The Poetics of Space

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I don't want to mislead you. The Poetics of Space doesn't answer the questions I proposed above. But it does provide tools to help visualize and "place" certain feelings and imaginations. Like American poet and creative writing teacher Richard Hugo who wrote about the need to "locate a home for the impulse to the poem." The Poetics of Space is about cultivating, housing, storing, protecting, and accessing the imagination and the emotions tied to imagination. One of the most resonating passages from the book discusses the concept of the house as a repository of memories: "Memory aids the individual in the dense texture of dreams. It is an abundance of history that the soul loves and by which it is enriched.", Something I couldn't agree more.

This new edition features a foreword by Mark Z. Danielewski, whose bestselling novel House of Leavesdrew inspiration from Bachelard’s writings, and an introduction by internationally renowned philosopher Richard Kearney who explains the book’s enduring importance and its role within Bachelard’s remarkable career. Bachelard] is neither a self-confessed and tortured atheist like Satre, nor, like Chardin, a heretic combining a belief in God with a proficiency in modern science. But, within the French context, he is almost as important as they are because he has a pseudo-religious force, without taking a stand on religion. To define him as briefly as possible – he is a philosopher, with a professional training in the sciences, who devoted most of the second phase of his career to promoting that aspect of human nature which often seems most inimical to science: the poetic imagination …” Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire, trans. Alan C. M. Ross (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 1, 6. Paul Simon was right. Now even the photo has faded. But the song Bachelard inspired my heart to sing hasn’t! Aurosa Alison is a professor of Landscape Aesthetics at Politecnico di Milano and in Digital Aesthetics at the University of Naples, Federico II. She is editor-in-chief of the international journal, Bachelard Studies. Her PhD thesis focussed on Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space.For Baudelaire, man’s poetic fate is to be the mirror of immensity; or even more exactly, immensity becomes conscious of itself, through man. Man for Baudelaire is a vast being”. The Poetics of Space, 215. Cit. in Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 388, n.29. I had the usual rough worldly Baptism by Fire, but I burned only as long as did the mythical Phoenix, rising out of the ashes to the New Life of the Spirit. Isobel Eganis a ceramic artist living and working in Ireland. Her work is included in a number of permanent collections including the National Museum of Ireland, Dublin and the Taipei County Yingge Ceramics Museum, Taiwan.

No, what finally turned me off was the way he blithely extrapolated from his experience growing up in early twentieth-century provincial France to discover profound truths about universal, essential human nature. Almost none of his arguments, none of his conclusions, had any weight with me, since they were all built on assumptions about how we experience space as children that had nothing to do with my own experience, nor the experience of anyone else I knew. After about four chapters, I could no longer see any point continuing on -- I had winnowed out everything there was for me to get from the book, and it wasn't much. Man himself is mute, and it is the image that speaks. For it is obvious that the image alone can keep pace with nature.”Explicit in his ontology of the poetic image, as in surrealist literature and art, is a critique of the ocular privilege accorded by Enlightenment philosophy to geometry and visual evidence. Despite its perceptual sophistication, the eye cannot necessarily go beyond a description of surface: “Sight says too many things at the same time. Being does not see itself. Perhaps it listens to itself.” 12 Space, for Bachelard, is not primarily a container of three-dimensional objects. For this reason the phenomenology of dwelling has little to do with an analysis of “architecture” or design as such: “it is not a question of describing houses, or enumerating their picturesque features and analyzing for which reasons they are comfortable.” 13 Rather, space is the abode of human consciousness, and the problem for the phenomenologist is to study how it accommodates consciousness—or the half-dreaming consciousness Bachelard calls reverie. In this sense, any “application” of Bachelard’s ideas to architecture requires a cautious approach at best. Indeed, Bachelard would undoubtedly argue that almost everything we know about architecture as a historical discipline stands in the way of everything we can know about the poetics of dwelling.

I think it's a book like The Poetics of Space that made architects aware that when you are designing hospitals and hospices, you are not designing cells. You are designing rooms, and the atmosphere of those rooms… it's a particular room that so many people end up in at the end of their lives, which is often a bedroom or a hospital room, and their place is a bed," Worpole said. It is silence, rather, that obliges the poet to listen, and gives the dream greater intimacy. We hardly know where to situate this silence, whether in the vast world or in the immense past. But we do know that it comes from beyond a wind that dies down or a rain that grows gentle.”

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To read and enjoy Bachelard's work takes a great deal of mental visualization, which some people can do more naturally than others, do not be discouraged. For example, his statement that a poet will "seek warmth and the quiet life in the arms of a curve" made me picture Allen Ginsberg on a swing. It takes special conjecture to move further. One has only to look at pictures of ammonites to realize that, as early as the Mesozoic Age, mollusks constructed their shells according to the teachings of a transcendental geometry […] A poet naturally understands this esthetic category of life. Ricœur, Paul (1970). Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-02189-5.

Since its initial publication in 1958, The Poetics of Spacehas been a muse to philosophers, architects, writers, psychologists, critics, and readers alike. The rare work of irresistibly inviting philosophy, Bachelard’s seminal work brims with quiet revelations and stirring, mysterious imagery. This lyrical journey takes as its premise the emergence of the poetic image and finds an ideal metaphor in the intimate spaces of our homes. Guiding us through a stream of meditations on poetry, art, and the blooming of consciousness itself, Bachelard examines the domestic places that shape and hold our dreams and memories. Houses and rooms; cellars and attics; drawers, chests, and wardrobes; nests and shells; nooks and corners: No space is too vast or too small to be filled by our thoughts and our reveries. In Bachelard’s enchanting spaces,“We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.” His analysis of the poetic image is unique and, I think, quite beautiful. The rest of the book is an application of this theory to various poetic images - mostly relating, in some way, to the home. While some of his analyses are compelling, his philosophy is heavily grounded in psychoanalysis. As such, he implicitly argues for the universality of image responses - that these poetic images have certain universal resonances. Given the diversity of human experience, particularly in the 20th and 21st century, I just don't buy it. His evidence is various extracts from poetry in which his images seem to be functioning in the same way - but it strikes me that diligent research could probably turn up any number of counter-examples. I'll accept that what he explores is what the images could be, but I won't go any farther than that. I can understand why so many people consider The Poetics of Space to be such an important book, but I found it rather uneven. The most interesting section, far and away, is the introduction. Bachelard begins the book by laying out his theory of the poetic image. Unlike metaphor, which is merely an intellectual comparison, the true poetic image causes a deep resonance in the reader. Upon glancing a poetic image for the home, for example, all of the homes of the reader's past well up in his imagination. The poetic image makes reading active - experiencing poetry is the mapping of your own memories onto the poet's text. As such, Bachelard's favorite word in the book is "daydreaming" - the course that your mind is set on after reading a particularly resonant image.

And Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality, like mine at 18, found their proper dénouement in the Faith of my Fathers.