Alice In Wonderland is famous for being both nonsensical and also logical. The child in me loves both logic and nonsense, logic is for everyone a safe refuge in the so-called "known", and you can be sure of it, as with the laws of geometry. When you get to the real world or the natural world or the world of the sea, everything changes constantly, and children are more conscious of this than adults, because they are growing constantly, and I think Lewis Carroll was playing with this when he had Alice grow tall and then short, a bit like in a fun house of mirrors. The child’s turbulent view of reality was reinforced.

What was radical about his wrtiting is that nobody had ever said "Oh my god, the world in the view of a child must look really crazy", and I think that is what is precious about his writing. I think it was radical for Victorians and it was maybe a precursor in the history of thought really. Because he was a teacher of mathematics Lewis Carroll did realize how sharply it differed from the logic and mathematics of the so-called adult world, but of course adults, while they use logic and mathematics are subject to this terrible evolution that's going on in themselves and their bodies, and the world around them, and ignore it by focusing on what they can mentally achieve.

In the Alice stories, we experience conflict between the characters, and even though that is based clearly on nonsense, they still display great concern over their disagreements. This shows conflict in a detached light, the argumentative nature portrayed as ridiculous.

In Lewis Carroll’s stories, he has her in conflict with the experiences themselves, she can’t agree with a lot of them. She's in conflict with them, but its a dreamlike conflict that is episodic and goes from one conflict to another without ever being resolved. But it still is a playful conflict, Lewis Carroll demonstrates that conflict can be very playful, absurd, if carried to extremes or even if trivialized and that's part of the wonder of his books.

Its something that appeals to me as somebody who's written plays most of my life and dealt with conflict on the stage continually, sometimes very seriously, sometimes comically, with the realization that each dramatic incident I've ever created, whether its serious or comic could also be acted as the opposite. For example the serious could be acted as a comedy, and the comedy could be acted seriously, I think Lewis Carroll was fully aware of that.

In the Alice stories children, particularly, can see conflict happening in the action, but they also see at the same time that its very silly. For both them and us, this is useful to get height on the happenings of life. And of course children's lives are entirely spent in conflict from the time they open their eyes in the morning till the time they shut them at night. There’s no moment without disagreement with their ’superiors’. From the time they don't want to drink their milk or go to school or want to go feet first down the stairs instead of head first, whatever - they're in conflict with adults.

This establishes an absurd quality in life, this being at loggerheads. Perhaps making it silly helps them to survive it? This gives them more perspective by seeing others (in the story) wrestle with logic and nonsense at the same time, and they can also see that what's being said on both sides is really playful ultimately, even though its said very dramatically.

As adults, when we see a drama onstage, we get a perspective and we can see it could be a comedy, and we can see the comic side of the tragedy because we have a certain distance from it. Children can do that, they can laugh at themselves, as also at anyone, within the conflict, and that is wonderful to witness.

That perhaps is the key to understanding how to avoid conflict, its that one comes to a feeling of one's own detachment from and fullness of life. The conflict does not reduce us, we stay in our strength, we are not fooled, and that is not always true for everyone.

We could learn from being innocent, being a beginner, as a child learns and grows through conflict and other experiences and when we stop doing that and regard it as an annoyance, we stop being a child and stop learning and growing.