I have to confess. The simple fact is I am involved in an ‘intrigue’. It’s a life-long love affair – with books. While the world is discarding them, and not merely digitising – but consuming and removing them, I am still engaging with joy in the traditional book format. Print has its place, just as art has its mantlepiece. However, the phenotype of the self-confessed bibliophile comes in many forms.
When standing in early morning queues to charity books sales, I like to ask people what they are there for. There are the panicked collectors (desperately seeking first editions or sets of a childhood series), the hobbyist acquirer (‘cookbooks of places we travelled to’), the impoverished students (‘wow – the collected works of Bertrand Russell for $5), the obscure historians (‘Churchill 1951-55’) and the loving parents of voracious mini-learners (‘give me a box for $20’). On entry, they disperse to the four winds of all known human interests. Every one; equally delighted.
My relationship with books is both prosaic and poetic. From my doctoral research I can’t turn down that obscure 1950’s text (now out of print). Having reached peak-book, I now buy a second copy of a life changing work, to give away as favourites (and to fend off desirous borrowings). Knowing close friends’ interests, I’ll find the quirky 1970’s edition of their passion (as their next birthday present).
To be honest, for a few dollars, I’d rather experience an unknown book, than have an unthinking cup of coffee. And the great thing about discard sales, is you can return the purchases back into circulation (and even buy them again on the next occasion).
You can then imagine the dismay, when the next Chapter Choicing inquiry, is not how to write the next section of the Apithology of Humanity Nurturance (AoHN) book – but to realise it isn’t a book!
Now, this is not a surprise.
In 2019 I wrote about the post-literate society and even entered a piece into an annual Art Award – which was ‘The Book Reconstructed’. I re-imagined the reading process, as a ‘yogas of engagement’, that asked something different from us – in somatic, functional, emotional, spiritual and neurological conjunction. What if we took ‘turning the page’ to a new level (different to the flat screens of unpaginated pixels).
In teaching apithology for a decade in a learning community, we recognised that inhabiting an embodied epistemology, was not attainable by ‘reading’ as a synonym for learning. There are over twenty Apithoria on the topic, one being:
Apithoria #5294 ~ “Learning apithology by reading about it, is like experiencing nature, by buying postcards of it.”
Why am I then writing a book about apithology?
Because, dear reader, it is not a ‘book’. It is a spatially orientated set of conceptions that enable a potentiated form of generative structures in the formative domain of humanity-mind. As they say (in present vernacular) – “It is what it is!”.
The writer’s question becomes: What entails, by way of format and presentation, once we relinquish the ‘all knowing reader’ as the recipient of the information?
Learning in apithology is done not as we are, but rather how we become; collectively (i.e. apithagogy). The choicing (all along) was previously framed as being between: increasing elucidation (more words, differently), or greater essentialisation (sophistication of form, distinctively). This is why in apithology there are specific ‘artefact’ forms, and learning to read them, is the practice that enables.
This is the ‘literacy’ of humanity learning – the one that comes after we give away the capacity for thinking individually. There is a double meaning here – in both the recognition that reading is dying as a cognitive capacity – and there is a form of collective inquiry for the knowing that is more than the ‘personal within individuality’. Apithology literacy – engages with both of these trends (knowingly).
This assists the finalisation of content into text for the AoHN book immensely. Instead of writing in one voice for all readers differently, there is a premise of ‘readership’ that is not about ability. It is about the presence in our humanity.
The conclusion to this inquiry – It is acceptable to let go of literary forms held in familiarity, so long as we do not forget, what literacy was for originally.
willvarey (2026)