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On Being Left on the Beach
The Rev. Don W. Vaughn-Foerster
June 12, 2005

I believe it is useful to do this. Aside from being addictive nonsense for those of us who like puns and double meanings, "The Hunting of the Snark" has a strong moral purpose. I am certain of this because Carroll assured us in his preface that this was so. Like life, this poem is both delightful and serious, and, to resort to Carroll's own seamless reasoning, knowing about it is simply better than not knowing about it. But my study of this poem suggests that it goes beyond satire and whimsy into a religious philosophy of great depth. In fact I believe it puts its finger on a nerve so raw that people generally avoid probing the poem too deeply. They would rather treat it as fantasy and let it go. What that raw nerve might be, I'll leave with you as my final point. 

Let's look at the poem itself for a few moments. It begins by telling of the crew and their landing. Once on shore the Bellman delivers a speech in which he describes the five marks of a Snark: its taste (which is meager and hollow but crisp); it sleeps late (i.e. it is lazy or slow to change its position); it is slow in taking a jest (it always looks grave at a pun); it is fond of bathing machines (Victorian wooden locker rooms on wheels that used to clutter up beaches -- it has no esthetic sense); and it is ambitious. Snarks, says the Bellman, are of two kinds: those that have feathers and bite and those that have whiskers and scratch -- perhaps references to gender. Furthermore, some Snarks are Boojums. When the Bellman said this, the Baker fainted. 

Our readings took us this far in the story line. But, there is much more. Most importantly, the Baker tells his story which repeats the Bellman's description of Snark's marks and ends with a strong warning from the Baker's uncle. The uncle encourages the Baker to find and bring home a Snark because "You may serve it with greens, / And it is good for striking a light." And then the uncle ends with this warning to the Baker: "If your Snark be a Boojum ... You will softly and suddenly vanish away, / And never be met with again!" The poem itself ends with the Baker seeing a Snark, bursting into "a torrent of laughter and cheers" and then, leaving these ominous words "It's a Boo ... (jum?)" hanging on the air as he "softly and suddenly vanished away." 

Okay. What really is a Snark or a Boojum? What kind of poem is this? an allegory? a political satire? Lewis Carroll was no help with these questions. All he would ever say when asked was, "A Snark is a Boojum" and beyond that his reply was "I don't know." That kind of leaves you hanging because in the poem it says that some Snarks are Boojums and, only to say a Snark is, is not to say other Snarks aren't. 

Others have not been so coy. Some say the Snark represents material wealth and the Boojum represents the harrowing effects of too much wealth too soon. Others say the poem is a satire on social advancement, or a court trial, or a voyage to the arctic, or an unsound business venture. Some say it is a criticism of the Christian church. These re possible interpretations based on parts of the poem left out of the readings. 

One of the more interesting interpretations I ran across was by F.C.S. Schiller, a pragmatist philosopher at the turn of the 20th century. He thought the poem was a satire on Hegelian philosophy's search for the Absolute. To find the Absolute and to be absorbed by it, he said, is to "softly and suddenly vanish away." A contemporary suggestion might be that meditating to attain oneness with the Absolute results in the same thing. 

Another, a bit more modern, interpretation (about mid-twentieth century) was that of Martin Gardner, the editor of The Annotated Snark, the book from which I've gotten most of my own information. Gardner's is an existentialist interpretation. The key for him is the Baker's conversation with his uncle where the Baker describes himself in terms of acute existential nausea, referring to his oppressed soul and quivering heart. The Snark, for Gardner, symbolizes the Baker's struggle between being and non-being. This is symbolically underlined by all of the crew members names beginning with "B" for "being" -- as over against "non being" I suppose. It symbolizes the light of faith because with it the Baker can "strike a light." The struggle with the Snark is what makes the Baker authentically aware of his own existence. 

For a long time I thought Gardner was right. However, I came across a curious coincidence. While reading a book on Jewish numerology (the Cabala), I noticed that the consonants in the words Snark and Boojum, as well as certain numbers prominent in the poem, could be given numerological meanings. Looked at this way, the poem took on a hidden meaning quite different from its apparent meanings as allegory or satire or an existential statement. 

Using the Cabala to translate consonants into numbers, the following interpretation became plausible. The word, Snark, could symbolize the ultimate significance of this perpetually creating and re-creating existence; and Boojum could symbolize that encounter with existence in which we, finally, recognize that all reality -- all of its substance and spirit -- comes to bear on each element and each aspect of the universe -- and on us -- right here, right now -- wherever and each whenever we are. Boojum, therefore, became something beyond our illusions of what is ultimately significant. It became awareness of what is real. The number 42 could be taken to symbolize all that we are or ever have been and our capacity to create and to be free. This, it would seem, was what the Baker left behind when he embarked on his hunt for the Snark. His 42 boxes left on the beach were no less than his identity and personal history. The 10 crew members could represent existence's ten fundamental forces which, through continual interplay, make existence -- according to the Cabala. 

The crew member who is especially important is the Baker. As the 9th crewman he represents the embodiment of life's creative energy. He, of course, was the one who encountered the Snark and that makes him the incontestable hero of the tale. The Baker wore 7 coats after leaving his identity and his personal history on the beach, thereby signifying that he was unconditionally open to every new possibility. He wore 3 pairs of boots and, esoterically, was thereby founded firmly in the deepest roots of life. Basic, also, is the first crewman, the Bellman. As number one he represents the continual, eternal pulsation of the life-death principle through all that is ... and is not. The image of the bell is particularly apt, especially if you have heard the constant rhythmic pulsation of a bell on a buoy in a harbor. 

But one of the most intriguing connections between the poem and the Cabala was this: There are 141 stanzas and this number, when deciphered, appears to bear this message: Erase illusion, return to life's source (roots), cease obstructing the primary energy of the pulsation of life/death in your existence! Numerologically, the sum of the poem's stanza seems to say: The hunt is an illusion that must disappear when reality finally breaks in on us. The number of "fits" (cantos or divisions) of the poem suggest that the "agony" (the word to describe the nature of the poem) is where life's energy and structure are holding an undeveloped pattern awaiting their release for further development. By the way, the Beaver was the eighth crew man who paced the deck a lot or sat making lace -- which, if you make the word plural, creates strands that draw things together. 

Actually, none of this proves that Lewis Carroll was a cabalist writing in code. Even if it were true, I couldn't prove any such thing because I don't know enough about the Cabala to do so. Besides, to be realistic, the Cabala is based on such abstract ideas that its ideas can be put together almost at random and some kind of sense can be read into them. In a way it is like a metaphysical Rohrshach blot in which you can see what you bring eyes to see. 

Even so, circumstantial evidence favoring Carroll's conscious use of cabalistic ideas is pretty weighty. He was, after all, the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, an English clergyman who knew ancient languages and who taught mathematics. The likelihood of his knowing Hebrew and some of its mystical applications is strong, as is the likelihood that, as a mathematician, he might be curious about numerology. Given his whimsical temperament, it seems likely that he would know such things and use them on the public with no hint of his true intentions. His intention in this case I would take to be to send a message about the nature of human reality to those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. 

But whether or not this is the case, I prefer to interpret "The Hunting of the Snark" in the following cabala-influenced way: The poem itself is a manufactured illusion about the search for reality or God or truth (whatever "ultimate" you wish to seek.) The crew is the sum of all it takes for humanity -- or the individual -- to be ("B") -- for us to be. The Baker is the prototype of humanity forever forgetting its most hard-won lessons and its own identity and yet forever on the verge of creating new being from non-being, the concrete from the abstract, sense from nonsense. In this regard a "Baker", mixing diverse ingredients and baking them into a new form, is an apt symbol for humanity, especially since what he really makes is bride cake (i.e. wedding cake), the food of combination, generation or procreativity, and creativity. The Snark is our illusion of what we, usually, take reality to be: humorless, urgent, naked, tasteless, somehow timeless -- existing somehow outside our experience. In hunting it in this form, we feel compelled to seek it by embroidering it, being vulnerable to it, reaching out to it innocently and naively, clothing it with our fantasies, and trying to bribe it into being what we want it to be -- in our own ambitions, playing on what we take to be its ambition. The Boojum is the realization that the Snark we find is not the Snark we seek. It is much freer and more satisfying, more immediately real and, therefore, more terrifying. 

The Snark as Boojum strips away all our anxious, negative, and humorless chatter and is something to cheer and laugh about. When we encounter it, illusion disappears -- and disappears in an unexpected way. What really happens is that we find ourselves in a more genuine sense -- and where we have been and what we have been in our illusions disappear. The Boojum makes us remember that all meaning, all significance is centered where we are. I, therefore, believe that, when, as the climax of the poem, the Baker encountered the Boojum, he was suddenly transported back to the beach to be with his 42 boxes, where he left his true identity, and that, having returned to himself, he was able to "serve the Snark with greens" -- that is, to be himself the Snark's servant (Reality's servant) by sending out from himself new shoots of life and creativity. Also, he was able to see better because his encounter with the Snark gave him a clearer light to see the real world by. He woke up. Carroll's great joke on the crew and on his readers is that what really disappears is not the Baker, but those with him still seeking Snark in their illusions. 

If this is what Carroll meant, then, "So what?" You may say. It sounds like just so much fantasy and nonsense, doesn't it? Well, if it is, it is also psychological and spiritual truth because Carroll (or this interpretation of him) puts his finger on what happens to all of us when we approach life as an ambitious search for our "blue bird of happiness" or for any ideal reality. What we usually seek, then, is illusion -- a projection of our own fantasies given momentum by the fundamental urgency of our hunger for meaning. It is an illusory search forced and renewed by the equally fantastic expectations of those around us, by the very tradition of such searching itself, and cut loose from the most fundamental reality of our own being -- cut loose from our identity (our personal history, our psychogenic endowment, our self) which we forget and leave on the beach before sailing forth on our hunt. 

What do I mean by this? Simply that, although we hunt through life for "lean" reality, leisure, seriousness, pleasure, and power, our search is only rewarded when we wake up to whom we have been all along, when we find anew the sense of being true to our original selves. I have seen this at work in Unitarian Universalists who have jumped into our whirlpool of pragmatism, humanism, secularism, and syncretism (chasing their own private liberal Snarks) only to end by realizing that what they wanted all along -- and had to have -- was what they neglected to bring with them but initially had as their own: their intrinsic ability to hope, to love, to have faith in humanity (in themselves and others), and to see what is actually before them and not just what they expect to see -- or what they expect others to expect them to see. When this happens, in some it looks like a return to orthodoxy; in others, like a new journey into a different, a fuller kind of liberalism. In all to whom it happens (who, finally, see their Boojum), it is a transportation back to the beach of the reality of themselves, cleared of anxious illusion. Simply stated, it is a leap into the full, creative chasm of their own selves, into the creative certainty of their own being. If it seems like they have disappeared, it is because we have not made that leap ourselves. The more likely thing is that they have not disappeared so much as we have disappeared from them. 

Can that leap be made without the journey through illusion? Probably not. Lewis Carroll intimates as much by the very writing of his poem. So much of life is fantastic that you have to wend your way through a good bit of illusion -- through a good bit of religious and cultural fantasy (both orthodox and liberal, theist and humanist) before you can see clearly what you really want to see and must remember about yourself. It's just that this is a painful thing to have to acknowledge -- to acknowledge that our precious pursuit of life's "blue bird of happiness" (the Snark, the reality we are chasing) is a success only if it cancels itself out. That is a raw nerve thought. That's when our Snark is a Boojum. 

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