Reflections of Reality (4)

Here we are at my fourth and final blog swap, and I'm very pleased to welcome Will Macmillan Jones to the stage. Fire away, Will …

Reflections of reality.

It’s quite an interesting title, isn’t it? My thoughts turned at once to a mirror, but that isn’t the only place to see a reflection. I like taking photographs, with my now – in technological terms, at least – SLR camera. Yes, a proper film camera. I don’t do this as often as I would like, not least because developing and printing the film is becoming quite expensive these days. I do cherish an ambition to one day capture one of those shots with the image and its mirror image reflected in still water. Like a bridge, or a building beside a lake. I’ll probably need a more modern camera for that, which will be a pity, but still.

Like several of AFE’s guests, I’m a fantasy lover, and I’m sure we have all read ‘Alice Through The Looking Glass’, and dreamt in idle moments of being able to enter these mirror images and explore the worlds to be found. Would they be identical, if reversed? Or would there be subtle differences in these places, allowing us to meet strange and wonderful characters, as Alice did?

Water has been a powerful creator of images down the centuries, with authors from Homer onwards using the flow of the running, clear or wine-dark waters as an allegory for the flow of our lives and times. And still water, when it isn’t running deep? Look in a pool created after a heavy rain shower, and what do you see? A reflection of the sky, and of the observer. Which is real? We see the image in the water, and yet which has more substance? The water or the image – or neither? When we move away from the pool, the reflection of ourselves flickers and fades, and is lost. Was it ever real? If you stretched out a hand to touch the surface, it was lost to view, but lingered bright in memory’s eye, a reflection of a reality. But whose - mine, or the pool’s?


Will Macmillan Jones is author of the Banned Underground Series. The first three books (The Amulet of Kings, The Mystic Accountants and The Vampire Mechanic) have been released by Safkhet Publishing, and you can also find out more about the series on its dedicated Facebook page.

I'll be making an appearance on Will's blog this week, so please come and check it out!