I’ve been reading The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing, by James Elkins. It’s worth a read — he covers a lot of phenomenological territory, in pursuit of what seems a very personal understanding of what seeing (as contrasted with vision or sight) is about. Seeing, as he sees it, is a complex ‘metamorphosis, not mechanism’. Unexpected insights in familiar places (he is an art historian by trade, and much of the book deals with how we exploit seeing in our representations of its effects). This from a riff on Picasso’s Women of Avignon:

When a whole crowd turns to see us, we are rooted in place. (Imagine a painting of heaven with everyone, from Jesus to the smallest soul, staring right at you).

I’m trying hard to imagine that, and it terrifies me. There’s a long middle section dealing with Bataille’s assertions about things which ‘can’t be seen, even though they may be right in front of our eyes: the sun, genitals, and death’, which I’ll come back to later…