Through Every Looking Glass ‘Til ‘Neath the Waves We Sink

Hi hi, Alice. I’m not too late, I hope. Pardon the foot tapping—a dreadful habit, I know! I’ve got to go soon but wanted to see you off.

Quickly, quickly, could you think back for me to the first time you tumbled down? Stumbled, pushed, or gently guided by a deft teacher’s hand can you recall your first delve into the depths of our inheritance of thought? You spent your early years tumbling down into one of the many rabbit holes carved near when and where you happened to be born, burrows etched by history and happenstance.

You didn't choose those first descents. They were simply there, waiting. And so you followed—wide-eyed, sponge-minded—soaking in the shapes of things. These early rabbit holes shaped you: their angles became your intuitions, their walls the bounds of the reasonable.

I see something of their mold in you, in the impressions of the dirt on the skin of your knees! They were the trails followed by your tribe—the line of soldier ants before and after you, crawling through curriculum and cultural norm. Sometimes you left the lineup, coming home to nest in the jurisdiction of parental influence, archetypal or eccentric in its rhythms. Somewhere along the way the education began to work because in the shape of the tunnels you inferred something about the wider world that the rabbit holes existed in. Did they tell you Wonderland was all there was? It's merely a tutorial as you now know.

You began to see the tunnels coming. You learned to ask: Should I fall into this one? What lies deeper? What awaits adjacent? You began to choose. To dig deliberately, and in so doing, Alice, you became something new—a soldier ant no more. You became a sailor.

The pre-carved tunnels, once your training wheels, faded away like the mist they’d always been. Well-trodden paths in our world of ideas formed a foundation for your cartography—before you set out to wander in a realm where, like in Hilbert’s Grand Hotel, more rooms remain, regardless how much you fill your brain!

Before you, Alice, lies the sea of thought—vast, alight with electrical storms, encompassing all the patterns of ideation and their innumerable permutations. I, a rabbit checking my pocket watch, am a sailor too. So happy to have met you, if only briefly, in this boundless archipelago.

I tell you, I’ve seen an island full of wonders called Scientific Inquiry where bright lads and ladies terraform the expanse of ignorance. Steadily plowing it up into dozens of fields, they build machines to listen for the whispers of spacetime. They trace the fingerprints of creation in particle spray, and let me help them teach atoms new dances. They speak in base-pairs, in spectra, and in binary, learning the languages of life and the universe itself.

Elsewhere, children of the mind from explorers like you and I roam to make myths and fight monsters, their stories lighting the way ahead or offering rest when the road grows long. I heard songs about itsy bitsy spiders and Spider-men, tales of Homer Simpson and Homer’s Odysseus, met Twain's Huck Finn and Spock and Scooby-Doo.

In books, you can peruse our concepts, our constructions, from architecture and antiquity to Zeeman effects and zeta functions, from zig-zag stepped ziggurats to the astrophysics of accretion disks. To navigate the landscape you’ve but to pilot your ship across the page, onto the silver screen, via the browser, through branching conversation, by mulling things over, or in still more modalities besides.

The interweb is new, many sailors claim they set out before its invention. Ships have never been faster. Just this morning, I saw videos of kittens, recipes for noodles, k-dramas, blogospheres, ancient meditations, forums where strangers rank clouds in tier lists, handwritten grimoires from teenage witches, and live streams from space station windows. You can be in places that are feelings, like so back, down bad, on the fence, in the dumps, out of pocket, under the weather, and over the moon. There are thousands of memoirs, millions of words, and a trillion-trillion ways to turn a phrase. We’ve got mountains of music, bizarre memetic viruses, the transcendentally universal and the hidden esoteric.

You can wrestle with paradoxes in carts tied by Gordian knots to pairs of oxes, or wave with music while maestro-ing wave equations, then stop for gas at the intuition pump. In any case I'm digressing... hard not to do when there's a tangent to every point but nonetheless!

You’re off to all that—or much else and heaps more. Ah! here, take some of my favorite maps, charts from Sagan and Gödel, who here were great explorers in science, your da Gama and your Magellan. Hmm, what else…? Oh take Occam’s Razor, I’ve survived many a close shave with it myself.

Careful, Alice! On these seas are pitiable Captain Ahabs, stuck chasing white whales. Try oft as possible to see the forest for the trees, and picture, if you can, the world for the forest.

Oh look! There goes the caravan of ideological tides—so many are sailing with it now… You can join them if you feel so inclined, but be careful not to follow with blinders on and let open seas become tunnels again! Even the most persuasive of us have only seen so much… or seen so little, really.

Often, we meet other sailors—every one you’ll ever encounter having charted a unique course, likely visiting islands you passed by, bringing tales of lands you’ve never heard of. Even those who’ve traveled to your same islands will have perched on other vistas, noticed different details. Trade them for their maps! Compare notes.

Oh, I’m envious, Alice. I wish I could be you too, as well as me, because there is so little time and so much to see.

I can already imagine it, your singular trajectory. Pay no heed should you see anchored ships whose sailors cry “nothing new under the sun.”

Nay! There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio! How can you say, with your half-dozen half-baked maps, that you have seen it all? Don’t you know at dawn every day we ply waters to horizons yet unseen? What can you mean by ‘nothing’s left undone’, when every streaming photon brings the energy to spur the unspooling of new thoughts from some set of threads not yet combined?

No indeed, Alice. Hold nothing back in this inexhaustible world of all things real or thinkable. Sail far, and sail fast. Record your travels.

And if ever you feel the tunnels closing in on you again, remember: you are captain of this ship. There are more lands to see, and yet more islands waiting for you to sculpt. Tour the vault of published thought, flitting from surge of curiosity to flight of fancy. Take the nebulous clay of thought-stuff yet wet, unmade, and—like a potter—from amorphous form amphora. You’ve only to divorce X from Y and wed Y instead to Z. That, of course, makes Bob your uncle—and you the officiant of unprecedented matrimony!

Alice please, I’m a desperate frantic rabbit, my clock always a-tick. I’ve got to go but here’s some neosporin for the scrapes you’ll earn on treks in thorny concepts. Take a swig of this bravery I bottled in a wellspring of ancestral courage for the road. Here’s my childlike-wonder-tinted glasses, a walkman with your theme-song, and a windup wayward train of thought.

“Chooo-chooooo-cogito-ergo -sum-summer-sun-summerian-cuneiform-codify-form-is-to-kata-as-sum-is-to–”

Oh it’s wound up already, sorry it does that. It will run out of steam, just don’t give it any ideas…

“Steam-steamboat-Willie-Walt–wet/free/silly-willy–”

Or do! Up to you. It’s all up to you!

But wait—before I dash off—look there! Do you see it? The way the morning light catches the waves, each crest a question? That's your ocean now, Alice. It’s mine, it's everyone’s and it’s yours.

The anchor's up. The wind is with you. Somewhere out there, in that infinite expanse between what is known and what might be, your first island awaits. Tell me what you find! Post a postcard! Meet me again at moots, marinas, meridians, or maelstroms, if our paths cross, if you feel cross, if you get a chance, by chance, or merely for merriment... maybe on Mondays.

Fair winds, Captain Alice. Fair winds and further shores!