Been thinkin’ about…Jabberwock fog

The February rain came down, washing away the sky, washing down the dark. Fog rose in the hollers and crept up the mountains, cold wet breeze whispering in the oak trees, chill blanket on the rock bluffs dark and black with rain. Lonely piles of snow moldered. The roads slick. A fitful afternoon between the wars of winter and green. New things come painfully. Nothing of worth is easy in this ancient thing we call time and space.

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

      Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

      And the mome raths outgrabe.

Another February, another cold fog and somber rain and piles of wasted snow. Another strange woods, dark in the twilight, where I was left pondering the weirdness of Lewis Carroll’s poem. Nonsense words in a no-nonsense world, just a whole month after I had lost a family member and the summer possibilities of a previous lifetime had weathered away in a too-bright, too-loud world overcast by grief. I was just a kid then, in hindsight. That was 27 years ago. The memories churn weirdly, an overcast and overhanging sky then too, and flashes —a kaleidoscope of colors, mostly blues and greens and reds — of rude soulless students and too-loud instructors and a desperate sense that I needed to be somewhere but I knew not where.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son! 

      The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! 

Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun 

      The frumious Bandersnatch!”

I was assigned the poem by my arts instructor, a harebrained faculty member in tweed who kept changing the rules every time she lost sight of the curriculum. “Just make something,” was the directive, hands waving vaguely. The lesson was deconstructionist — there had been no lesson on how to use the software and now some 20 students were sitting in a darkened computer lab, staring at a program we had never used. The use of the poem Jabberwocky was starting to make more sense by the minute.

“He took his vorpal sword in hand; 

      Long time the manxome foe he sought— 

So rested he by the Tumtum tree 

      And stood awhile in thought.”

I’ve always done my best thinking out-of-doors and the colder the wind the better. Deep in the twilight woods, the twisting, looping, curling roots and vines and branches were stark and black against the snow. Back in the warmth, pencil to paper, tendrils and curves took shape, a dark wood, a serpentine beast all of fog and fear, dead leaves framing the edges. The next afternoon I took my mom’s film camera down to the burn barrel and photographed the kitchen trash as it was burning.

A week later, the photographs came back from the drug store developer and I scanned in the fire, using flames as the Jabberwocky’s eyes. My art instructor was nonplussed, mostly too busy taking a smoke break. 

"And, as in uffish thought he stood,

      The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,

Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,

      And burbled as it came!"

I made it through the class, graduating as always with an A. The next year I would learn Photoshop for real from a much better instructor (my department chair) and later go on to teach at that particular institution for six years, ever-mindful that students deserve a teacher who is actually competent. And never forgetting that Jabberwocky — my Jabberwocky — in the cold February rain. Real light would slowly come back into my world, fitfully as it always does after great loss. My then-world’s first instructions came hard — life was not fair, nor would it be easy, especially for someone overly gifted in simply being sensitive. Dragons, it would prove, are everywhere.

"One, two! One, two! And through and through 

      The vorpal blade went snicker-snack! 

He left it dead, and with its head 

      He went galumphing back."

The February rain came down, washing away the sky, washing down the dark. Another job, another road, another season, markers like miles, now years past. Cynicism is a dirty word. Something of that lonely boyish young man still exists, boots in the moldering snow, eyes seeing magic in the dark. And a faint, strong light remains, not unlike the fairy lights someone in my family once saw in the boxelder groves at night. Not unlike the papery lanterns of yellow maples leaves whispering on the steep mountainside above, crumpled, battered and never ending.