Isn't the notion that "Anything that can be read is a text" a little

sweeping?  And doesn't it presume a rather purist approach to "reading"

(to just *read* the word "reading" for a moment [!])?  I mean, do I

*read* everything in the same manner?  Mike Frank's letters here are

certainly texts for me; but like every other soul on the Net, I sweep

across tons of horsemanure daily in order to find the *texts* I want to

*read.*  Is that sweeping, "reading"?

 

Further:  Is seeing, reading?  I think the supposition that it always is

betrays a hidden antiocularcentrism.  My experience of depth, of form, of

color, of light, is ocular, yes, but not--I'd submit--textual.  Not

reading.  Perhaps, on the basis of what I see, I eventually come to a

reading, or a deduction.

 

I'm thinking of a moment in APOLLO 13, which I saw only yesterday.  At

the launch, we see --I think from without, but certainly with the

exterior suggestged at least in the background-- the capsule hurtling

through space.  This comes after, and visually reflects, a scene in which

Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks) tells his son that the capsule will move away from

the earth at the speed of a bullet.  We hear this and we imagine that

motion and it's not, frankly, conceivable until later we see the shot I'm

discussing, where the foreground background differential is such as to

suggest that, yes, this thing is moving much faster than anything we've

ever been able to conceive.  I was struck by this movement, this

hurtling.  I wasn't reading it.  I am NOW reading it, and thinking about

what it means, and my reading NOW actually incorporates a recognition of

what I was seeing then, because when I was seeing it, yesterday, I wasn't

even conscious of seeing, so absorbed was I in seeing.  I am NOW reading

it, and noticing that even in animated sci-fi there is no sense at all of

movement *per se*: it's all implied.  Here, the cinematographer has

managed to light the background in such a way that we see its motion

against the foreground (this is not easy, when one is travelling much

more swiftly than ther other and being photographed with a film with a

single rating).  And the shot is set up to have the motion sweep across

the screen, from left to right.  Very old-fashioned stylistically, and

yet perfect for showing the magnitude of the speed.

 

Later in the film, twice at least, the mission controller makes a comment

to the astronauts to inform them of their current speed in feet/sec--the

order is 35000 ft/sec or so, which is pretty damned fast.  Having SEEN

this depiction earlier, I can appreciate what is being said.

 

I think seeing is faster than reading, much much faster; and so this

business in APOLLO 13 about speed, about the speed at which we hurtle

into space; is ALSO about seeing itself; the speed at which we hurtle

into vision.

 

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