The Poetics of Space

by Gaston Bachelard

A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability.

Great images have both a history and a prehistory; they are always a blend of memory and legend, with the result that we never experience an image directly.

Isn’t it true that a pleasant house makes winter more poetic, and doesn’t winter add to the poetry of a house?

— Baudelaire

A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.

But if a house is a living value, it must integrate an element of unreality. All values must remain vulnerable, and those that do not are dead.

The minute we apply a glimmer of consciousness to a mechanical gesture, or practice phenomenology while polishing a piece of old furniture, we sense new impressions come into being beneath this familiar domestic duty.

To begin with, all words do an honest job in our everyday language, and not even the most ordinary among them, those that are attached to the most commonplace realities, lose their poetic possibilities as a result of this fact.

Now a metaphor gives concrete substance to an impression that is difficult to express. Metaphor is related to a psychic being from which it differs. An image, on the contrary, product of absolute imagination, owes its entire being to the imagination.

But from the moment the casket is opened, dialectics no longer exist. The outside is effaced with one stroke, an atmosphere of novelty and surprise reigns. The outside has no more meaning.

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.

The action of the secret passes continually from the hider of things ...

Thus values alter facts. The moment we love an image, it cannot remain the copy of a fact.

The surest sign of wonder is exaggeration.

Man lives by images. Like all important verbs, to emerge from would demand considerable research in the course of which, besides concrete examples, one would collect the hardly perceptible movements of certain abstractions. We sense little or no more action in grammatical derivations, deductions or inductions. Even verbs become congealed as if they were nouns. Only images can set verbs in motion again.

I shall ask the reader to note that the word as is stronger than the word like, which as it happens, would omit a phenomenological nuance. The word like imitates, whereas the word as implies that one becomes the person who dreams the daydream.

Images that are too clear—here we have an example—become generalities, and for that reason block the imagination.

Nature seems to enjoy contradicting natural morality.

the French proverb: Qui vole un oeuf, enlève un boeuf16 (He who steals an egg will carry off an ox).

the imagination, by virtue of its freshness and its own peculiar activity, can make what is familiar into what is strange. With a single poetic detail, the imagination confronts us with a new world. From then on, the detail takes precedence over the panorama, and a simple image, if it is new, will open up an entire world. If looked at through the thousand windows of fancy, the world is in a state of constant change.

By solving small problems, we teach ourselves to solve large ones.

I am moreover convinced that the human psyche contains nothing th...

And when a philosopher looks to poets, to a great poet like Milosz, for lessons in how to individualize the world, he soon becomes convinced that the world is not so much a noun as an adjective. If we were to give the imagination its due in the philosophical systems of the universe, we should find, at their very source, an adjective. Indeed, to those who want to find the essence of a world philosophy, one could give the following advice—look for its adjective.

The intellectualist philosopher who wants to hold words to their precise meaning, and uses them as the countless little tools of clear thinking, is bound to be surprised by the poet’s daring.

a syncretism of sensitivity keeps words from crystallizing into perfect solids. Unexpected adjectives collect about the focal meaning of the noun.

Language dreams.

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.

Common-sense lives on the ground floor, always ready to engage in “foreign commerce,” on the same level as the others, as the passers-by, who are never dreamers. To go upstairs in the word house is to withdraw, step by step; while to go down to the cellar is to dream, it is losing oneself in the distant corridors of an obscure etymology, looking for treasures that cannot be found in words.

To make others believe, we must believe ourselves.

one could say, in the manner of Schopenhauer: “The world is my imagination.”

The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I possess it. But in doing this, it must be understood that values become condensed and enriched in miniature. Platonic dialectics of large and small do not suffice for us to become cognizant of the dynamic virtues of miniature thinking. One must go beyond logic in order to experience what is large in what is small.

Here the mind that imagines follows the opposite path of the mind that observes, the imagination does not want to end in a diagram that summarizes acquired learning. It seeks a pretext to multiply images, and as soon as the imagination is interested by an image, this increases its value.

From the standpoint of the imagination, he was not “wrong”; the imagination is never wrong, since it does not have to confront an image with an objective reality.

Indeed, there is a sort of innate optimism in all works of the imagination. Gérard de Nerval wrote, in Aurélia (p. 41): “I believe that the human imagination never invented anything that was not true, in this world or any other.”

But the unhurried reader—I personally hope for no others—undoubtedly

Too often the world designated by philosophy is merely a non-I, its vastness an accumulation of negativities. But the philosopher proceeds too quickly to what is positive, and appropriates for himself the World, a World that is unique of its kind. Such formulas as: being-in-the-world and world-being are too majestic for me and I do not succeed in experiencing them.

A fairy tale is a reasoning image. It tends to associate extraordinary images as though they could be coherent images, imparting the conviction of a primal image to an entire ensemble of derivative images.

I once read somewhere that a hermit who was watching his hour-glass without praying heard noises that split his eardrums. He suddenly heard the catastrophe of time, in the hour-glass. The tick tock of our watches is so mechanically jerky that we no longer have ears subtle enough to hear the passage of time.

In general, too, facts do not explain values. And in works of the poetic imagination, values bear the mark of such novelty that everything related to the past is lifeless beside them.

All memory has to be reimagined. For we have in our memories micro-films that can only be read if they are lighted by the bright light of the imagination.

For it is not possible to concentrate on human problems in the face of a cosmos in danger.

Because all flowers speak and sing, even those we draw, and it is impossible to remain unsociable when we draw a flower or a bird.

All solitary dreamers know that they hear differently when they close their eyes. And when we want to think hard, to listen to the inner voice, or compose the tightly constructed key sentence that will express the very core of our thinking, is there one of us who hasn’t his thumb and forefinger pressed firmly against his lids? The ear knows then that the eyes are closed, it knows that it is responsible for the being who is thinking and writing. Relaxation will come when the eyes are reopened.

But to determine the metaphysics of all that transcends our perceptive life would require a different type of research. Particularly, if we were to describe how silence affects not only man’s time and speech, but also his very being, it would fill a large volume. Fortunately, this volume exists. I recommend Max Picard’s The World of Silence.

In the vast world of the non-I, the non-I of fields is not the same as the non-I of forests. The forest is a before-me, before-us, whereas for fields and meadows, my dreams and recollections accompany all the different phases of tilling and harvesting. When the dialectics of the I and the non-I grow more flexible, I feel that fields and meadows are with me, in the with-me, with-us. But forests reign in the past.

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.

The French baritone, Charles Panzera, who is sensitive to poetry, once told me that, according to certain experimental psychologists, it is impossible to think the vowel sound ah without a tautening of the vocal chords. In other words, we read ah and the voice is ready to sing.

But we should have to learn how to meditate very slowly, to experience the inner poetry of the word, the inner immensity of a word. All important words, all the words marked for grandeur by a poet, are keys to the universe, to the dual universe of the Cosmos and the depths of the human spirit.

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

Poetic space, because it is expressed, assumes values of expansion.