"Alice In Lockdown" Reflects How Maddening the Pandemic Has Been To Date

All images in this post are by Marta Zubieta ©2020

"Equating the dream logic of Lewis Carroll with the lived political reality of Covid19. Alice in Lockdown is a self-directed illustration project where Zubieta explores the confusion and self-transformation journey we have gone through since the beginning of Lockdown. Bringing vibrant colour to often bleak subjects, Zubieta explores the millennial culture and its issues through pink-tinted glasses, neon colours, and dreamy characters. Zubieta found in Alice the perfect metaphor to explore the reality she was living in during the outburst of Covid 19." (Summary from martazubieta.com)

Marta Zubieta's quarantine-created "Alice In Lockdown" series has been getting a lot of attention on social media and it's easy to see why. The "logical nonsense" world of Alice In Wonderland speaks perfectly to the surreal challenges we've all been faced with since going into lockdown.

What isn't as well known is how this Spanish artist (based in Bristol, UK) came to create her paintings. It's a little more than "artist expresses feelings visually when stuck at home"... Here are two excerpts from Zubieta's first blog post as her new series was developing in May 2020:

First piece: Alice in Lockdown: Alice trapped in the new reality, in this piece I combine pop culture symbols and pastel colours to express the feeling of fake comfort in our houses while we are being hyper controlled.

The idea started at the beginning of the lockdown when some art contests where happening working with the concept of self-isolation and staying at home. I imagined myself trapped in my house forever and I envisioned Alice when she grew really big and got trapped in the Wonderland house.

My social commentaries about how coronavirus was being handed in England weren’t very welcome on Facebook so I thought I would put this social commentaries in pictures. The result was even better than expected, people who would normally criticise conspiracy theories were very impressed with the artwork even if when looking close you can find symbols of conspiracy theories.

 

...Second piece: Down the Rabbit Hole: Alice going through the rabbit hole of our digital world, a hyperreal maze of content that tell us what to believe, what to do, what to buy, and how to entertain ourselves, does that rabbit hole ever reach an end?

With this piece I want people to question themselves about their everyday interaction with the digital media and how it influences the way the think or act. I want to talk to everyone but I am sure it will resonate with my generation the most.

Zubieta's next post speaks about how she wanted to express the warped reality we all suddenly found ourselves in, and her thoughts on how to go about it so it would be heard.
From her second progress post:

Following my research of storytelling and the hero’s journey from last year, and my previous essay about hyperreality and its relation with social media, I wanted to get a broader knowledge on archetypes and the power of these in combination with pop culture for communicating ideas, as a global visual communication that goes beyond language, location or race.

What is the purpose? I want to create art that tells the other side of the coin, In a period where lot the artwork is being created to make us feel uplifted and hopeful, I want to create artwork that empathise with the feelings of impotency, loneliness, connection addiction, and misunderstanding of the uncertain situation we live in. (Ed.: All emphasis in bold is by OUABlog.)

 

She goes on to explain that by using a very familiar character and archetype, she can more immediately express well-known elements and it was Alice in Wonderland that resonated with her experience in quarantine, straight away (for example, Alice growing so large she can't fit inside the house anymore). As a result, she can immediately refocus the lens, twisting the images to express well-known aspects of the story in a different way and encourage people to consider things from this perspective. In a very real sense, it's a short-hand that allows for very direct communication with whoever sees the art.

It's clear in part this is because the rules - which society needs to live by for a stability - become distorted and topsy-turvy. What's less obvious to the viewer (or reader of Alice) is that by beginning from an illogical place but still attempting to proceed logically, is quite literally maddening. The more we apply logic, the less it makes sense, which is the opposite of what should happen. As a result, reality becomes even more distorted than it would have if the absurdity was thrown into the middle of something normal; something that wasn't already twisted. The madness of a situation - in our case, a pandemic in the middle of political upheaval - tends to creep up on Alice (us), until we realize that we've been trying to make sense of something nonsensical for a long time, only to find ourselves suddenly overwhelmed and exhausted, not knowing what to do or how to keep coping. It's a very real challenge.

Zubieta writes: 

Going down the rabbit hole in the book is a representation of going to the unconscious, connected with lockdown, the covid-19 seems to be the hole that has trapped us all at home, making us having to deal with our inner monsters but also with the voice we listen the most: the media.

Inner Jungles: How do we make sense of the outer world in our intimate spaces? (@wordincanvas)

Zubieta also connected with James Tuson (@wordincanvas), a writer who creates poems and spoken performance pieces based on other visual artist's work, and asked that he add his words to her images. (We adore artists collaborating!) Here's an excerpt of one of the results:

Alice in Lockdown

Have we gone mad?

Down the habit hole

...At least the hedgehogs can now roll free through our empty parks

Why sometimes I’ve disbelieved as many as six explanations to all this before breakfast

Getting curisor and curisor as the days drag on

Curious little oysters aren’t we whilst its’ all convenient for us in our shells.

Hell I even find myself talking to the flowers...

You can read Tuson's whole poem at the bottom of Zubieta's post HERE. We've included another excerpt by Tuson with a different thought process, a vignette, created in response to the Tea Party scene below.

The Mad Hatters Invitation the official Tea Party, by James Tuson, @Wordincanvas (excerpt)

The Mad Hatter inconveniently invites you to attend the corona party, come come all we must commence with this befuddlement and such it’ll be very very rude indeed if you don’t fall in line and keep your distance at our signs. We’ve gone to great many lengths to make this as straightforward for you as possible. Improbable you say? Do you have any idea why a raven is like a virus? Unkindness! Now now let’s not dampen spirits you’ve only just arrived, you must, you must have a cup of tea and have a go on our sweet sweet 5G, it’s truly the best in all of silly gits end. Am I making sense? (Continue reading HERE.)

Being fascinated with how people connect and use fairy tales for expression, reflection, and to consider changing social narratives, we also wanted to include this fascinating mind-map (below - click to enlarge) of the development process that Zubieta included on her blog. There is no commentary attached to the image but it's easy to see how the idea grew, marrying the resonant story to fairy tales and fairy tale characters and archetypes. (You can spot references to Peter Pan in there, along with Chihiro from Spirited Away.) It's clear that what wasn't palatable for people to see discussed (as she mentions, on Facebook) was a lot easier to consider and reflect on, by using the vehicle of fairy tales, fairy tale imagery and a reframed familiar story for people to think about on their own terms. 

It's an excellent study in the use of fairy tale relevancy and why revisions of beloved tales can be more communicative than regular forms of communication. In a world where it's harder and harder to trust words being spoken by authorities and the media, and many people are polarized, minds closed and defense mechanisms operating on a hair-trigger, sometimes it takes the reframing of a familiar fairy tale to bypass barriers and speak to the shared experience we are having. 

That's powerful stuff.

Going down the rabbit hole, in the book, is a representation of going into the unconscious. (When) connected with lockdown, Covid-19 seems to be the hole that has trapped us all at home, forcing us to deal with our inner monsters but also with the voice we listen to the most; the mass media. (Zubieta)

You can support Marta Zubieta and find her work online in the following places:

Main website: martazubieta.com

Instagram: @onirical_zubieta

Etsy: OniricalZubieta

Twitter: Marta Zubieta @oniricalZubieta

Facebook: @martazubieta

Review of Lafcadio Hearn's Japanese Tales (Oddly Modern Fairy Tales series)

(Review written by Leigh Smith)

“I have pledged me to the worship of the Odd . . . the Strange . . . the Monstrous… ”

~Japanese Tales of Lafcadio Hearn

“Strange.”

If I had a digital file of Lafcadio Hearn's Japanese tales, I'd be curious to run a search for how many times this word appears amid his 28 tales. This before-his-time multiculturist’s dark fairy tale work foreshadowed an entire body of unsettling art. 

He anticipated the so-called automatic writing of practitioners such as André Breton, opened receptive minds to Cubism and Surrealism movements of the 1920s and primed the public imagination for the fantastical tales of  H.P. Lovecraft. Lafcadio Hearn successfully navigated multiple cultures, transforming himself from Other to revered father figure/folklorist/historian. In short, he became the hero of his own fairy tale life.


As a fan of the macabre and fantastical, I was drawn to this book as a soul to the quintessentially Japanese cherry blossom (sakura)*. The collection's obsession with strangeness is also why I think it’s accessible to our own generation of culturally fluid, proudly freak flag-flying readers. 

Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, aka Koizumi Yakumo. 1889
Photo by Frederick Gutekunst / Public domain

Japanese readers in 1900 may have been steeped in the Buddhist and Shinto teachings about life’s vagaries, but in 2020, we have our ‘disappearing’ social media to remind us of our impermanence (Snapchat, TikTok, etc.).

Plus, modern readers will appreciate the bite-sized nature of Hearn’s stories. The tales are just that: short “tail ends” of Japanese legends and folklore, which can be quickly digested and enjoyed. Even the opener, which is the longest story in this anthology-of-sorts—“The Dream of a Summer Day” and its Pandora-like box—is only 17 pages. Most of the stories clock in at only a handful of pages. As a whole, they transcend their time, but for a couple zeitgeist themes or tropes that I'll mention later.

Hearn's “Exotic” Tales

These stories, selected by editor Andrei Codrescu, originally introduced the Western mind to Japanese culture, as seen through Shinto and Buddhist lenses. The cast of colorful characters and tropes readers encounter include:

• A man who saddles and rides his corpse-wife by clinging to her hair.
• An enchanting screen maiden (an artist's depiction of a woman on a screen) who becomes real.
• A shark-person (Samébito) who weeps blood that turns to jewels upon the ground.
• A samurai-beloved young woman named Aoyagi who experiences a metamorphic twist of fate.
•  A priest who is transformed into a Golden Carp.
• An unwitting entertainer for the dead, in the oft-cited ghost story, “The Story of Mimi-Nashi-Hōichi”.**

If one thing prevails in this collection, it is this: all is not what it seems, for everything is changing. Constantly. And because everything is in a state of flux, all does not necessarily end well. So, dear reader, do not expect the happily-ever-afters of heavily modernized and Westernized fairy tales. Hearn had his finger on the pulse of the unsettling. Let's briefly explore why that might be.

Lafcadio Hearn: Other from Another Mother

Hearn and Koizumi Setsu.
Unknown photographer in Japan pre-1904 / Public domain

It is not a surprise that Patrick Lafcadio Hearn (1850 – 1904) wrote from a position of Other, considering how he became entangled with his parents' inner demons as a child. He bounced from his mother’s homeland of Greece to his father’s home in Ireland. Both parents eventually abandoned him. 

At age 7, he became a permanent ward of his aunt. By the time he was 19, he was virtually penniless but on his way to America. After spending some time in Cincinnati, Ohio, and a decade in New Orleans, he finally settled in Japan for the last 14 years of his life. He married a Japanese woman and started a family.

“[Hearn] never returned to the womb of his mother's Lefkada [Greece] but found himself at home in a patriarchal world where he was a Father, unlike his own genitor.” 

-Andrei Codrescu, Editor of Japanese Tales of Lafcadio Hearn

It’s impossible not to view these stories through a modern lens. And that lens uncovers glaring threads of patriarchy and age-ism. And while Hearn’s position as an esteemed member of society was hard won, his privilege is reflected in his many elitist characters.  I don't doubt that Hearn (called Mr. Koizumi while he wrote these stories) was a product of his time. But it’s still problematic when the women who appear in these tales exist along a binary. If they’re human, they’re generally preternaturally beautiful, young, graceful, and self-sacrificing—like any “good” Japanese wife of the Hearn’s time. Conversely, they can also be ugly, vain, unpleasant hags. The non-human women are supernaturally monstrous “Yuki-Onna” (White Witch) and often violent.

Yuki-onna by Sawaki Suushi / Public domain

A perfect example is the farmer's wife in “Of a Mirror and a Bell.” She covets the return of her bronze mirror, which had been given for melting down to make a temple bell, but it, alone among the mirrors, would not melt. In short, it was magically imbued with the woman's anger and covetousness. Hearn even reminds readers of the supposed old saying, “a mirror is the soul of a woman.”

One positive tale in which the woman's value is not dependent on her beauty, but perhaps her duty, introduces a milk nurse named O-Sodé who asks a divinity to trade her life for that of the now-sick girl she'd nursed 15 years earlier. In her remembrance, the family of the saved girl plants the best cherry tree they can find (“Ubazakura,” or “Cherry tree of the Milk Nurse” which has flowers of white and pink).

Men, in these tales, especially those of the samurai or priestly class, were generally treated more favorably, with wider character variation among both human men and divinities or magical beings.

Lafcadio Hearn in the 21st Century

Beyond the aforementioned shortcomings, however, I see much to enjoy in this cross-cultural experience of reading Hearn. In some ways, I can vicariously commune with Japanese culture through him. I was also pleasantly surprised to see parallels between the myths and legends of other cultures. Here are a few I picked up:

• “The Story of Aoyagi” (Aoyagi means green willow) could find (new/old) fans of Edith Hamilton, Bulfinch et al, in its parallels with several Greco-Roman stories such as those of the united-in-death lovers Baucis and Philemon, or oak and linden.
• “The Story of Kwashin Koji”: In this tale, a religious painting seems to undulate and show real, flowing blood. This recalls stories such as Wilde's “The Picture of Dorian Gray” or the Greek myth of Pygmalion and Galatea.
• In “Hi-Mawari,” a boy and his older friend (Robert, age 8) search for Welsh fairy rings but instead encounter a harper. The harper's music is said to be witchcraft. Fans of Greco-Roman mythology will quickly be reminded of the magical musician, Orpheus, who used a song to win his wife back from Hades.

All is Unreality—Even Us

Woodblock print of cherry blossom
"Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji"
by Hiroshige / Public domain

It would be too simple to reduce Lafcadio Hearn to a purveyor of the strange, predicting the 20th century’s modernism and political upheavals. I like to think of Hearn's work as living and breathing, even in its preoccupation with the impermanence of life.

The collection will appeal to all lovers of uncanny short stories, from Poe to Neil Gaiman. Furthermore, the curious black and white illustrations of flying severed heads, faceless women, samurai, etc. will appeal to fans of anime and manga, I think. This volume also could draw in readers who appreciate the reverence for nature beyond simply the national symbol of the sakura (cherry blossom). “The Story of Aoyagi” is tailor-made for those who decry the cutting of forests.

Read the tales within Japanese Tale of Lafcadio Hearn. Even its foreword (by Jack Zipes) and introduction (Codrescu) are accessible to non-academics. Just remember—in the words of 14th century Buddhist priest Kenko: “All is unreality. Nothing is worth discussing, worth desiring.”

Japanese Tale of Lafcadio Hearn can be purchased on Amazon or via the Princeton University Press' website. It's part of Princeton's "Oddly Modern Fairy Tales" series.

Read our review of another book in this series: Workers' Tales: Socialist Fairy Tales, Fables, and Allegories from Great Britain. 




FOOTNOTES
*Modern novelist, Hanya Yanagihara, wrote in a recent essay in The New York Times Style Magazine, that “Japan without the cherry blossom is like a person without a head: The image is wrong, inconceivable.”

**From Hearn's Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1904)


ABOUT THE REVIEWER:
Leigh Smith writes strange tales herself, mostly under the pseudonym Leigh Ward-Smith. In the real world, she writes marketing copy, curates/manages social media for an architectural firm, and does research and editing for a retired professor. She occasionally blogs at Leigh's Wordsmithery (https://leighswordsmithery.wordpress.com/); likewise the occasional tweet @1WomanWordsmith.