer but also logician, puzzle maker, mathematician, photographer and ordained deacon of the Church of England.

It was, or so I thought, that it was with great thanks to Dodgson, the compounding of the words ‘wonder’ (to feel or express great surprise at something or to ask yourself questions) and ‘land’ (a country/particular area of the earth’s surface) found its way into the dictionary however, this is not the case. The earliest known use of this word seemingly is documented in the late 1700s embedded within the writing of ‘P. Pindar’, whoever that was.

Delving deeper into the ‘Wonderland’ word where Alice is concerned, I’m not convinced the dictionary definitions of a place full of wonderful things or an imaginary place of delicate beauty or magical charm is totally applicable considering the threads of Grimm’s fairy tale-like unsettling scary episodes throughout the two stories Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Incidents include a near drowning incident, claustrophobic conditions, disorientation, a swarming of bats and an irate Queen of Hearts threating death by head chopping. Therefore, perhaps it might be useful to add to the overall ‘Wonderland’ definition a curious place to question elements of surprise where one can get lost, at times marvel at the twisting of a strangely familiar environment and known reality (however one defines this).

Moving on, I began to wonder (see definition of word above) how many editions have been published of the story in question. Well, since November 1865 over 7,500 editions have been published of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland also known as Alice in Wonderland. It has also been translated into nearly two hundred different languages! I have at least four different versions in my own collection including one that was my grandmother’s from the 1890s.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland c 1890
W.B. Conkey Company, Chicago

Where there is a popular story, merchandise is sure to follow and Alice in Wonderland is no different. For well over a century, manufacturers have been coming up with all sorts of products to offer ranging from ceramic figures, Christmas ornaments, dollhouse furniture, teapots, toast racks, stuffed toys and games, the list goes on. I am particularly fond of the Misfitz mix and match card game as pictured below.

Alice in Wonderland Misfitz Card Game 1900-1925 C W Faulkner & Co Ltd (publisher)

V & A Collection, MISC.321-1986

A romp with Alice and her friends is always an adventure. I do hope you’ve enjoyed it. Before we climb out of the rabbit hole and take leave, here’s some poetry and writing from Wonderland and beyond:

Appearing in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Chapter 7 and recited by the Hatter, age ?

Twinkle, twinkle, little bat

Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!

      How I wonder what you’re at!

   Up above the world you fly, 

like a tea-tray in the sky.     

Appearing in The Tower, an elementary school publication, written by Katy Eggleston, age 7

Blackout Poetry November 2023, page 167 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,  by Kate Eggleston-Wirtz, age ?

Thank you for reading.

☺

Sources

Alice-in-wonderland.net, 2023. About the book “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”. https://www.alice-in-wonderland.net/resources/background/alices-adventures-in-wonderland/ Accessed 12 November.
Cambridge Dictionary, 2023. Land. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/land accessed 19 November.
Cambridge Dictionary, 2023. Wonder. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/wonder accessed 19 November.
Carroll, L., 1890. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. W.B. Conkey Company, Chicago.
Harper, D., 2023. Wonderland (n). https://www.etymonline.com/word/wonderland accessed 6 Nov 2023.
Victoria and Albert Museum, 2023. Alice in Wonderland Misfitz. https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O26776/alice-in-wonderland-misfitz-card-game-c-w-faulkner/ Accessed 12 November.

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Wonderland

Oh my fur and whiskers! I thought this was going to be a straight forward look back at the story through memories of my own family’s dog-eared copy of the book. But I made the mistake of checking a fact online and down I went, straight down through multitudes of err...white rabbit holes.

I expect you think you know the story or even just parts of it, I certainly did, but it seems I was completely missing the point or points. These are just four of them.

1 Drugs (slightly odd)
A very popular theory is that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a thinly veiled allegory about drug use. There’s the slowing down of time, expanding and decreasing space, the hookah, the mushrooms, hallucinogenic animals and objects. There is no evidence of Lewis Carroll taking drugs that would induce such a reaction but there certainly is of a post 1960s generation with lyrics such as Jefferson Airplane’s Remember what the Dormouse said / Feed your head, feed your head from ‘White Rabbit’.

2 Spirituality (very odd)
The story can be read as a journey of spiritual awakening, a quest for enlightenment. A way to explore the self without resort to logic.

3 Sex (completely barking)
Some readers have wondered if the book reveals more about Lewis Carroll. Psychoanalytical types love it. Types such as William Empson who pointed out that Alice is “a father in getting down the hole, a foetus at the bottom, and can only be born by becoming a mother and producing her own amniotic fluid”. I think that WE needed his head examined.

4 Maths (off the scale) 

I’m going to leave other interpretations such as Colonisation, Empire, Jesus and Disciples and politicians etc as I want to come to my absolute favourite and for that I need to switch to LC’s real name of Charles Dodgson (pictured below).

The following is taken from Melanie Bayley writing in the New Scientist who is quoting from various mathematicians:

‘The 19th century was a turbulent time for mathematics, with many new and controversial concepts, like imaginary numbers, becoming widely accepted in the mathematical community..... Outgunned in the specialist press, Dodgson took his mathematics to his fiction. Using a technique familiar from Euclid’s proofs, reductio ad absurdum, he picked apart the “semi-logic” of the new abstract mathematics, mocking its weakness by taking these premises to their logical conclusions, with mad results. The outcome is Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland...

Take the chapter “Advice from a caterpillar”, for example. While some have argued that this scene, with its hookah and “magic mushroom”, is about drugs, I believe it’s actually about what Dodgson saw as the absurdity of symbolic algebra, which severed the link between algebra, arithmetic and his beloved geometry.

The first clue may be in the pipe itself: the word “hookah” is, after all, of Arabic origin, like “algebra”, and it is perhaps striking that Augustus De Morgan, the first British mathematician to lay out a consistent set of rules for symbolic algebra, uses the original Arabic translation in Trigonometry and Double Algebra, which was published in 1849. He calls it “al jebr e al mokabala” or “restoration and reduction” – which almost exactly describes Alice’s experience....’

This goes on for a few pages and is wonderful and includes: the base-10 number system, to survive in Wonderland Alice must act like a Euclidean geometer keeping her ratios constant, projective geometry, discovery of quaternions in 1843 and pure time.

In 2015 it was the 150th anniversary of the book’s publication. A lot of people used that fact to write poems. This is one of them, it’s mine and, oh my dear paws, it is awful.

Alice is over there

Said the woman with a white badge
pointing to row upon row of Wonderland
where some books were short and fat
some long and thin
some looked heavy some looked fun
and one was all of those things

“This isn’t right,” exclaimed the Customer
“There’s only one Alice”

“That is not so” said Alice in a pink dress
“She’s correct” said Alice in a hat
which set off a deafening chorus
of girls’ voices that right had been left
but they were not, absolutely not,
some kind of cheap copy
except for a slim volume on the top shelf
who proudly bristled that that’s exactly what she was
until an old hardback demanded SILENCE then exclaimed
“Do not choose them, I am the original Alice,
these are copywrongs,
so you may pick me as it is my anniversary”
which caused a huge fluttering

“That’s quite enough, Sir,” said the Assistant firmly
“we’ve all been Alice since 1907, so please leave.”

She fussed around the shelves calming them all down
muttering to herself about consequences
before disappearing down a corridor marked
To Science and Natural History.

Thanks for reading, Terry Q

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Alice's Adventures in Sunderland

Today - Boxing Day - is traditionally the date on which pantomimes (fun for all the family) commence. The convention doesn't strictly apply anymore, it seems. Nonetheless, in honour of that fine tradition, a little theatrical weirdness is in order, don't you think?  It's only my second attempt at pastiche; Lewis Carroll the innocent victim this time. And so, to mark this season of excess and in an attempt to at least touch on the theme of Family Gathering, your Saturday Blogger is pleased to offer you a short excerpt from Alice's Adventures in Sunderland. I've tried to sprinkle it with a patina of rusty Georgian Wearside grime and part of it is based loosely on a dream I had when I was a child. Enjoy...

Chapter 1: Down The Worm Hole
Alice was getting very tired of being her father's little assistant at the Bank, of having nothing to do but sit on a stool swinging her legs without her stays making a noise in this stifling temple of money. "What use am I here," thought Alice, "without transactions to perform or conversations to enjoy? Daughters-to-work days are so over-rated."

As she was pondering in her mind (as well as she could, for she was both young, lazy and a little naive) if it might not be worth her while trying to sneak out unnoticed, all of a sudden a white-haired rabbi with pink-rimmed eyes loomed close and spoke distinctly in her direction: "When seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea."

"I beg your pardon Sir," said Alice, frowning most politely. "Did you speak to me?" The rabbi merely smiled enigmatically and beckoned to Alice to follow as he moved swiftly to the door. She glanced at her father and at his row of obediently industrious tellers and clerks. No one was paying her the slightest attention. In another moment, burning with curiosity, down slipped Alice from her stool and headed after the disappearing rabbi, never once considering the wisdom of her action.

Outside on Sea Road, Alice looked left in the direction of the town and right in the direction of the derricks and wharves for any sign of the white-haired rabbi. A roar from the throats of twenty-thousand football fans floated up the street from Roker Park. Unperturbed, she kept scanning until she spotted the rabbi's retreating back and hurried after him. Eventually he turned and disappeared through the doorway of a tavern. Alice stood hesitating outside The Lambton Worm, for she knew that public houses were no places for young girls. One second she was contemplating the situation, the very next she found herself falling through a trap-door in the pavement and down what seemed to be a very long and dirty chute. "Oh my goodness," she thought as down, down, down she fell.

Presently she began to wonder "Might I fall right through to the centre of the world at this rate?" But hardly had she begun to contemplate such a possibility when suddenly crash! bump! She  came to rest upon a heap of coal sacks and feathers. Alice was shaken though not a bit hurt and scrambled to her feet in a trice. She coughed, sneezed and looked around. As her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom she became aware of many other pairs of eyes regarding her intently, the eyes of birds of all shapes and sizes.

 

They gathered round her, but not in a menacing way and the tallest of them, an emu, addressed her on their behalf. "We have been waiting for you pet," it said. "We have been waiting a long time. Tell us the answer if you please." "I would gladly do so, if only I knew the question," Alice replied, for it was in her nature to be helpful if she could. "However, I am not your pet." "That is merely a term of endearment," explained the dodo. "We have been very patient," added the pelican, "for so long now. Do please tell us something at least."

 

Alice considered this entreaty. She looked at their expectant faces, the emu, dodo, pelican, penguin, flamingo, ibis, albatross, gannet, seagull. She was quietly congratulating herself on recognising so many different species when it came to her. She held the emu firmly but gently by its long neck and said gravely: "When seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea."

 

At once there was a great squawking of excitement among the family of birds and a sudden hopping and flapping. "Of course. We should have realised," they cried to each other as they rose into the air as one. "Sardines. Thank you, thank you for these words of wisdom." And with much beating of their wings, every single one flew straight through the solid ceiling and was gone. "But how is that possible?" wondered Alice, coughing because of the coal dust and feathers that swirled around her. "This is a very curious matter indeed." 

 

As the dust cleared, she noticed coal piled up in one corner, beer barrels in another and a three-legged glass table standing in the middle of the room. On the table was a tray containing three brown bottles and a bottle-opener. Round each bottle was pasted a paper label with the words "VAUX - Double Maxim for Double Strength" in striking calligraphy. "Nice graphics", remarked Alice, as she prised the top off the first bottle and drank the contents to help wash away some of the dust in her throat. The contents of the second bottle soon followed those of the first, and the third followed the second, by which time Alice had no cough left and was feeling decidedly more cheerful and ready to look for the rabbi or some way out of the Lambton Worm hole. 

 

 

At that moment, a door that she hadn't noticed before swung open and in walked her mother and her sister attired for the night and carrying a candle before them, followed by a large walrus that bore a striking resemblance to her father. "Oh my, how late it's getting," her mother exclaimed to her sister as they passed before her, seemingly unaware of Alice's presence. The walrus, however, clearly saw her for it bore down on her in a threatening manner, wobbling horribly as it advanced. Alice began to hasten after her mother and sister, but her mother, on reaching the far wall, pulled back a velvet curtain revealing another door, opened it, ushered her sister through and then turned to Alice. "We are retiring to bed now, Alice, but you are a naughty girl and so must remain here below." Before Alice could protest, the pair were through the doorway, the door was shut firmly in her face and she heard the key turning in the lock.

 

Quickly she skirted the walls, the coal and the barrels, back to the opposite side of the room but the door through which her family had entered was nowhere to be found. The walrus was definitely still there, though, and began to chase after Alice. Three times round the cellar it pursued her, growling horribly, and a sense of panic mounted in the girl. Finally, she jumped up onto the glass-topped table, scattering the empty bottles in every direction, and stood there petrified as the walrus continued its lumbering circuit of the table, wheezing and wobbling as it propelled its quivering bulk and never once taking its eyes off her. "This might be the end of me," said Alice to herself, but in this apprehension she was mistaken, for suddenly the walrus exploded, its skin splitting apart and all of its yellow blubber pouring out like so much rancid blancmange across the floor. Alice screamed and then, poor little thing, began to cry.

 

When she finally regained her composure (as well as she could, for she was both young, timid and a little traumatised), Alice gazed down at the table she was standing on and between her feet, through its glass top, espied a mirror on the shelf beneath. She climbed down carefully, for the table and floor were by now both very slippery, and knelt the better to see that the mirror had the words "TASTE ME" beautifully spelled out on its surface in white powder. "Well, I'll try anything once," said Alice, whose recent experience had left her feeling somewhat in need of further restoration.

She tasted a little bit of the powder. It was sharp and bitter on her tongue and anxiously she said to herself "What's up?" But soon her eyes began to glitter, her toes and fingers to tingle and finding the sensation very agreeable, she tried some more. Alice had so got into the habit of expecting out-of-the-ordinary things to happen today, so wasn't surprised by the leaden feeling spreading through her limbs and the sensation of being pinned to the floor. "What a curious ceiling", she exclaimed, staring up at a painting of an enormous grinning black cat wearing a red-and-white football scarf sitting on the branch of a tree. As she stared, the cat winked and began to vanish quite slowly, beginning with the tip of its tail and ending with its grin, which lingered for some moments after the rest of the animal had gone - leaving just a striped scarf dangling from a branch.

In the near distance, the Seasiders silenced the Roker roar: Sunderland 2 Blackpool 4 - Hampson (twice), Quinn and Upton scored.

Quiet descended on this deepest cellar of the Lambton Worm as the afternoon wore off. So Alice considered her situation (as well as she could, for she was both tipsy and hallucinating) and very soon she had licked up every trace of the sparkling powder.

To be continued (one day, maybe...)

Thanks for reading. I wish you a Happy New Year, S ;-)

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Editing the Great Writers

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OED OD - OCD?

When this theme arose last year, I imagined a dessert island.  It was a good place to get stranded.  There was custard and, legend has it, rhubarb crumble.  This year I am feeling, sadly, a little less pudding.  My partner in cake is no longer around and I'm off my tea loaf.  But enough of my soggy semolina...

I would want only one title with me on the desert island.  Currently it runs to 20 volumes, contains 22,000 pages, and weighs 140lbs.  Behold, the mighty tome which is the Oxford English Dictionary!

Blackpool Library Service has signed up to give every one of its members online access to the OED online and I feel that this fact should be advertised more often.  For me, it is worth joining the library for this feature alone.  Hours and days can be happily resigned to history while dallying among nykins (sweethearts) and babbarts (hares), kichels (small cakes (damn, they snuck in again)) and stushies (disturbances).  It's like getting to know loads of interesting people without having to feign an interest in their preoccupation with cake...

Behind every word is the story of its origin (as far as it can reasonably be traced) and a selection of uses.  To support the historical context and usage, there are excerpts from diary entries and newspaper clippings, novels, novellas and scientific journals.

For a poet, what more could you possibly need to while away your remaining days?  To take a random example, below is the partial entry for a single word, nonced into life by the exquisite Charles Dodgson:

nyctograph, n.

Pronunciation:  Brit. /ˈnɪktə(ʊ)ɡrɑːf/ 

A device invented by Charles Dodgson (‘Lewis Carroll’) with which a person can record ideas (esp. those remaining after sleep) at night in bed without fully waking up.

1891   ‘L. Carroll’ Diary 24 Oct. (1953) II. xiv. 486   Today [sc. 24 Sept.] I conceived the idea of having a series of squares, cut out in card, and devising an alphabet, of which each letter could be made of lines along the edges of the squares, and dots at the corners... I shall call it ‘The Typhlograph’. (24/10/91. Instead of ‘typhlograph’ I have adopted ‘Nyctograph’ at the suggestion of Warner).


And here is what I make of it:

Nyctograph

Nyct slips stars behind my peepers
Locks them under heavy lashes 
If I write before I wake
Those stars quick Nyct is sure to take

Straight lines to fish
Round spots for bait
Square box to store
Starlight I'll make.

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Favourite Poems

The arrival of October brings with it a familiar set of emotions for me as a writer. I remember the cold night nearly two years ago, when a quiet Lara spent an evening nudging me in an audacious attempt to flirt. I also remember being hooked on the idea of poetry, properly hooked.

That memorable evening was, I have to say, all thanks to WordPool. I have tried to be involved with this more than once, offered up suggestions and been conveniently shelved twice. I’ll brush over any positive mentions of Blackpool Council then- forget them, fools, it can’t be done here!

That though, is exactly what gets my goat. I always liked poetry. I never thought I would write it. It was this group, or an association with it, that got me in that night. I remember turning up at The Brick Theatre, reading some drivel I’d written to respond to ‘A Favourite Poem’ and going on to the Grand later. A great day, looking back.

That was National Poetry Day, 2009. I remember responding to something from Felix Dennis’ Homeless in My Heart (a book primarily bought for the wonderful pictures that accompany the writing), having a stab at responding to Heaney’s Digging (everyone’s favourite poem from my class at school- it was taught really well) and, later in the week, getting really drunk and attempting a response to Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky, complete with swishing sword actions and arm waving.

They were my favourite poems back then. They are still some of my favourites now, amongst a bookshelf of others, though thinking on, I don’t recall reading these three gems for a well over a year. I hear them all the time- their rhythmic lines etched into my head somewhere down the line- and for that, I love poetry.

I could never recite a few lines of my favourite novels for someone. Ask about a bit of poetry though and I’m sure something would pop into my head. I can keep my favourite poems with me wherever I go and have even found myself acting in their advice before now (‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ coming to mind more than once in the company of women).

Really though, it is always an emotional hook that drags me in. It is not always a masterpiece, not always a snappy rhyme and not always a name I’d previously heard. I like the way you can be hooked on a moment though- and that the thought will stay with you for hours. If I had to name something as an absolute favourite- the most memorable poem, the one that made me cry, the one I stumbled across in an Anthology... Ian McMillan’s wonderful response to William Carlos Williams’ ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’. Have a read of this, I can see no better ending.

The Green Wheelbarrow (scroll down a little)

Thanks for reading, S.

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