Nicole’s Reviews > Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter > Status Update

(Introduction by Richard Kearney)
"To imagine going down into the water or wandering in the desert is to change space; and to change space is to change being."

(introduction by Richard Kearney)
"Bachelard is in his element in politics, and his politics is of the elements: water, fire, air and earth."

(Introduction by Richard Kearney)
"The world itself dreams, he said, and we help give it voice. The image is the specific phenomena of the speaking creature. The highest act of imagination is the will to attune oneself to the saying of being itself."

(Introduction by Richard Kearney)
Politics comes from 'poiesis', meaning "to make", and for Bachelard this is a two-way process: we are made by material images that we remake in our turn. We are inhabited by deep imaginings—visual and verbal, auditory and tactile—that we reinhabit in our own unique way. Poetics is about hearing and feeling as well as crafting and shaping. It is the double play of re-creation."

(Introduction by Richard Kearney)
"Our soul is an abode and by remembering 'houses' and 'rooms' we learn to abide within ourselves."

(Notes)
1. Referring to Anna Teresa Tymieniecka's book 'Phenomenology and Science', we can say that for Minkowski, the essence of life is not a 'feeling of being, of existence' but a feeling of participation in a flowing onward, necessarily expressed in time in terms of time, and secondarily expressed in terms of space.

(Introduction by Richard Kearney)
"[...] Bachelard shows us ways of dwelling again in the flesh of space, of dreaming our homes as nests and shells, of reimagining hidden gardens and caverns where we can delve back into a world of natality, newness, beginning.

(Introduction by Richard Kearney)
"Now more than ever we have need for intimacy, secrets, sites of interiority and contemplation where we can practice what Baudelaire—one of Bachelard's favourite poets—called the art of "fertile laziness" (la paresse féconde)."

(Introduction by Mark Z. Danielewski)
"For language is both image and text. The one tool we have capable of transcending both."

(Introduction by Mark Z. Danielewski)
"A house... allows the poet to inhabit the universe
...the universe comes to inhabit his house."