cover image The Oculatum: A Book of Great Insight for Those Who Wish to See

The Oculatum: A Book of Great Insight for Those Who Wish to See

Butler Yates. Dutton Books, $19.95 (216pp) ISBN 978-0-525-94717-2

Each page of this high-concept compendium contains a four-line proverb (usually under 10 words), with another one beneath it printed upside down. Thus the book has, according to Dutton's introduction,""no beginning and no end;"" it may be read front to back, or, upside down, back to front. Format, then, trumps content, for""it is of no consequence that the reader remember, understand or comprehend the phrase; it matters only that it be read."" The proverbs are the basis of an incantatory ceremony that promotes""clarity."" Each day one is to be chosen at random, and read or uttered six times in succession three times in the day; six days of this should heighten one's""focus and awareness."" Said to descend from 16th-century antecedents, the book is motivated by a mystical sensibility that eschews linear narrative, imputes hidden significance to random processes and draws meaning from ritual practice rather than cognition. But although written in a rather archaic syntax, the proverbs are not at all mysterious. Such fortune-cookie aphorisms as""From dark night comes dawn light,""""Discard not the old till the new is proved"" and""Loan no coin to friend save you lose both,"" are all too easy to comprehend after just one reading, let alone eighteen.