bachelard notes

p 155, the chapter on miniature:

"...the miniscule, a narrow gate, opens up an entire world. The details of a thing can be the sign of a new world which, like all  worlds, contains the attributes of greatness.

Miniature is one of the refuges of greatness."

p 161

"Why should a metaphysician not confront this [miniature] world? It would permit him to renew, at little cost, his experiences of "an opening onto the world," of "entrance into the world."...Such formulas as: being-in-the-world and world-being are too majestic for me and I do not suceed in exoeriencing them. In fact, I feel more at home in miniature worlds which are, for me, dominated worlds. And when I live them I feel waves emanating from my dreaming self. For me, the vastness of the world has becomme merely the jamming of these waves. To have experienced miniature sincerely detaches me from the surrounding world and helps me to resist dissolution of the surrounding atmosphere."

My thoughts on temporary structures, meaning, for me in this study, books, would tend towards enclosure, but also towards a miniaturisation of the life-support-systems of cultural operation (the systems pertinent to the ontology of making artworks, if you will). I relate strongly to Bachelard's words here, and his words later on the commerce between inner and outer that is a containment, a predicate, a problematic that encloses the miniature whenever it occurs- for it occurs as a virtual world within a real world. But that does not mean that the phenomenology of the miniature is altered. It still harbours imaginations like Bachelard's and the poet's (and the maker of books) in a nurturing, enabling structure.

I want to mention a thought that occurs to me now on Tarot. That the world of relations in the Tarot is a miniaturisation of the real world, a schematic of an individual's understanding of his surroundings, past present and future. But the Tarot paradoxically asserts that it has not only a miniature view, but a wider view than that afforded by reality. It purports to be a window onto a universe with further dimensions. So the Tarot asserts a triple identity:  as a miniature, as a comprehensive scheme of the real, and as an indicator of something beyond normal reality. My understanding would be that these identities are furnished by imagination rather than by some supernatural force (unless one allows that imagination itself is super-natural). I wonder if the Tarot's model of input and output, and its agglomeration of an identity by our questing interpretation of it, by our interaction with it, can tell us something about how we encounter artists' books. There are many differences to be sure, but I want to note this observation to myself.

p 184 "intimate immensity"

"Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone. As soon as we become motionless, we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world which is immense, Indeed, immensity is the movement of motionless man. It is one of the dynamic characteristics of quiet  daydreaming."

Isn't reading a way of producing this state of aloneness? Isn't the book's act of enclosure tantamount to the study of Saint Jerome: a paradoxical immensity and openness achieved by enclosure and miniaturisation. A comparison, also of the differences in presence of a panorama or virtual reality artwork and one which is actuated by a reader through a narrative immersion. Different immersions. One is foisted on the sensorium of the viewer, the other depends tenuously on the quiet daydreaming intention of the viewer and is all the more immense for it, since it enlists the imagination, the inner senses.