“Is not this world an illusion? And yet it fools everybody.”
― Angela Carter
Outside of my perception there perhaps lies a different reality to my own. That is, I can be witness to an event or happening, and surrounded by other human beings, yet as a group we will not share a unified and objective experience.
Once upon a time, in a land far, far too close for comfort, there was a story. The story was not necessarily a very complicated one, nor was it very important, but it was there just the same. The story was just like us, it might have contained a person we connected with (whether we liked them or not was usually unimportant), or it may have even had a setting familiar to our own. What was most important was that it reflected what we saw and felt as our reality, as un-magical as it may have seemed.
The Bloody Chamber, a short story by Angela Carter, is one such story that sleeps in the phenomenological sticking place, wheedled into the wet smoke of my being and taking it’s dues as my other sitting-room. I need no actual mirror to climb through, it’s presence is a phenomenological veil over my mind’s eye as I look back into the memories of my narrative. This project is the visual journey of my attempt to share my story, and experience, with others; and to invite them into the phenomenological experience of The Bloody Chamber in my mind.
