Under

I just wanted to note the recurrence of Under, as a capitalized name for a particular place or condition.

First, the Men at Work song "Down Under" came up in "Tim knows" (February 17) and "To the Faithful Departed" (March 6). The original song of course refers to Australia, but these posts refer to how it has recently been appropriated for meme purposes and made to refer to Agartha, the underground home of the King of the World, as described in Ossendowski's Beasts, Men, and Gods. This of course relates to "Ar-Pharazon the King," who lies "buried under falling hills . . . in the Caves of the Forgotten." In "We must maintain a warlike atmosphere in Antarctica" (March 12), I note that "Antarctica is also the ultimate 'Down Under,' even more so than Australia."

Near the end of The Strange Fascinations of Noah Hypnotik (spoiler!), we learn that during most of the story Noah has been living in a Matrix-style virtual reality which he thinks is real, while at the same time his friend Alan has been in a coma. Both of these conditions are referred to by Noah as "Under." Plato's Allegory of the Cave is also repeatedly referenced, for a further link to the Caves of the Forgotten. After returning to the real world, Noah visits the still comatose Alan in the ICU and tells him where he's been:

I give Alan the Concise History of my time Under, and when I'm done, I kiss his motionless hand . . . for as long as I'd been Under, he'd been Under too.

To find that quote, I word-searched my digital copy of Noah Hypnotik (I read it in hard copy but also downloaded an epub for searchability) for the word under and scrolled down to the end of the long list of hits. I found what I was looking for near the end, but here's the very last occurrence of under in the book:

I let the snow land where it may and wonder at the longevity of its history: its lakes, oceans, and pools; its cave rivers; its underground civilizations.

The sentence is about snow, linking it to some degree to the Antarctic, but it refers to both caves and for some reason to "underground civilizations," suggesting Agartha.

Finally, I have been reading Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's The Story of Alice, a biography of Lewis Carroll, his muse, and his books. The first manuscript version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was titled Alice's Adventures Under Ground. Douglas-Fairhurst notes the non-standard spelling -- "the word Underground having been tunnelled into to become Under Ground" -- which serves to make Under a stand-alone capitalized word, in keeping with our theme. The author also quotes some pre-Alice uses of the word wonderland, one of which ties wonder to under:

Down into wonderland --

Down to the under-land --

Go, oh go!

Down into wonderland go!

Yesterday's post "Just-ice and Al-ice" ties Wonderland to the Antarctic, noting that the Alice books were taken there by Captain Scott, so there's a tie to that other "Down Under." It's also worth noting that the broad narrative structure of Noah Hypnotik matches that of Alice, with the main character not realizing until he "wakes up" near the end that the whole story has taken place in an unreal dream-world.

"The secret rules of Wonderland," also posted yesterday, includes three quotes from The Story of Alice. In the first of these, I quoted only part of the sentence. Here is the complete sentence, coming just after a mention of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams:

The unconscious turned out to be another version of Wonderland -- a place that gave the impression of being chaotically lawless, while secretly working according to its own rules.

Here is the reason Freud gives, in The Question of Lay Analysis, for abandoning his earlier term "subconscious" (Unterbewusstsein) in favor of "unconscious" (Unbewusstsein):

If someone talks of subconsciousness, I cannot tell whether he means the term topographically – to indicate something lying in the mind beneath consciousness – or qualitatively – to indicate another consciousness, a subterranean one, as it were. He is probably not clear about any of it. The only trustworthy antithesis is between conscious and unconscious.

So again we have the idea of an underground world.

This next bit is not directly related to the Under theme, but I'm including it here because it doesn't quite merit a post of its own. This afternoon I read in The Story of Alice of how the Alice books had influenced the work of Evelyn Waugh. Describing the plot of Waugh's Decline and Fall, Douglas-Fairhurt writes:

Sent to the red-light district of Marseilles, he arrives at a brothel called Chez Alice, and when he ends up in prison a former teacher from the school working there as a chaplain meets a grisly death by being decapitated by a religious maniac.

What is synchronistically notable here is the juxtaposition of prostitution, the name Alice, and a former teacher. In the comments on "Book of Mormon names and Pi Days" (May 8), Laeth mentions the novel he is currently writing, saying that it "shares characters with Sketches of Alice" and that "adolescent prostitution is mentioned in two of the chapters." The title character in Sketches of Alice is the main character's former history teacher.