POETICS OF SPACE / Downstairs at Memory Lake
I'm loath to share fragments of a dream but it gave me insight into my current reading so deal.
Reading, a few pages deciphered in each 25-minute block I spend with it, Gaston Bachelard's THE POETICS OF SPACE and have a first, probably mistaken, impression.
Though writing of imagination, it feels as though he's describing a memory palace – "...this simple localization of our memories" – a poetic Sherlock Holmes. This stands out:
"When we dream of the house we were born in, in the utmost depths of revery, we participate in this original warmth, in this well-tempered matter of the material paradise... Our daydreams carry us back to it." – Gaston Bachelard, THE POETICS OF SPACE, p. 29.
As does:
"To inhabit oneirically the house we were born in means more than to inhabit it in memory; it means living in this house that is gone, the way we used to dream in it." – Bachelard, p. 38.
Dreamt last night not of my childhood home, that place is long – and mercifully – gone, mostly bad memories, but of my grandparents' house on the lake. Saw the rooms again, smelled them, felt them – "the odor of raisins drying on a wicker tray," as Bachelard says – and, even though said rooms were filled with angry koalas and an escaped tiger (I have no idea, might have had a low blood sugar in the middle of the night), I woke up smiling. My grandmother, long gone, was there too – as was her dog, Benji, a walk-on who lived to 22 –, freaked out about the koalas and the tiger but hey - he was thrilled to see me — and, while my
Grandmother refused to go downstairs (aforementioned koalas and tigers), I went and that's when the memories, the "raisins drying," really came out. I woke up remembering — remembering what it felt like to be home. Dammit, I miss that place – but, if I can erect it in my mind, if I can bring it back to life, deck by deck, smell by smell, maybe it becomes the place to which I can return, even if I'll never physically set foot in it again...
"... For nowhere with more quiet or with more freedom from trouble does a man retire than into his own soul..." – Marcus Aurelius, MEDITATIONS, IV-3.
... flawed reading or angry koalas be damned.
