Jabberwocky: Jinx

[Abishai100]

When you see your own reflection (in a mirror or a pond), you are instinctively aware of how your mind sees your own body --- you literally see an image of your own perception of the self.

That is the wonder of reflected images --- they are holograms of perception (sounds like an oxymoron!).

When we watch 'culture-reflective' Hollywood (USA) films such as The Wolf of Wall Street, we are viewing our own social sense of 'civilization awareness.'

When we watch stories in the media of culture-symbolic deterioration (e.g., the celebrity-hysteria O.J. Simpson race-controversial murder trial), we see images of our sense of species self-awareness (perhaps threatened or challenged ethically).

This explains why there are numerous folk stories and movies about people seeing ghosts or monsters in mirrors. For example, in the horror film Poltergeist II: The Other Side, a man looks inside a bathroom mirror and for some paranormal reason sees the flesh of his face falling off and then realizes the hallucination was some kind of unexplained manifestation of the fear he was feeling while monitoring a haunted house for the presence of supernatural spirits.

Perhaps this 'mirror consciousness' suggests that when we 'daydream' or 'imagine' terrible things happening to us --- e.g., the psychotic zombie Jason Voorhees (from the Friday the 13th horror film series) stalking our sense of 'wilderness safety' in a fictional haunted region of the forest known as Crystal Lake --- we literally speculate on our sense of body awareness (and hence body health/safety) falling apart.

A young woman infected with HIV knowingly engages in promiscuous sex with uninfected male partners to intentionally get them sick, and this impacts scientists' analysis of the randomness of the statistical spread of AIDS. This woman (perhaps a prostitute) has *intentionally* or *consciously* altered our species sense of body/vitality 'awareness' or measurement.

It would stand to reason, therefore, that we shouldn't tempt fate by making jokes or being arrogant/complacent about the perceptual intrigue associated with 'mirror parapsychology.'

So do people who claim to see ghosts in mirrors perhaps 'messengers of a deformed reality?'

The great philosopher-writer Lewis Carroll wrote of a zany and somewhat frightening creature named Jabberwocky who is seen by a precocious young girl named Alice when she finds she has the ability to go 'inside' a mirror and see a parallel universe on the other side of it.




Jabberwocky (Carroll Reference)

 

[MaineDerryAir]

Interesting ideas; especially your point that our perspectives are simply our interpretation of reality so a mirror only shows us what we expect to see. It kind of reminds me of Pennywise from Stephen King's IT...no one ever really saw his true form but simply what their perspective on fear would look like.

 

[Abishai100]

Alice

It kind of reminds me of Pennywise from Stephen King's IT...no one ever really saw his true form but simply what their perspective on fear would look like.

That's an excellent point. In fact, I've written quite a deal about Shiva (Hindu god of destruction) debating with Pennywise, since both 'folk mythos avatars' symbolize a natural fascination with material preservation (and its flipside --- horror!).

What frightens me about the Jabberwocky from Lewis Carroll's work is that he goads both the human sensibility about self-control and the natural human anxiety about unrequited dreams. The Jabberwocky is a nightmare and therefore reveals our sense of desperation. He might was well be Jason Voorhees or the Boogeyman. The fact that the precocious young girl (fictional) Alice (from the Carroll book) sees the Jabberwocky in a 'mirror-universe' suggests that she embodies the generic hope of humanity that 'what we see...is what we love!'




Alice in Wonderland (Wikipedia)