Preserved in the Burstein Collection archives, this remarkable drawing by Gavin O’Keefe has resurfaced after many years. Mark Burstein, its custodian, shared it with me, and together with Gavin we decided to celebrate this moment of muchness.
As Gavin wrote: “How amazing to see my drawing of a ‘Muchness’ after so many years! I had honestly forgotten I’d drawn it... Obviously this is a ‘machine’ incorporating ‘M’ elements: mountain, music, moon, mouth, and any other ‘m’s the viewer can discern.” I
n Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the Dormouse says the three sisters in the well “drew all manner of things beginning with an M” including “mouse-traps, and the moon, and memory, and muchness.” Carroll turns this phrase into a paradox: a drawing of sameness itself, an image of what cannot be pictured.
O’Keefe’s vision transforms that impossible idea into a Magnetic Meditation of Magic Meanings, a Mechanical Madness of Matter and Mind, a Mirror Merging Myth and Mystery, turning all into a Mathemagic Metamorphosis.
The word “muchness” later reappeared in Tim Burton’s film, when the Mad Hatter tells Alice she has “lost her muchness”: a symbol of creative vitality, courage, and selfhood. Gavin O’Keefe’s drawing captures that spirit: a mechanical, metamorphic, and mysterious muchness.
Gavin O’Keefe is an artist, writer, and lifelong Carrollian who has illustrated Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland three times: The GO Alice (1990), The Alice Books (2010), and a forthcoming full-color edition expanding the emotional and cultural depth of his vision.
