Tick Tock, Imagination, Art and the Clock

As this new year begins, we find ourselves reflecting on what has come to an end in 2024. With acknowledgement of closure comes a fresh possibility to turn over a new leaf and change habitual thoughts, feelings and actions, life situations, possibilities. The start of a new year is a time of mutually opposed contradiction and interconnection as the end of things as they were turns into the beginning of new things which brings forward new endings which open doors, closing others. As we turn the page from what has been, we may have tentative ideas or solid plans of striding into transformation; and, or, we may be anticipating repetition, stagnation, or retraction as the things in our lives (opportunities, people and actions) stagnate or shrink in response to time’s progression.

Whether wonder, boldness, iteration or shrinking colour your response to the march forward, I’d like you to come with me and take a trip back in time, and remember one of literature’s most famous and loved characters who taught us to approach life with healthy curiosity and resilient imagination, the starting point for all learning and a creative life.

Can you remember?…

Lewis Carroll’s (1865) protagonist is Alice, a young English girl in a blue dress who daydreams by a riverbank. I imagine now, as I did when I first encountered her on the page that she has rosy cheeks and her limbs are relaxed by the sun, her long hair shines likes golden flax and is warm to the touch. Mellowed by the comfort of a summer’s day, distant birdsong and her sisters’ conversation, she drifts off to an imaginal other world- Wonderland. In this other place, she is soon greeted by a talking White Rabbit who announces he is very, very late for a very important but mysterious date. After urgent checking of his fob watch, and making a song and dance about how behind time he is, he darts down the rabbit hole to hurry to his appointment. Alice is intrigued by this talking White Rabbit and having plenty of childlike innocence to fuel her wonder, she follows her curiosity down the rabbit hole trying to catch him.

“The hurrier I go, the behinder I get.”- the White Rabbit, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Alice, the curious and persistent girl who dreams her way into Wonderland, follows the harried and fob-watch checking White Rabbit into an unknown burrow as he rushes off to meet his commitments. The new furry acquaintance invites Alice to follow him down the rabbit hole with the hastening encouragement of “hurry, hurry! I’m late!”. Alice does follow quickly and her first steps inside the hole are suddenly met with no ground on which to place her feet… she begins to fall, gravity taking her down, deep down into a strange and temporally detached place in which order and logical rules no longer structure reality.
 
Alice is young in years, still a child, not yet living under the knowledge of adult pressures. She is innocent to the worry the arrow of time conjures as it relentlessly tugs the present moment into the future, making demands as it shoots forward. The adult’s paradoxical knowledge of what is not, but may be (in time), calls on us to keep pace through action in the world to match the needs of the day and the imagined days after that. As adults, we chase the white tail of the darting, hurrying clock bearer, hoping to catch the little cottontail and secure him in our grasp, but the White Rabbit, like the arrow dashes endlessly forward, always just out of our reach. As we age, we leave the timeless innocence of our childhoods, and we learn to edge out of the carefree worlds of our imagination as we develop acute sensitivity to self and other in adolescence. As time passes, we settle in to the rational and responsible world of adult care and set agendas.

According to psychoanalyst Erik Erikson (1994) adolescence is a time of developing healthy self-awareness, a sense of who we are and a budding autonomy. Growing a social consciousness, we dream to live life on our own terms with our friend’s approval, of course. This drive to liberation from familial patterns and constraints carries us forward in our growth until somewhere between early adulthood and middle age we develop the most ordinary knowledge that to be free and live as we might choose, means that we must take the responsibility of choosing the tracks of who we will be and what kind of life we will live. We discover with delight and regret the consequences of our actions and non-action calling us to further question: what will I do with my time? This confrontation of the limits and affordance of our apparent existence is what German philosopher Heidegger (1927) called “Dasein”; an awareness of our own finite portion of being, living and inevitable passing that is interconnected and embedded in relationship to others and the world. This embedded-ness provides the contexts in which our living and dying take place, they contribute fundamentally to who we are. So, we cannot understand ourselves and what it means to be without understanding our active engagement with the world outside of us. Heidegger says that we make choices about what we perceive is significant in the world, leading us to make sense of what has meaning and what is meaninglessness. The meaning we create then shapes our concern for self and the world. Children have not yet encountered the responsibility of choice, care, and self consciousness due to time but are, as long as their needs are being sufficiently met, happily innocent of the larger concerns of personal responsibility in respect of past, present and future and how these create our existence. They are rightly dependent on adults to care for their wellbeing until the time comes for them to take up their own reasons for care and answer the demands life makes on their time, in exchange for developing personal meaning.

As adults, we often think we are time poor while we spend our time on what we think is important, which leads to hurrying and if we can, trying to pause the clock. We suffer a background fear of getting behind, being left behind, being too old, over the hill, never arriving, never hitting the target, missing the cue. We learn that our time and labour in the economic market can be exchanged for financial value which is often retold as the maxim “time is money”. We are driven to be focused, productive, efficient and we are out of touch with a healthy imagination that is free of time’s concerns and worries. A healthy imagination can conjure images of positive selfhood, accurate understanding of others and possibilities for growth. Hope. Instead, our imaginations repeatedly rehearse the same unwanted scenario in our imagination, whether real or false. Our imagination when it is unhealthy, believes we are our past. This belief in the past creates our sense of self in the present and influences the future recreating itself in its own image.

The negativity bias (Hanson, 2024) in the human mind is as perplexing as it is frustrating. Who would consciously choose to rehearse their past negative emotions and worst ideas about themself and the world? From an evolutionary perspective, taking in and focussing on the bad in our inner reality and the outer world and minimising and ignoring the good means that we are more alert to what we don’t want. The negative bias in our thinking steers us to focus imaginatively on bad feelings in the present from moments in the past, so we can learn quickly from negative experiences, protecting our future for survival. The stumbling block of this bias is that positive feelings and events are quickly forgotten. It’s a clever and economical use of available brain power to maximise avoidance of what threatens to harm us, but when we lose our capacity for healthy and innocent noticing and imagination for all that is good in us and the world, we run the risk of psychologically looping around the bad, bringing it out of the past and recreating it in the future.

As a result, when we are afforded time off or a chance to be with one’s thoughts without the demands of work or others, instead of feeling recharged we can end up feeling more stressed, more anxious, more vulnerable and less hopeful than before. We might discover, as Dr Rick Hanson poetically puts it, our minds are like velcro for all the bad we experience and teflon for all the good. The good in our lives just slips right off the pan, while the bad sticks to our minds with a vice-like grip. To counter this bias we need to develop a healthy, balanced imagination to bring freedom, movement and flow to our lives, to anchor us in possibility and move us towards the good.

“How long is forever?” asked Alice. The White Rabbit answered, “Sometimes just one second.”- Alice in Wonderland

Back to little Alice: her imaginative journey began by being contentedly idle on a riverbank. Later, as Alice wanders in Wonderland she discovers she is in a world of non-sense and un-logic. She becomes lost as she tries to engage in meaningful conversation with all she meets while following the White Rabbit. She is greeted with maddening language games and logical reversals that lead to non-sense. The Mad Hatter who is hosting a tea party for un-birthdays is preoccupied with what is not (a birthday) while apparently celebrating what would be, but is not. Alice, being the fast learner she is, adeptly learns to acknowledge the absurdities of the world inhabited by the adults and other talking creatures, but not allow them to deconstruct her own map of hopeful reality and her knowledge of how things function in a logical way. Instead of staying for tea with the Mad Hatter, she insists she must stick to her chosen path and chase the White Rabbit who holds the clock. She moves forward with an eye on the time. As she moves through Wonderland discovers she needs to think carefully before taking a new path and not be overwhelmed by all the puzzles, bafflements and distractions she stumbles upon. She continues to grow in size as she follows the clock forward. Coincidently, in Western culture a white rabbit is often seen a symbol of new beginnings, youth, hope and transformation especially in times of season change (such as spring in the Northern Hemisphere). Later, Alice’s lucky meeting with the Cheshire Cat on the other hand, is ambiguously helpful as it is chaotic. He is as paradoxically wise as he is discourteous as he tells her “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad” and offers the perplexing admission that “Imagination is the only weapon in the war with reality”. He is the archetypal Trickster, an agent provocateur, the voice of unstuffy wisdom.

Alice’s most remarkable qualities in persisting with a cool head and navigating the mad world of un-rationality are her open-minded curiosity, her resilience and persistence. She perseveres through her intuitive curiosity in getting to where she is going even if she doesn’t logically know where that somewhere is!

As the story unfolds. Alice transforms into the archetypal Heroine and Explorer through her logical pursuit and shows us, in a contradictory way, how to be the Fool; to be able to lose time wondering, get lost in madness and wonder; she suffers the loss of all reference points to a logical and sane world. And yet, she remains coherent, well-mannered and truthful. The struggle to find meaning makes her grow.

In the end, she is able to gain something much more substantial in return for her loss of orientation to sound knowledge and good logic. Alice learns that although the arrow of time keeps moving forward at the pace of a bustling rabbit, and all those she has met on her path speak in riddles, or un-wisdom and reversals, she does not waste time or action in getting to where she needs to go. She listens to her frustration in response to the chaos of Wonderland but learns to leave the madness and non-sense behind whenever she encounters it; she doesn’t set up camp there. Instead Alice pursues the somewhere she believes in where things make sense and despite all the puzzlement and madness around her, trusts her intuition to move her forward in good time.

Art, as holder of paradox and container of time

Art, like language has the capacity to describe things as they are or might be from a place of feeling and thinking. In artistic representations, more-so than language, meanings can remain ambiguous, paradoxical and hold opposites of subjective truth and objective fact, just like we see in the unpredictable wisdom of Wonderland. Although art, once it is made, comes from the past it is open to possibility of interpretation over time as each fresh perception brings forward the internal world of the beholder to imbue the artwork with meaning. What we find then, is that the artwork can never be fully pinned down in our descriptions and concrete meaning; art remains in our minds, meaningfully undefined. Art is not propaganda.

The arts speak through use of imagination and symbols, rather than literal descriptions, which means they can hold together the opposites and contradictions of living, such as thoughts versus feelings and the temporal truths of the past, present and future in one coherent whole in a way that narration alone cannot (Rubin, 2016). The symbolic images, existential concerns and archetypal literary motifs we find repeated in storytelling such as concerns for Time, the Hero, the Explorer, the Fool, the Trickster, exist in the story as represented by the White Rabbit, Alice and the Cheshire Cat, but as they are but figures of Carroll’s imagination, they do not belong to the logical sequences of everyday life. They are distanced from us and our daily cares, held in the literature in words and in the pictures for imaginative contemplation. They are symbolic representations of themes and patterns of being that we universally recognise, they are metaphors rather than the thing itself. The use of storytelling to speak about our shared concerns for time, the universal experience of believing oneself might be heroic or foolish or an agent of chaos provides a psychological interval between us and these patterns of being in the world. This space between (the reader, the viewer) and the symbols in art (the White Rabbit, Alice, the Cheshire Cat) allows for personal reflection and messages from the story to be received and understood in an intuitive way that is hard to describe in language (Hinz, 2009).

Art’s unique value is to be a testament to shifting subjective experience, while it is afforded a buffering from a literal, verbatim interpretation that would cut short all imagination to understand its intuitive meaning. The story of Alice in Wonderland has been allowed to dwell in our imagination as children as an adventure-fantasy, speaking poetically to our minds, helping us to know unsought things about the world, sincerely. The story is classical in the west, as it speaks, like all good art does, from the dividing line between logical reasoning and un-reasoned intuition, symbol and imagination without ever preaching a moral code or giving strict instruction about the world (Moon, 2004).

Perhaps in 2025 you will give your healthy imagination the gift of time. Time to be un-logical, to do nothing but paint, draw, to play with materials, to be curious, to let loose and cast value judgements aside just for a little while, to dream. You might like to re-read a childhood book that once captured you, so you can perceive it afresh with the eyes of a grown-up. What insight does the story offer you now? Remember your imagination can be used not only for developing anxieties and concerns informed by the passage of time and preoccupation with the future, but also for good. You can use your imagination to externalise your inner world through symbol and story, bring personal awareness about who you are and all the good in your life, build resilience in the face of confusion and develop hope. As the great British child psychiatrist Donald Winnicott (1971) puts it, ”Play, like dreams, serve the function of self realisation”. Another way of saying it, is healthy dreaming helps us becoming who we really might prefer to be, in time.

Time is precious, TLDR;

Time keeps moving forward, moving with time brings in new opportunities to learn and make choices.
Our choices bring responsibility and develop meaning.
Time doing nothing is not logical.
People need time to do nothing.
Our imagination needs guiding towards the good as it naturally drifts towards the bad.
We grow through confusing experiences.
Do not underestimate the power of art to hold your questions, paradoxes and confusions. That is its value!
Although making art is an action you can take in the present, it is a way of being that fosters curiosity and speaks to our intuition.
Give yourself the gift of healthy imagination. Instead of allowing your daydreams to fuel anxieties, use your mind to imagine how to express your intuitions, grow your sense of self and develop hope.
Use your imagination to focus on the good.
Alice in Wonderland is an eternal story with metaphorical insight for both young and old.

Image: “In Wonderland” painting and collage, by Anna Worthington

References:
Carroll, L. (1865). Alice in Wonderland. S. French. (Original work published 1865)
Erikson, E. H. (1994). Identity and the Life Cycle. New York Norton.Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.).
Blackwell. (Original work published 1927)
Hinz, L. D. (2009). Expressive Therapies Continuum. Routledge.
Moon, B. L. (2004). Art and Soul. Charles C Thomas Publisher.
Negativity - Rick Hanson, PhD. (2024, July). Rick Hanson, PhD - Inner Strengths for Challenging Times. https://rickhanson.com/topics-for-personal-growth/the-negativity-bias/
Judith Aron Rubin. (2016). Approaches to Art Therapy. Routledge.
Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and reality. Brunner-Routledge.