Sight
9 July 2007
Sight is the supreme sense for those who can see. It dominates our perception of the world. We shut our eyes and everything soon seems different - what is important and what isn't shifts. The ground beneath our feet is at once more solid and yet its undulations seem more pronounced.
Sight is a constant frame of reference in a moving world. Just as the eye travels forward and back along each line that you read - scanning like some organic sonar for sense and meaning - our perception of the world is constantly assessed and re-assessed by our dancing gaze.
Small children are sometimes extremely single-minded. They do not learn quickly to scan. Of course, they have not yet grasped that scanning is a precautionary principle. Experience will teach them that, when they are fully focused on some toy or game, there may be a dangerous or shocking surprise just out of view, in peripheral vision.
I pay a lot of attention to the visual panorama when I am writing. I am lucky that people enjoy what I imagine that I see. I wonder if it is a relief for a reader to have the author direct their gaze - I mean, I know that I enjoy the sense of enclosure in a beautifully created imaginary world. There is a feeling, as my agent says, of being 'in safe hands'.
That feeling of security also corresponds, I think, to a promise the author makes to the reader. That promise runs more or less like this:
'Everything counts.'
I love to read a book in which every event and every location - let alone every character - makes a full and substantial contribution to the plot.
Surely the satisfaction of reading a book like that comes from the fact that you are sure it will all hang together, that your time reading will have been well spent - even if, as you turn the final page, some aspects remain equivocal, ambiguous.
Unlike the real world that we must constantly scan and rescan for dangers lurking on the edge of vision, half-hidden, a backward half-glance, in a dark wood, by a decrepit ruin where the wolves howl and the wind blows.
A ruined Sepulchre.
