Daisy’s Reviews > On Poetic Imagination and Reverie > Status Update

As Rilke says, “in order to write a single verse, one must see many cities, and men and things; one must get to know animals, and the fight of birds, and the gestures that the little flowers make when they open in the morning.”  Each contemplated object, each evocative name we murmur is the point of departure of a dream and of a line, a creative linguistic movement.

…Only an iconoclastic philosopher can undertake that heavy task: detaching all the suffixes from beauty, seeking out behind the visible images the hidden one, going to the very root of the image-producing force.
In the heart of matter there grows an obscure vegetation; in the night of matter black flowers blossom. They already have their velvet and the formula of their scent.

It seems that we could in some way parallel Parain’s very interesting thesis on language by giving to the demonstrating logos a certain depth in which myth and image can subsist. Images also demonstrate, in their own way. And the best proof that their dialectic is objective is that we have just seen an unlikely image impose itself on the conviction of the most diverse writers.

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. 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 that rolls over rocks.

Imagination, even conceived as a free movement, does not lead to delirium; it opens the reality of the imaginary, whose true sign is for Bachelard the emergence of the “happy being.” Each new poetic world is not a pure invention, it is a possibility of nature.

“How can an image, at times very unusual, appear to be a concentration of the entire psyche?” Bachelard asks. “How—with no preparation—can this singular, short-lived event constituted by the appearance of an unusual poetic image, react on other minds and in other hearts, despite all the barriers of common sense, all the disciplined schools of thought, content in their immobility?”

During such moments the essentially paradoxical nature of his mind coincided most perfectly with his charm: speaking in earthy accents, he tended toward ethereal thoughts; what might begin with casual references to the weather or polite inquiries concerning one’s health would end with reflections on the necessity to dream well.
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