Shared Worlds: History and the Imagined Fantastical

I love taking pictures of old buildings. And, as mentioned before, old and secret doors and windows in old buildings. Part of this is the simple beauty of these things. Part of it is the mystery. Part of it, though, is the sense of lived history in these places. These are connections to the lives of actual people. They are not simply monuments of the present, but actual pieces of lives in the past.

As a writer of fantasy, nothing seems more magical. The realness of these buildings is a departure point (an inspiration point) for me as a writer. It's not just that I can imagine a soldier looking over a battlement at an invading army, but that I can see him on an empty night, the cold wind blowing up over the stone. Thinking of a fire, of a girl he loves, of something to eat, even as the light fades in the west and the great eastern darkness boils up off the horizon. Does he notice? Or has he seen it so many times that he's blind to it, living by touch, living from shiver to shiver?

This is the magic of physical history on the mind of a writer.

So! I had a shot yesterday of a cannon in Belem Tower looking out over the water to the Vasco da Gama Bridge, outside Lisbon, Portugal. I loved this tower, and took a bunch of pictures of it. It's an important building, too, both for its beauty and its age. And the age is important, because it was one of the few great buildings in Lisbon to survive the horrendous 1755 earthquake that shattered the city.

Here are a few shots of the Belem Tower. It's worth seeing, if you ever get the chance.

We hope you've enjoyed the tour. Please exit to the left.

Windows Between Worlds

Yes, that is a cannon. DO NOT MESS WITH ME.

Whither This Way or That

The feet whisper this way or that, but only the bees know the way, and only the birds are smart enough not to care. The prison is pretty and green and full of flowers, but the thorns are like cruel shepherds at the end of the day; home, home to the fences, dear feet. Tomorrow you can dream of wide green fields...

Secret Garden

I'd have this in my backyard, if I could.

A walled plateau maze garden at El Escorial, outside Madrid. Photo by me.

Secret Doors

I'm listening to Frances Hodgson Burnett's classic The Secret Garden on audiobook with my daughter right now, a book I've wanted to read for a while. And one of the things I realize that I'm fascinated with (much like many with my bent of thinking, I'd guess) is secret places. I have a love of secret doors, secrete passageways, secret gardens - secret worlds.

It's a large reason why I have this picture as my avatar pic:

This is one of my photographs, something I took on my honeymoon. It's from the gardens of the Alhambra palace, outside Granada, Spain. A secret door in a secret garden...

My love of photography and my love of writing are connected, I think, through this idea - secrets. A secret way to view something, a new way to see it, a twisted angle - a secret window on something new.

I think a lot of people have a strong urge in this regard. Portal fantasies are a sort of symbol of this, a representation of the desire to see through the mundane to the secret mysteries beyond, to peel back the plain and find the strange, the wondrous, the surreal.

This crops up in my stories, I think, and it definitely crops up in my photos. I'm hoping to show a few of these in the next while. A chance to step through a wardrobe or fall down a rabbit hole...