I drink and devour and dream. Bachelard says it himself;
“We never finish dreaming the poem, never finish thinking it. And sometimes there comes a great line, one charged with such pain or such thought that the reader - the solitary reader- murmurs: on that day, I shall read no further” p. 28
I haven’t read a man who exalts such emotion, such an attunement to the unseen, to all the ignored matter beyond the human eye, who attempts to hint at the beauty missing rather than seen. His explorations of a worldview missing poetry and heralding analytical thinking feel deeply ahead of his time.
I wonder what element I am.
I must ask Rosie.
This is Dad’s book. I came in red hot cynical and left levitating.
I prefer my reverie over my dreams. I like lucid longings, they are present.
I didn’t finish the second half because he lost me at a few wanky essays dedicated to Nietczche’s genius.
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“The less we know, the more we name” - Bachelard, p. 157. PF.
- depth psychology, Freud and post-Freudian
- Elements favoured by alchemists (fire, air, water, and earth). First command of bachelards attention is fire
At the level of elemental relationship between object and subject, “dream is stronger than experiment” PF p.46- introduction xxxvii
“Metaphors evoke one another and are coordinated more than sensations, so that a poetic mind is purely and simply a syntax of metaphors” PF, 213. This “inspired monotony” of images points to a possible structure of oneiric life oriented by material elements.
Came to reject Freud and his focus on “causes”. Favours Jung and his concept of archetypes, which places symbols in the subconscious.
For Jung, an archetype of not an image- it is psychic energy spontaneously condensing the results of organic and ancestral experiences into images; it can be designated as the paradigm of a series of images. Introduction, xxxviii
Bachelard prefers reverie to nocturnal dreams. He also dismisses the idea of “common symbols of every man”.
It is only when they are taken up by great poets that old myths and old worlds regain their significance. For Bachelard, imagination must infuse a second life into familiar images, it must create “metaphors of metaphors” Inteoduction xl
Phenomenology is a philosophy of experience. For phenomenology the ultimate source of all meaning and value is the lived experience of human beings. All philosophical systems, scientific theories, or aesthetic judgments have the status of abstractions from the ebb and flow of the lived world. - google.
Images are not things. Images are “lived”, “experienced”, “re-imagined” in an act of consciousness which restores at once their timelessness and their newness. Therefore a poetic image does not duplicate present reality, and is not the echo of the past; it can be provoked by occasional circumstances, but has no true causes. The best way to study images is to explore their power of trans-subjectivity. They reverberate in the reader’s consciousness and lead him to create anew while communicating with the poet.” introduction xli
Bachelard believes meaning does not precede words. Very logo-centric Derrida would have a field day. But also beautiful. “Truly, words dream” PR, p.16
He shows that language which speaks of water absorbs “the lessons of the stream”; water becomes a “most faithful mirror of voices” p. xliii introduction.
“In contrast, for Bachelard, matter becomes the provocation of a basic relationship between subject and object, and the “mother substance” of all dreams. .. “sometimes, even when i touch things, i still dream of an element” (PS, p. xxxiv)
He believes certain people are defined by one element, “He who listens to the stream cannot be expected to understand the one who hears the singing of the flame” (PF. p. 178).
“Material imagination is “this amazing need for penetration which, going beyond the attractions of the imagination of forms, thinks matter, dreams in it, lives in it, or in other words, materialised the imaginary” AS, p. 14
“Water itself dreams”
Bachelard repeatedly denounces the temptation to favor images over imagination. For example, the symbol of the wing is too static to communicate the conviction of airy light; rather, it is flight’s logical embellishment.” P. xlviii
- imagination is autonomous in relation to perception, and also precedes perception - imagination is apriori to any psychological function
- Terror is present before he monster, nausea before the fall
- Poetry illustrates the metaphysics of creative imagination (intro, xlix)
- function of unreality vs function of reality “a being deprived of the function of unreality is neurotic as well as a being deprived of the function of the real… if the function of opening out, which is precisely the function of imagination, does not perform well, perception itself remains obtuse” (AS 164)
- Images properly fuse emotion and symbol operate neither at the surface of things nor the surface of language, “the poet does not describe, he exalts things” (PR, 164)
- Man realises himself only by reaching beyond himself
- “I would like so much to show that poetry is a synthesizing force for human existence!” (PR, 107).
- “Imagination is a tree” TR, p. 300. It is capable of integrating earth and sky, reality and ideal.
Bachelard expands the well known theory of correspondences, which he thinks more faithful to the dynamism of imagination than Rimbaud’s alchemy. “A doctrine of imagined qualities must not only achieve the Baudelairian synthesis by adding to it the deepest organic aspects of consciousness, it must also emphasise a daring, proliferating sensuousness, intoxicated with inexactitude” (TR, p. 81)
Bachelard’s poetics opens into an ethic of joy - “anguish is artificial: we were meant to breathe freely” (PR, p. 22)
“What is the source of our first suffering? It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak… it was born in the moments when we accumulated silent things within us.” (ER, 262).
“The brook will nonetheless teach you to speak, in spite of sorrows and memories, it will teach you euphoria through euphuism, energy through the poem. It will repeat incessantly some beautiful, round word which rolls over rocks” (ER 262)
“We have only to speak of an object to consider ourselves objective. But, by our very act of choice, the object designates us more than we designate it, and what we consider our fundamental thoughts about the world are often an avowed of our immaturity of mind” - Two aspects of a career, science and poetry, the permanence of reverie p.3
“The axes of poetry and science are opposed from the start. All that philosophy can hope is to make poetry and science complementary, to unite them as two well chosen contraries” p. 4
“What i am looking for in history is this permanent document, the evidence of a resistance to psychological evolution: the old man within the young child, the young child in the old man, the alchemist behind the engineer” p. 5
The polarity of imagination and reason:
- masculine and feminine signs of the concept and the image
- “It might even be a good idea to stir up competition between conceptual and imaginative activity. In any case, all efforts to make them cooperate are doomed to disappointment. The image cannot give matter to the concept; the concept, by giving stability to the image, would stifle its existence” p. 6
- “Intellectual criticism of poetry will never lead to the center where poetic images are formed. We must avoid ordering the image as a hypnotist orders his somnabulistic subject” p.7
- “to listen to the somniloquy of the dreamer” p. 7
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Creative imagination and language:
- images form along two lines - exposure to the new, the unexpected event
- and the other is the depths of being, at once primitive and eternal, rising above seasons and history
- formal imagination vs. material imagination
- Images of the heart must become formal
- “They have weight, they are a heart”
- the individualising power of matter
- Matter vs form, material vs formal
- “Poetic images, too, have their matter”.
Matter is dreamed and not perceived
- look
Imagination is the function of unreality.
“Imagination is not, as its etymology might suggest, the faculty of forming images which go beyond reality, which sing reality” p. 15
“A man must be defined by the tendencies which impel him to go beyond the human condition” p.16
“Here, in this commitment to the invisible, is the original poetry, the poetry that gives us our first taste of our inner destiny” p. 16
“The poem is essentially an aspiration to new images. It corresponds to this essential need for newness that characterises the human psyche” p.20
- images lose their imaginary power through repetition
“To acquire a feeling for the imaginative role of language, we must patiently seek, in every word, the desires for otherness, for double meaning, for metaphor” p.2
“To perceive and to imagine are as antithetical as presence and absence. To imagine is to absent oneself; it is a leap toward a new life” p. 21
“The dreamer drifts away” - imagination requires a voyage, a presence, not just reverie, we need a movement of imagination and dynamic reverie
“A beautiful poem is opium or alcohol. It is nutrient for the nerves. It must cause a dynamic induction in us.” P. 22
“How often has the universe suddenly answered. O my things, how we have talked!” P. 23
“The very law of poetic expression is to go beyond thought” p. 23
“We can classify poets by asking them to answer the question: “tell me what your infinite is and ill know the meaning of your universe: is it the infinite of the sea or the sky, is it the infinite of the earth’s depths or the pyre?” p. 23
- prosody
- undulations
- sudden accents
- prose poetry
“From the standpoint of its will to shape expression, the literary image is a physical reality which has its own relief” p. 28
“We never finish dreaming the poem, never finish thinking it. And sometimes there comes a great line, one charged with such pain or such thought that the reader - the solitary reader- murmurs: on that day, I shall read no further” p. 28
“The will must imagine too much in order to realize enough” p. 30
“At times, some really diverse images, which we believe hostile, incongruous, disintegrative, become blended into a ravishing image. The strangest mosaics of surrealism suddenly take on continuity of movement.” P. 32, the poetics of metamorphoses
- groups of metaphors in a poem, how they relate and ignite each other
“In order for a reverie to continue with enough persistence to produce a written work, for it to be more than the simple vacuous pastime of a fleeting moment, it must find its matter…” p. 35, the oneiric source of aesthetics
“… the least settled sojourns…” p. 36
“The crab would rather lose its claw than loosen its hold…. one must live to pinch, and not pinch to live” p. 40
“… vital synergy…” p. 41
Haha he loves Nietzsche 🤣
- material poetics related to the elements ie. water , but in a way that is ‘natural’ to human condition, whereas dynamic poetics uses elements still, but in a way that twists them; it’s not an expected use. Ie. Nietzsche poem “you womanly, wondrous waves, are you enraged against me?” P. 44