The Poetics of Space

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I was thinking of how to explain why I love reading Bachelard so much, and the best I can come up with for now is my love for his unusually deep way of thinking. This book, like others I have read of his, delves into the poetry of experience. In this book he approached space, as in the places that surround us and that we occupy. In the table of contents: The House: from cellar to garret; House & Universe; Drawers, Chests and Wardrobes; Nests; Shells; Corners; Miniature; Intimate Immensity; Dialectics of Outside and Inside; Phenomenology of Roundness. These are not esoteric overly metaphysical spaces. The Poetics of Space ( French: La Poétique de l'Espace) is a 1958 book about architecture by the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. The book is considered an important work about art. Commentators have compared Bachelard's views to those of the philosopher Martin Heidegger. Tranquil foliage that really is lived in, a tranquil gaze discovered in the humblest of eyes, are the artisans of immensity. These images make the world grow, and the summer too. At certain hours poetry gives out waves of Stilgoe, John R. (1994). "Foreword to the 1994 edition". The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press. ISBN 978-0-8070-6473-3.

Likewise, he establishes an analogy between a house and a mother’s womb. In fact, to him, a house is a symbolic extension of a mother. A house is like a mother that shelters, protects, and embraces us. The real house and the dream house It just goes to show that the transitive property of literary taste isn't very reliable. Michael Pollan liked this book; I like Michael Pollan's books; ergo, I'd like this book. Nope. And you know, these epiphanies can lead us down a wonderful rabbit hole - just like Alice - into an enchanted land that almost seems... well, make-believe.

Gilson, Étienne (1994). "Foreword to the 1964 edition". The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press. ISBN 978-0-8070-6473-3.

No, what finally turned me off was the way he blithely extrapolated from his experience growing up in early twentieth-century provincial France to discover profound truths about universal, essential human nature. Almost none of his arguments, none of his conclusions, had any weight with me, since they were all built on assumptions about how we experience space as children that had nothing to do with my own experience, nor the experience of anyone else I knew. After about four chapters, I could no longer see any point continuing on -- I had winnowed out everything there was for me to get from the book, and it wasn't much.I read this book while en route to Las Vegas for a family gathering. Las Vegas is a space I hate with unspeakable disgust- yet, I remember reading the Poetic of Space in this environment and it made the whole incident even more surreal- I copied many passages from the book into my notebook. It is that kind of book, where fragments capture a thought you could never get right into words. Since its initial publication in 1958, The Poetics of Spacehas been a muse to philosophers, architects, writers, psychologists, critics, and readers alike. The rare work of irresistibly inviting philosophy, Bachelard’s seminal work brims with quiet revelations and stirring, mysterious imagery. This lyrical journey takes as its premise the emergence of the poetic image and finds an ideal metaphor in the intimate spaces of our homes. Guiding us through a stream of meditations on poetry, art, and the blooming of consciousness itself, Bachelard examines the domestic places that shape and hold our dreams and memories. Houses and rooms; cellars and attics; drawers, chests, and wardrobes; nests and shells; nooks and corners: No space is too vast or too small to be filled by our thoughts and our reveries. In Bachelard’s enchanting spaces,“We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.” Man himself is mute, and it is the image that speaks. For it is obvious that the image alone can keep pace with nature.” I had the usual rough worldly Baptism by Fire, but I burned only as long as did the mythical Phoenix, rising out of the ashes to the New Life of the Spirit. His analysis of the poetic image is unique and, I think, quite beautiful. The rest of the book is an application of this theory to various poetic images - mostly relating, in some way, to the home. While some of his analyses are compelling, his philosophy is heavily grounded in psychoanalysis. As such, he implicitly argues for the universality of image responses - that these poetic images have certain universal resonances. Given the diversity of human experience, particularly in the 20th and 21st century, I just don't buy it. His evidence is various extracts from poetry in which his images seem to be functioning in the same way - but it strikes me that diligent research could probably turn up any number of counter-examples. I'll accept that what he explores is what the images could be, but I won't go any farther than that.

Science studies objective phenomena, i.e., observable facts or events. Bachelard decides to study the subjectivity of the soul expressed in poetic imagery. Poetry uses images that touch one's soul without apparent cause or observable fact. Poetic imagery stimulates a response in the reader that seems to come from a forgotten image. The author claims that other scientists (psychoanalysts and psychologists) interpret images from their own analytical, biased points of view. In contrast, Bachelard observes that imagination is a major power of human nature. The fact that poetic imagery is not subject to rules of logic does not lessen its reality. The author uses the house, which is full of sensations and subjective imagination native to anyone who lives in one, to demonstrate the reality of poetic imagery. The term "topophilia" is used to describe his comments on happy spaces. Bachelard comments on felicitous or happy space that is eulogized and enjoyed. Hostile space is not considered. Bachelard begins with images of intimacy in the houses of man, and then follows with things in those houses, hidden things, and houses of other animals, nests and shells. He finishes his study of poetic imagery with comments on size and notions of interior and exterior, open and closed spaces, roundness and book subjects. Why does it matter? Why do we need to localize, contain, or even imagine things like memory? For understanding. A different facet of anything helps us gain perspective—literally—and, thus, understand notions that might otherwise overwhelm and be ignored. Of all aspects of self-awareness, our mortality might be the most difficult. It is common for writers to anchor concepts of death and mortality in physical spaces. From Joan Didion, who wrote about "twilight blue nights" after her daughter's death, to Christopher Hitchens, who imagined, when dying, that he crossed over to a "land of the ill." Explicit in his ontology of the poetic image, as in surrealist literature and art, is a critique of the ocular privilege accorded by Enlightenment philosophy to geometry and visual evidence. Despite its perceptual sophistication, the eye cannot necessarily go beyond a description of surface: “Sight says too many things at the same time. Being does not see itself. Perhaps it listens to itself.” 12 Space, for Bachelard, is not primarily a container of three-dimensional objects. For this reason the phenomenology of dwelling has little to do with an analysis of “architecture” or design as such: “it is not a question of describing houses, or enumerating their picturesque features and analyzing for which reasons they are comfortable.” 13 Rather, space is the abode of human consciousness, and the problem for the phenomenologist is to study how it accommodates consciousness—or the half-dreaming consciousness Bachelard calls reverie. In this sense, any “application” of Bachelard’s ideas to architecture requires a cautious approach at best. Indeed, Bachelard would undoubtedly argue that almost everything we know about architecture as a historical discipline stands in the way of everything we can know about the poetics of dwelling. Kearney, Richard (2014). "Introduction". The Poetics of Space. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-310752-1. First published in French in 1958, the book's English translation appeared in 1964, and went on to become a classic.And Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality, like mine at 18, found their proper dénouement in the Faith of my Fathers. When Irish ceramic artist Isobel Egan says her porcelain structures are about memory, I know exactly what she means. (Bachelard influenced her work.) Gaston Bachelard referred to house corners as the spaces with the greatest significance. In one way or another, each person chooses a small space of their home to inhabit to the fullest.