Handing Round The Refreshments
Out of sorts this morning, a disoriented feeling, and I hardly know how to begin writing. A dream played in my mind just before waking this morning. I was on the verge of being questioned, asked to give evidence about a stolen snowmobile. Did I have a role in the hijacking of the machine, in what happened afterward… The investigator was pleasant enough, though my instinct told me his demeanor veiled malign intentions. I was waking from the dream and I realized that I had grease residue from the stolen machine on my hands, enough to tie me to the “crime.” Grease, difficult to remove with soap and water! I woke to morning light.
Where do dreams originate? This dream — was it ignited by the murder of six people yesterday at the private school in Nashville, Tennessee? The shooter, female, was armed with two AR-15 assault rifles, a semi auto handgun. She was shot dead by responding police. She was a former student at the Christian private school.
This was no dream. The dimensions of the event are Kafkaesque: 1) three and three, dead nine year old children and adults, 2) a Christian institution, 3) weapons conceived for war, and 4) a troubled woman who was suicidal. No inchoate, on the cusp-of-consciousness vision this, — but the material facticity of dead bodies and funerals to plan…
I returned to Lewis Carroll’s The Adventures of Alice In Wonderland, chapter XI entitled, Who Stole the Tarts? In Wonderland theft of the royal tarts is a capital crime.
‘That’s the judge,’ [Alice] said to herself, ‘because of his great wig.’
The judge, by the way, was the King; and as he wore his crown over the wig, (look at the frontispiece if you want to see how he did it,) he did not look at all comfortable, and it was certainly not becoming…
‘Herald, read the accusation!’ said the King.
On this the White Rabbit blew three blasts on the trumpet, and then unrolled the parchment scroll, and read as follows:—
‘The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts,
All on a summer day:
The Knave of Hearts, he stole those tarts,
And took them quite away!’
‘Consider your verdict,’ the King said to the jury.
‘Not yet, not yet!’ the Rabbit hastily interrupted. ‘There’s a great deal to come before that!’…
Official response to the Nashville mass shooting will follow a ritual pattern: customary hand-wringing, a wooden appeal to Congress to-do-more, thoughts and prayers condolences. Like before, — nothing changes.
Will a school in your neighborhood be the next bloody scene? There’s a great deal to come!
Pass the tarts…
