The Poetics of Space

by Gaston Bachelard

As for me, I let myself be caught. I followed the molding.

For it is a poetic fact that a dreamer can write of a curve that it is warm.

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.

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 mount and descend in the words themselves—this is a poet’s life. To mount too high or descend too low is allowed in the case of poets, who bring earth and sky together. Must the philosopher alone be condemned by his peers always to live on the ground floor?

“Reader, study the periwinkle in detail, and you will see how detail increases an object’s stature.”

In two lines, this man with a magnifying glass expresses an important psychological law. He situates us at a sensitive point of objectivity, at the moment when we have to accept unnoticed detail, and dominate it.

The man with the magnifying glass takes the world as though it were quite new to him.

A scientific worker has a discipline of objectivity that precludes all daydreams of the imagination.

The dreamer sends waves of unreality over what was formerly the real world.

To use a magnifying glass is to pay attention, but isn’t paying attention already having a magnifying glass?

For with an “exaggerated” image we are sure to be in the direct line of an autonomous imagination.

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.

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.

(Her secret was Listening to flowers Wear out their color.)

But even when they start from psychology, the turning away from psychological impressions to poetic expression is sometimes so subtle that one is tempted to attribute a basis of psychological reality to what is pure expression.

But Moreau was not taken in, and he notes that he quoted the poet’s words “in spite of the poetic exaggeration that marks them, and which it is useless to point out.” But then, for whom is this document intended? For the psychologist, or for the philosopher, who is interested in the poetic human being? In other words, is it the hashish or the poet that exaggerates? Alone, the hashish would not have succeeded in exaggerating so well. And we quiet readers, whose knowledge of hashish impressions has been acquired through literary proxy, would not hear colors shudder if a poet had not known how to make us listen, not to say, super-listen.

(The odor of silence is so old . . .)

As life grows older, we are besieged by many a silence!

And where is the root of silence? Is it a distinction of non-being, or a domination of being? It is “deep.” But where is the root of its depth? In the universe where sources about to be born are praying, or in the heart of a man who has suffered?

(Space has always reduced me to silence.)

When you felt so alone and abandoned in the presence of the sea, imagine what solitude the waters must have felt in the night, or the night’s own solitude in a universe without end!”

the range of sensibility from one dreamer to the other rarely coincides.

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.

To give an object poetic space is to give it more space than it has objectivity; or, better still, it is following the expansion of its intimate space.

“these mountains in shreds, these dunes and dead rivers, these stones and this merciless sun,” all the universe that bears the mark of the desert is “annexed to inner space.” And through this annexation, the diversity of the images is unified in the depths of “inner space.”

The being-here is maintained by a being from elsewhere. Space, vast space, is the friend of being.

How much philosophers would learn, if they would consent to read the poets!

the heightened beauty of a reflected landscape presented as the very root of cosmic narcissism.

“A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.”32

Immensity has been magnified through contemplation. And the contemplative attitude is such a great human value that it confers immensity upon an impression that a psychologist would have every reason to declare ephemeral and special.

everything takes form, even infinity.

Entrapped in being, we shall always have to come out of it. And when we are hardly outside of being, we always have to go back into it. Thus, in being, everything is circuitous, roundabout, recurrent, so much talk; a chaplet of sojournings, a refrain with endless verses.

Everything, even size, is a human value, and we have already shown, in a preceding chapter, that miniature can accumulate size. It is vast in its way.

And we are in hell, and a part of us is always in hell, walled-up, as we are, in the world of evil intentions.

“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.

Limitless night ceases to be empty space.