You're mouthing out the words still. Bib-lio-la-try with a jump and slide from 'Bib' to 'lio' so that 'lio' sounds like 'leo' and two quick rehearsals to get the accent (as in ' not your native drawl) correct, then the easy part: 'la' and then 'tary', except you double-check whether it is 'tary' or 'try' or 'tarary' (common mistake, I say, blushing), because when you run all the sounds together, you still put the emphasis on the second syllable, not the first, and 'try' becomes 'tary'.
If it were easy to say, it wouldn't be such a wonderful word.
It means to idolise books, before you ask. You knew what it means? Five smartie points to you who couldn't pronounce the word a paragraph ago. I'm comfortable admitting I didn't know the word until yesterday. Did you know then that the connotation of 'idolise' here is religious: literally to worship an idol? Only bibliophiles could conceive a word about their obsession that has religious connotations.
Who oh who would worship a book, you-who-aren't-bibliophiles-and-are-living-vicariously wonder. No, you don't. Because then there would be no blog post and you wouldn't be reading it, and this clearly is a blog post and you are reading it, so the answer is me - and perhaps you, too.
Blasphemy! Heresy! But listen here, ours is a quiet and solitary idolatry - we're not exactly sacrificing animals to our bookshelves. Just time and a few trees. If anything, we should be at the mercy of the environmentalists, except that they're busy raising money and protesting conferences and reading.
This whole blog is devoted to my bookshelf (with regular deviations into metaphysical crises, as befits a reader. And a writer. Ask yourself which of these you are). It's an altar. I admit it. An altar, not The altar, because I brush my teeth and eat my vegges on the other side of this page (which is incidentally the same side of the page that you are on). Sometimes I don't read. Don't cry. I read a lot. I just don't read all the time. Although, nothing else is quite as satisfying.
Devoted. Did you notice that? This blog is devoted to... Now I'm not the only one engaging in blasphemy! My blog is too! Like a plague it travels. This digital world mimics its backbone of hidden 0s and 1s. It is ordered and logically structured. Maintained by the pulsing of keyboards. It is to blasphemy what the gutters were to the Black Plague.
Don't abandon me yet - I promise I am not contagious. Although who's to say I didn't catch this from you?
The wallpaper of this blog is a black-and-white shot of a railway bridge. It looks as though it is three-dimensional, but it isn't. It cannot be. Even if Google Glass succeeds in displaying a world so convincing that you try to reach for a book, you cannot. (You will reach through the bookshelf, but don't worry, you can't get stuck. I think.) This whole digital world is one-dimensional and, to some extent, an illusion. (I don't really sit with my head propped to the side like that. Sometimes I change my clothes, too.)
Now that I think on it, the photo tells you what to expect from this blog: nuances, shadow and light, and hints of other things. A snapshot without a supporting landscape, where the viewer is two-faced (the photographer and you - oh and also me, since I chose it), that you cannot touch or walk into to find out what those hinting things hint at. And all so hipster-ish-ly black-and-white cool. We see what the photographer selects for us to see. You read what I select for you to read (granted, sometimes things slip from the edges of my fingers and perhaps you catch them).
To get to business now, my thanks to Barthes and Derrida and even Descartes for providing the argument I can't argue against but others can by burying it under the word 'extreme'. Meaning is lost, well, it was never there, I protest fists in air (on behalf of those oblique writers), blah blah, stop rolling your eyes. Can I then truly idolise anything? Yes!
Let me explain. Words are in on it. The whole business. Words are wind, Jon Snow. In Ragnarok (mixed references but you understand), the god Loki values nothing. He turns everything inside out and upside down to understand it and make metaphors of it. He's the one worth trusting when Odin's looking at you with his one good eye and the other eye that sees more, and suddenly you do not know who you are. He is also very serious and not much fun. I'd run for Loki's camp any day.
Words pretend, a lot, just like the trickster god . They gain your trust, though notice they never ask for it - the gullible lot we are, we just assume. Not gullible, no, just hopeful. Hope springs eternal, to complicate the barrage of sayings I'm throwing in the hopes that you'll agree with me just because you're too overwhelmed to fight back. (See what I did there?) But when you uncover their disguises, they laugh, shrug their shoulders and say it was all a hoax anyway.
Don't cry (again. You are an emotional bunch). When the one-eyed and all-seeing god is staring at you, it is very reassuring to know that it is ok to know that you don't know and that not-knowing can be discovery.
Discover. Discovery. There we go! Bibliolatry is idolatry of a tricksy creature - creatures - that laughs at itself and you (and you at you) and then leads you down the winding path. Paths. This blog is one path, and because the 1s and 0s (and our attention spans and our capacities to process information) say so, it can only be one path with one view, even if we can meander to create a beaten track from which we see the one view from different perspectives.
So, we're not blaspheming, if only because our paths are too convoluted for you to capture and prosecute us.
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