Working on Holden's Silence

Working tonight on Holden's Silence: the main imagery is set up, a backdrop for the prose, and for further illustrative practice. I've brought in material from the bylaws that belonged to the library when it first opened, and have written a piece of prose based on or exploiting a relationship between the gaps in the rules of the library and the gaps in the language that makes up our experience of books. There is an ungovernable other outside the library that is at least partly responsible for the wonder of it. The other is also the reader. It's all rather enjoyably fuzzy, and not a little dreamlike. In fact, whilst writing the prose piece, I've felt a sort of "knightly quest" theme stealing over the surface of the writing. It's not immediately obvious, but nonetheless a feeling I have: there's an "understory" of a knight finding a ruined library, half-overtaken by nature. This is reasonably explicit in the visual imagery, but only alluded to in the language of the prose piece, which slides between discussing the rules of the library and the rules of the quest, elides them both into the dream of the ruined library, feeding nature. It's quite an anxious little piece. I hope it doesn't put people off.

As far as I know, I have no great plans to reorder or substantially change the ordering or substance of the images. I'll review this, but I planned the themes of the book before the specifics, so the main tropes of ruined library/nature/forest are present throughout. I'm waiting to see how I will re-edit the text alongside the pages, and prepared to follow-up serendipitous connections between the text and image. It may be that I will work on both text and image, but to reiterate, I am pretty happy with the images at present: what happens to the images now will depend on what happens when I bring the text into it.