The scribbles are more-or-less random quotes from Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text, which has arrived just a bit too late to inform my article on ‘The Promise of Reading’, even though its descriptions of the pleasure/bliss of reading would be really useful for my notions about why book-makers want to make-reading.

Perhaps another idea wll come out of it. Anyway, this sketch purses the Axis Mundi project I’ve been thinking about: everything is at the centre of the world. Potentially everything is holy. But there’s a disconnection between the perspectival organisation offered by photography and conventional imagery (even, partly by narrative, though its a perspective organised largely by the reader). We look through a conventional lens, literally and figuratively to see the world. We find it centred wherever we look, in the objects of our experience and in our perception of space and volumes. This back and forth argument between the ‘holiness’ of the real world with its distinct objects and experience, and on the other hand, the animating principle of the viewer/reader/being, recalls defunct notions of sight and seeing. Do we see by projecting rays actively out of our eyeballs? Or do we perceive rays which enter directly into our consciousness. (Both, perhaps? Or rather, we do see light, but we make up a lot of what we think we perceive as real).

Which is a lot to ask of a poor old stencil, a photo of a keyboard, and a couple of illegible quotations. We’ll see how the book gets on…