It’s not an omen or a emblem, it’s an an insect. It has nothing to do with (for instance) hope. There’s a reason why the sermon is no longer a living literary genre. But
emblem
Consciousness: an eye catches itself in the act of being seen

Walbrook, thou shouldst be living at this hour
Shirtless young man, in profile. Shaved head, with earring. Obese hairless body, with perhaps a dozen tattoos plus several ornamental keloids. If the creature is looking at anything in particular, it’s been cropped out of the image. If he has any particular expression on his face, it’s inscrutable. Caption: “James on the bank of the James river, Richmond, Virginia, 2012.”
The monochrome image, from Vanessa Winship’s book She Dances on Jackson, comes to us online from a blogpost by the Australian photographer Gary Sauer-Thompson at
http://www.sauer-thompson.com/junkforcode/archives/2013/05/vanessa-winship.html#more
It’s followed by this comment (by Winship? by Sauer-Thompson?): “The loneliness and melancholy in American life is created by the pursuit of the American dream.”
Perhaps the comment might be more fastidiously convincing if its verb form were corrected from is to are. But what it fundamentally lacks is an audio. The pronoun “You Americans” is required by cliché tradition in a caption like this one, and it should preferably be spoken in a Viennese accent through a cloud of cigarette smoke. In my ideal fantasy the speaker is the late Anton Walbrook, speaking as he immortally spoke in The Red Shoes: “Vun does nut keh to prrhectice vunce rrrrhelichn in an atmosphère such ez ZIS.”
Accompanied by language such as that, both the caption and its image could get interesting.
In the meantime, however, look. Look, see, and revere the emblem of the term obiter dictum, with Moira Shearer immortally reflected in its shades.
A letter to English 434: yes, literature thinks of itself as architecture
In the classical era, Horace ends his Odes with a vaunt: Exegi monumentum aere perennius, “I have built a monument whose bronze is everlasting.” Centuries later, the romantic Ralph Waldo Emerson ends his “Nature” with the same metaphor of construction:
Adam called his house, heaven and earth; Caesar called his house, Rome; you perhaps call yours, a cobler’s trade; a hundred acres of ploughed land; or a scholar’s garret. Yet line by line and point for point, your dominion is as great as theirs, though without fine names. Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions.
Sometimes, too, literature and architecture have been erected side by side, in a way that’s explicitly interchangeable. That was the case with the stained glass windows of medieval churches, whose illustrations of sacred literature were called “the books of the poor.” With poetic economy, Milton’s Penseroso calls them “storied windows.” The interchangeability is fully reversible, too: building as book, book as building. Click this example to enlarge it for detail.
What you see here on the title page of the first edition of the King James Bible (1611) is a literature which asks us to live in it as if it were a building. The building is specifically a church: a church whose storied stones have been shaped into a work of literature. Unifying the building’s decorative detail is a single visual metaphor depicting the text as a church portal open to the words calling out to us from within, from just behind this page: a text reading itself out to us as “The Holy Bible, Conteyning the Old Testament, and the New.”
Flanking the door are Moses and Aaron, the two lawgivers of the Old Testament. On their paper page, the two men are to be read as architectural ornaments made of stone, each one in a niche under a bracket which holds up a frieze of the tents and coats of arms of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Above that storied rooftop detail is unwalled heaven, with its two lights, sun and moon, and the source of illumination expressing itself in Hebrew letters as the Name of God. Below that undepictable utterance, the story of the Trinity is incarnated for us to experience with the senses as a pair of picture stories: an image of the Holy Ghost as a dove and an image of the Son as the sacrificial Lamb of God. Around the Lamb sit the Twelve Apostles, each one telling his story of himself with the help of an iconic attribute, and in the corners of the image sit the Four Evangelists, writing. Each of the writers has a story-telling iconic companion, too: Matthew with his angel, Mark with his lion, Luke with his ox, and John with his eagle. And finally, at the bottom, on the stairs, is the Eucharistic image of the pelican, whose story is a legend of a mother who feeds her young with her own blood.
English majors, remember big-talking Laertes in Hamlet referring to himself with characteristic bluster as “the kind life-rendering pelican.” Remember too that Shakespeare is exactly contemporary with this picture guidebook to the architecture of heaven. And one more time: the stairs depicted in the guidebook lead up to a door. The door opens to show us that it is the tenor of a religious metaphor. The vehicle of the metaphor, the image that communicates the tenor to us, is architectural. So yes: it probably does matter that we’re learning about modernist literature this semester inside a building which derives from modernism but gets its own defining metaphors all wrong.