These are the FOUR key ideas explored in Magic-Eye: 1. MAGIC-EYE PICTURES 2. THE MIRROR-WORLD 3. PREMATURE BURIAL AND CATALEPSY 4. TS ELIOT'S FOUR QUARTETS – THE DEATH OF THE FOUR ELEMENTS MAGIC-EYE PICTURES Magic-Eye pictures are amazing. It seems impossible that a strange image of random dots or repeating patterns could reveal an intensely real image in three dimensions. It is the experience of getting lost in magic-eye pictures that is explored in the novel Magic-Eye. More on magic-eye pictures PREMATURE BURIAL AND CATALEPSY The initial idea for the book magic-Eye came from my youngest son Alex, who one day asked in the matter-of-fact way that eight-year-olds do: 'Dad, would you rather be buried alive or burned alive?' In fact both of these gruesome ways of dying happen in Magic-Eye. The fear of being buried alive is an age-old obsession, medically known as taphophobia (from the Greek taphos meaning 'grave' and phobos, 'fear'). There are reports of premature burial dating back to the 13th century, and famously, George Washington, fearing he might suffer this fate, said on his deathbed: 'Have me decently buried, but do not let my body be put into a vault in less than two days after I am dead... Tis well.' Even more chilling were the lengths composer Frédéric Chopin went to. His ghoulish last words were: 'The earth is suffocating... Swear to make them cut me open, so that I won't be buried alive.' And in accordance with his wishes, his heart was cut out before burial, preserved in alcohol and taken by his widow to Holy Cross Church in Warsaw. The human condition of catalepsy can mimic death so closely that even in the modern age there are many documented cases of people narrowly escaping premature burial. Of course, we don't tend to know about those who haven't had such a lucky escape, not managing to wake-up at the last moment! Alison Burchell has been pronounced dead three times by doctors and has twice woken up on a mortuary slab. And the power of this concept to fascinate and horrify the public was demonstrated just a few months back with the story of Noelia Serna whose body twitched while being prepared by an undertaker, sparking a huge international news story.
THE MIRROR-WORLD
Did you know? Mirrors are really weird. We tend to take them for granted as everyday objects, but while researching Magic-Eye, I had to read quite a lot of material about mirrors before I really understood how they work. So I'm going to keep it as simple as I can... When we look at ourselves in a mirror, it looks like we see ourselves rotated 180 degrees facing out. But of course it's much weirder than that. Because if you raise your right arm, your mirror-twin raises their left arm. So the mirror just reverses everything, doesn't it? Well, no it's not that simple either, because our feet are still on the ground, not up in the air. Confused? Well, the best way of thinking of a mirror image is as a backward image. I did this little experiment and it all suddenly made sense to me. A word we see reversed all the time is the word AMBULANCE, so that when it's seen in a car-mirror it comes out the right way round. Well if you write the word AMBULANCE in a dark pen on a thin piece of paper, then flip the paper around on its side axis, everything becomes clear. You see the word like this:  just like you would if you held the word up in front of a mirror. So to understand how mirror reflections work you need to imagine you are looking at the image from behind. Another fun thing to try is to see if you can do mirror-writing. A survey showed that about 1 in 6,500 people could do mirror writing, so I gave it a go and found that I could do it! It was huge fun, and I think far more people can do it than that. Why not give it a go? Leonardo de Vinci was the most famous person to use mirror-writing, and there are several theories as to why he did it. There are lots of other weird and interesting things about mirrors. This short piece from The New York Times is fascinating. 'In a sense, mirrors are the best ‘virtual reality’ system that we can build,' says Marco Bertamini of the University of Liverpool. 'The object ‘inside’ the mirror is virtual, but as far as our eyes are concerned it exists as much as any other object.' TS ELIOT'S FOUR QUARTETS – THE DEATH OF THE FOUR ELEMENTS I have loved Eliot's poetry since my teenage years – particularly the beautiful way he explores our perception of everything around us (particularly time). Then there is the wonderful music in the rhythm and cadence of his words, the rich imagery and the multilayering of his references. In the Four Quartets, I was struck by the way in which Eliot makes the four elements of air, earth, water and fire at one moment destroyer and at another, destroyed, and this is a key idea that I explore in the Magic-Eye books. In the first book, FIRE is being released as a sentient being in the mirror-world, due to an infinitesimal flaw in the first expansion of the universe at the big-bang. FIRE is a timeless, destructive element, it has no interest in the affairs of humanity, it simply wishes to continue its existence. Each chapter of Magic-Eye is framed by a quotation from Eliot's Four Quartets, and there are layers of meaning in the book to do with time, reminiscence, perception, death and spirituality for those who wish to explore the connections. Read an extract from Magic-Eye |  Four elements & signs of
the zodiac, Bartholomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things – 15th
century, Le Mans
 Christian Eisenbrandt's patented spring-loaded coffin lid, 1843
Designed to prevent premature burial  Death Mask of Frédéric Chopin (1810 - 1849):(from Jack Gibbons' collection)  The strangeness of Reflection   The terrifying power of FIRE. Here, the inferno created by an overheated chip-pan |
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IDEAS EXPLORED IN MAGIC-EYE |