topsy-turvydom

We see a domestic topsy-turvydom in many Japanese sketches.

A topsy-turvydom that meant the kingdom of death.

Their first feeling was that they had come out into eternity, and that eternity was very like topsy-turvydom.

Following which, Gilbert was dubbed "the king of topsy-turvydom" and Sullivan decided to write no more music for comic operettas.

An erect satyr in topsy-turvydom.

But wherever trees and towns hang head downwards in a pigmy puddle, the sense of Celestial topsy-turvydom is the same.

But this new spiritual dread was a more awful thing than had been the mere spiritual topsy-turvydom symbolised by the paralytic who pursued him.

("Pregnant women . . . had schizophrenic eyes via whose topsy-turvydom they saw the world.")

The Christian world used to permit this topsy-turvydom once a year at Carnival, when the beggar would be king and restraint would bend the knee to licence.

Gilbert's focus on visual accuracy provided a "right-side-up for topsy-turvydom", that is, a realistic point of reference that serves to heighten the whimsicality and absurdity of the situations.

For these two men on the tower were left alone with the most terrible aspect of Gothic; the monstrous foreshortening and disproportion, the dizzy perspectives, the glimpses of great things small and small things great; a topsy-turvydom of stone in the mid-air.

Ivan Gaskell (Curator of Paintings, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts in the Harvard Art Museums) argues that "If we trace the imagery of topsy-turvydom in Dutch art we find tobacco to be a key element in scenes of comic disorder".

They point out Mercury's "I'm the celestial drudge", which anticipates Giuseppe's "Rising early in the morning" in The Gondoliers, and find the "real brand of Gilbertian topsy-turvydom" in the song about the former head of a railway company, "I once knew a chap who discharged a function".

I have only visited the place once, though it lies, so to speak, opposite to the Italian city where I lived for years, and yet you would hardly believe how the topsy-turvydom and transmigration of this myth somehow seemed less mad than they really are, with the wood loud with lions at night and that dark red solitude beyond.