The Poetics of Space

by Gaston Bachelard

And so, beyond all the positive values of protection, the house we were born in becomes imbued with dream values which remain after the house is gone. Centers of boredom, centers of solitude, centers of daydream group together to constitute the oneiric house which is more lasting than the scattered memories of our birthplace.

two principal connecting themes: 1) A house is imagined as a vertical being. It rises upward. It differentiates itself in terms of its verticality. It is one of the appeals to our consciousness of verticality. 2) A house is imagined as a concentrated being. It appeals to our consciousness of centrality.6

“One’s Paris room, inside its four walls,” wrote Paul Claudel, “is a sort of geometrical site, a conventional hole, which we furnish with pictures, objects and wardrobes within a wardrobe.”13

the house’s situation in the world, which gives us, quite concretely, a variation of the metaphysically summarized situation of man in the world.

attracts us to the center of the house as though to a center of magnetic force, into a major zone of protection.

This valorization of a center of concentrated solitude is so strong, so primitive, and so unquestioned, that the image of the distant light serves as a reference for less clearly localized images.

The lamp is the symbol of prolonged waiting.

We are hypnotized by solitude, hypnotized by the gaze of the solitary house; and the tie that binds us to it is so strong that we begin to dream of nothing but a solitary house in the night.

House and space are not merely two juxtaposed elements of space. In the reign of the imagination, they awaken daydreams in each other, that are opposed.

we know perfectly that we feel calmer and more confident when in the old home, in the house we were born in, than we do in the houses on streets where we have only lived as transients.

And so, faced with the bestial hostility of the storm and the hurricane, the house’s virtues of protection and resistance are transposed into human virtues. The house acquires the physical and moral energy of a human body. It braces itself to receive the downpour, it girds its loins. When forced to do so, it bends with the blast, confident that it will right itself again in time, while continuing to deny any temporary defeats. Such a house as this invites mankind to heroism of cosmic proportions.

Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.

the house remodels man.

a house is first and foremost a geometrical object, one which we are tempted to analyze rationally. Its prime reality is visible and tangible, made of well hewn solids and well fitted framework. It is dominated by straight lines, the plumbline having marked it with its discipline and balance.8 A geometrical object of this kind ought to resist metaphors that welcome the human body and the human soul.

The more simple the engraved house the more it fires my imagination as an inhabitant. It does not remain a mere “representation.” Its lines have force and, as a shelter, it is fortifying. It asks to be lived in simply with all the security that simplicity gives.

The representation of the fictional house is not the absolute intended aim of the written house---the written house also shelters.

Spyridaki’s house breathes. First it is a coat of armor, then it extends ad infinitum, which amounts to saying that we live in it in alternate security and adventure. It is both cell and world. Here, geometry is transcended.

For how forcefully they prove to us that the houses that were lost forever continue to live on in us; that they insist in us in order to live again, as though they expected us to give them a supplement of living. How much better we should live in the old house today! How suddenly our memories assume a living possibility of being! We consider the past, and a sort of remorse at not having lived profoundly enough in the old house fills our hearts, comes up from the past, overwhelms us.

It was a place that was lost in the world. Thus, on the threshold of our space, before the era of our own time, we hover between awareness of being and loss of being. And the entire reality of memory becomes spectral.

The voices of the past do not sound the same in the big room as in the little bed chamber, and calls on the stairs have yet another sound. Among the most difficult memories, well beyond any geometry that can be drawn, we must recapture the quality of the light; then come the sweet smells that linger in the empty rooms, setting an aerial seal on each room in the house of memory. Still farther it is possible to recover not merely the timbre of the voices, “the inflections of beloved voices now silent,” but also the resonance of each room in the sound house.

Late in life, with indomitable courage, we continue to say that we are going to do what we have not yet done: we are going to build a house.

when a poet rubs a piece of furniture—even vicariously—when he puts a little fragrant wax on his table with the woolen cloth that lends warmth to everything it touches, he creates a new object; he increases the object’s human dignity; he registers this object officially as a member of the human household.

When a dreamer can reconstruct the world from an object that he transforms magically through his care of it, we become convinced that everything in the life of a poet is germinal.

The house, even more than the landscape, is a “psychic state,” and even when reproduced as it appears from the outside, it bespeaks intimacy.

Start with this sentence in the essay.

Contrary to metaphor, we can devote our reading being to an image, since it confers being upon us. In fact, the image, which is the pure product of absolute imagination, is a phenomenon of being; it is also one of the specific phenomena of the speaking creature.

M. Carre-Benoit attributed a sort of magic power to these drawers concerning which he said that they were “the foundations of the human mind.”2

Every poet of furniture—even if he be a poet in a garret, and therefore has no furniture—knows that the inner space of an old wardrobe is deep. A wardrobe’s inner space is also intimate space, space that is not open to just anybody.

An anthology devoted to small boxes, such as chests and caskets, would constitute an important chapter in psychology. These complex pieces that a craftsman creates are very evident witnesses of the need for secrecy, of an intuitive sense of hiding-places. It is not merely a matter of keeping a possession well guarded. The lock doesn’t exist that could resist absolute violence, and all locks are an invitation to thieves.

Watch them, rather, in the moment of positive joy that accompanies the opening of a new box, like this young girl who receives implicit permission from her father to hide her secrets; that is to say, to conceal her mystery. In this story by Franz Hellens, two human beings “understand” each other without a word, without knowing it, in fact. Two pent-up human beings communicate by means of the same symbol.

“Everything that touches upon this ineffable experience must remain quite remote, or only give rise to the most cautious handling at some future time. Yes, I must admit that I imagine it taking place one day the way those heavy, imposing seventeenth-century locks work; the kind that filled the entire top of a chest with all sorts of bolts, clamps, bars and levers, while a single, easily turned key pulled this entire apparatus of defense and deterrence from its most central point. But the key is not alone. You know too that the keyholes of such chests are concealed under a button or under a leather tongue which also only responds to some secret pressure.”

The casket contains the things that are unforgettable, unforgettable for us, but also unforgettable for those to whom we are going to give our treasures. Here the past, the present and a future are condensed. Thus the casket is memory of what is immemorial.

In reality, however, the poet has given concrete form to a very general psychological theme, namely, that there will always be more things in a closed, than in an open, box. To verify images kills them, and it is always more enriching to imagine than to experience.

In other words, there is only one place for the superlative element of what is hidden. The hidden in men and the hidden in things belong in the same topoanalysis, as soon as we enter into this strange region of the superlative, which is a region that has hardly been touched by psychology. And to tell the truth, all positivity makes the superlative fall back upon the comparative. To enter into the domain of the superlative, we must leave the positive for the imaginary. We must listen to poets.