The Poetics of Space

by Gaston Bachelard

And yet, as it is, the text quoted by Sartre is a valuable one, because it designates topoanalytically, that is, in terms of space and experience of outside and inside, the two directions that psychoanalysts refer to as introvert and extrovert: before life, before the passions, in the very pattern of existence, the novelist encounters this duality. The lightning-like thought that the

little girl in the story has found in herself comes to her as she leaves her “house.”

Here we have a cogito of emergence without our having been given the cogito of a being withdrawn into itself; the more or less sombre cogito of a being who first plays at making itself a “Dutch stove,” like Descartes, a sort of chimerical home, in a corner of a boat. The child has just discovered that she is herself, in an explosion toward the outside, which is a reaction, perhaps, to c...

elytra

Yet in such daydreams as these the past is very old indeed. For they reach into the great domain of the undated past.

Having crossed the countless little thresholds of the disorder of things that are reduced to dust, these souvenir-objects set the past in order, associating condensed motionlessness with far distant voyages into a world that is no more.

People never tire of recalling that Leonardo da Vinci advised painters who lacked inspiration when faced with nature, to contemplate with a reflective eye the crack in an old wall! For there is a map of the universe in the lines that time draws on these old walls. And each of us has seen a few lines on the ceiling that appeared to chart a new continent.

The critical mind can do nothing about this. For it is a poetic fact that a dreamer can write of a curve that it is warm. But does anyone think that Bergson did not exceed meaning when he attributed grace to curves and, no doubt, inflexibility to straight lines? Why is it worse for us to say that an angle is cold and a curve warm? That the curve welcomes us and the oversharp angle rejects us? That the angle is masculine and the curve feminine? A modicum of quality changes everything. The grace of a curve is an invitation to remain. We cannot break away from it without hoping to return. For the beloved curve has nest-like powers; it incites us to possession, it is a curved “corner,” inhabited geometry. Here we have attained a minimum of refuge, in the highly simplified pattern of a daydream of repose. But only the dreamer who curls up in contemplation of loops understands these simple joys of delineated repose.

topophilia;

In other words, the tiny things we imagine simply take us back to childhood, to familiarity with toys and the reality of toys.

And to get out of prison all means are good ones. If need be, mere absurdity can be a source of freedom.

felicitous

oneiric

Miniature is one of the refuges of greatness.

prestidigitation,

elucidate

All small things must evolve slowly, and certainly a long period of leisure, in a quiet room, was needed to miniaturize the world.

antediluvian

diastole

But we haven’t time, in this world of ours, to love things and see them at close range, in the plenitude of their smallness.

pineal

The evening lamp on the family table is also the center of a world. In fact, the lamp-lighted table is a little world in itself, and a dreamer-philosopher may well fear lest our indirect lighting cause us to lose the center of the evening room.

images of immensity, we should realize within ourselves the pure being of pure imagination. It then becomes clear that works of art are the by-products of this existentialism of the imagining being. In this direction of daydreams of immensity, the real product is consciousness of enlargement. We feel that we have been promoted to the dignity of the admiring being.

We then return to the natural activity of our magnifying being.

Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone. As soon as we become motionless, we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world that is immense. Indeed, immensity is the movement of motionless man. It is one of the dynamic characteristics of quiet daydreaming.

When a relaxed spirit meditates and dreams, immensity seems to expect images of immensity. The mind sees and continues to see objects, while the spirit finds the nest of immensity in an object. We shall have various proofs of this if we follow the daydreams that the single word vast inspired in Baudelaire. Indeed, “vast” is one of the most Baudelairian of words, the word that marks most naturally, for this poet, infinity of intimate space.

In the text that follows, any number of factors may be found that could be used for a phenomenology of extension, expansion and ecstasy. But after having been lengthily prepared by Baudelaire, we have now come upon the formula that must be put in the center of our phenomenological observations: “immensity with no other setting than itself.” Concerning this immensity, Baudelaire has just told us in detail, that it is a conquest of intimacy.

When the dreamer really experiences the word “immense,” he sees himself liberated from his cares and thoughts, even from his dreams. He is no longer shut up in his weight, the prisoner of his own being.

And the fact is that always, in Baudelaire’s poetics, the word vast evokes calm, peace and serenity. It expresses a vital, intimate conviction. It transmits to our ears the echo of the secret recesses of our being. For this word bears the mark of gravity, it is the enemy of turmoil, opposed to the vocal exaggerations of declamation. In diction enslaved to strict measure, it would be shattered. The word vast must reign over the peaceful silence of being.

If I were a psychiatrist, I should advise my patients who suffer from “anguish” to read this poem of Baudelaire’s whenever an attack seems imminent. Very gently, they should pronounce Baudelaire’s key word, vast. For it is a word that brings calm and unity; it opens up unlimited space. It also teaches us to breathe with the air that rests on the horizon, far from the walls of the chimerical prisons that are the cause of our anguish.

And when I let my nonconformist philosopher’s daydreams go unchecked, I begin to think that the vowel a is the vowel of immensity. It is a sound area that starts with a sigh and extends beyond all limits.

Poets will help us to discover within ourselves such joy in looking that sometimes, in the presence of a perfectly familiar object, we experience an extension of our intimate space.

The two kinds of space, intimate space and exterior space, keep encouraging each other, as it were, in their growth.

In fact, his “inner space” is an adherence to an inner substance. As it happens, he has had long, delightful experience of deep-sea diving and, for him, the ocean has become a form of “space.” At a little over 125 feet under the surface of the water, he discovered “absolute depth,” depth that is beyond measuring, and would give no greater powers of dream and thought if it were doubled or even tripled. By means, then, of his diving experiences Diolé really entered into the volume of the water.

One substance, one dimension. And we are so remote from the earth and life on earth, that this dimension of water bears the mark of limitlessness.

This change of concrete space can no longer be a mere mental operation that could be compared with consciousness of geometrical relativity. For we do not change place, we change our nature.

Philosophers, when confronted with outside and inside, think in terms of being and non-being.

excrescences.

agglutination.

Sight says too many things at one time. Being does not see itself. Perhaps it listens to itself. It does not stand out, it is not bordered by nothingness: one is never sure of finding it, or of finding it solid, when one approaches a center of being. And if we want to determine man’s being, we are never sure of being closer to ourselves if we “withdraw” into ourselves, if we move toward the center of the spiral; for often it is in the heart of being that being is errancy. Sometimes, it is in being outside itself that being tests consistencies. Sometimes, too, it is closed in, as it were, on the outside. Later, I shall give a poetic text in which the prison is on the outside.

In a letter to Clara Rilke, Rilke wrote: “Works of art always spring from those who have faced the danger, gone to the very end of an experience, to the point beyond which no

human being can go. The further one dares to go, the more decent, the more personal, the more unique a life becomes.”

How concrete everything becomes in the world of the spirit when an object, a mere door, can give images of hesitation, temptation, desire, security, welcome and respect.

Thus, without commentary, Van Gogh wrote: “Life is probably round.”

They will express surprise that this being we seek to characterize in its intimate truth should be so ingenuously handed over to geometricians, whose thinking is exterior thinking.

This is why, from my standpoint, these expressions are marvels of phenomenology.

I should say, therefore: das Dasein ist rund, being is round.

In fact, it is not a question of observing, but of experiencing being in its immediacy.

Sometimes we find ourselves in the presence of a form that guides and encloses our earliest dreams. For a painter, a tree is composed in its roundness. But a poet continues the dream from higher up. He knows that when a thing becomes isolated, it becomes round, assumes a figure of being that is concentrated upon itself.

The world is round around the round being.