the poetics of space / gaston bachelard

... by overlaying our memory of the childhood house with daydreams leads us to the ill-defined, vaguely located areas of being where we are seized with astonishment at being.

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.

[… fingertip memory. How does the body, not merely the mind, remember the feel of a latch in a long-forsaken childhood home? …]

We live fixations, fixations of happiness. ‘We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection.

Of course, thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed.

 … to de-socialize our important memories, and attain to the plane of the daydreams that we used to have in the places identified with our solitude .

Memories are motionless, and the more securely they are fixed in space, the sounder they are.

Memories of dreams, however, which only poetic meditation can help us to recapture, are most confused, less clearly drawn.

In point of fact, we are in the unity of image and memory, in the functional composite of imagination and memory. The positivity of psychological history and geography cannot serve as a touchstone for determining the real being of our childhood, for childhood is certainly greater than reality.

It is our consciousness that crystalizes our remote memories.

To inhabit oneirically the house we were born in means more than to inhabit it in memory; it means living in the house that is gone, the way we used to dream in it.

The phenomenology of the daydream can untangle the complex of memory and imagination; it becomes necessarily sensitive to the differentiations of the symbol.

… real images are engravings, for it is the imagination that engraves them in our memories.

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

How suddenly our memories assume a living possibility of being!

Our memories are encumbered by facts.

Amazon Books.

The classic book on how we experience intimate spaces.

"A magical book. . . . A prism through which all worlds from literary creation to housework to aesthetics to carpentry take on enhanced—and enchanted-significances. Every reader of it will never see ordinary spaces in ordinary ways. Instead the reader will see with the soul of the eye, the glint of Gaston Bachelard." —from the foreword by John R. Stilgoe

the psychoanalysis of fire / gaston bachelard

… fire within is all that is required to make the grieving soul give voice to its memories and sorrows …

How can it be better stated that nostalgia is the memory of the warmth of the nest, the meory of the cherished love for the “caladium innatum’.

Were it not for the memory of man made warm by man, producing as it were a redoubling of natural heat, we could not conceive of lovers speaking of their snug little nest.

… Novalis is the poet “of the little blue flower,” the poet of the forget-me-not tossed as a pledge of imperishable memory over the of the precipice in the very shadow of death.

That which fire has caressed, loved, adored, has gained a store of memories and lost its innocence.

Amazon Books.

We have only to speak of an object to think that we are being objective. But, because we chose it in the first place, the object reveals more about us than we do about it. What we consider to be our fundamental ideas concerning the world are often indications of the immaturity of our minds.

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This little book constitutes, for me, an excellent introductory piece to the thoughts of Gaston Bachelard. Much more clearly than "Poetics of Space", or "The Right to Dream", this book gives insight into Bachelard's transition from scientist to philosopher. If you haven't yet read any of his works, you should consider doing so if only to reevaluate your own methods of analysis of the world around you, both the material and the immaterial. In the "Psychoanalysis of Fire" Bachelard turns his sciento-phenomonologist methods of analysis to the existence of fire, both as a real presence throughout the history of mankind and as a literary, symbolic presence with perhaps even more significance.

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Writing a preface for The Poetics of Space (1958) in 1963, a year after his friend's death, medievalist Etienne Gilson noted: "We all loved him, admired him and envied him a little, because we felt he was a free mind, unfettered by any conventions either in his choice of the problems he wanted to handle or in his way of handling them."

Gilson goes on to say that this book, The Psychoanalysis of Fire (1938), was Bachelard the free mind's "first warning shot." He records the puzzlement he had upon its publication in these words: "After appointing a man to teach the philosophy of science and seeing him successfully do so for a number of years, we don't like to learn that he has suddenly turned his interest to a psychoanalysis of the most unorthodox sort, since what then was being psychoanalyzed was not even people, but an element."
As one of the truly unusual and original books anyone would hope to come upon, almost every paragraph (nay, sentence) of the book has the power to change the perspective of an engaged reader. Perspective on, yes, fire, but also on many other things. Prometheus and his "clever disobedience," which leads to a startling formulation "The Prometheus complex is the Oedipus complex of the life of the intellect." The psychoanalysis of rubbing (thus, cleaning) and heat producing in what Bachelard calls the "Novalis complex," which leads to a meditation on the nature of love. Alcohol, the eau-de-feu ("water on fire") working as eau-de-vie by setting one's being on fire instantaneously in the "Hoffmann complex." These are just most obvious themes of the book. Attentive readers will discover much, much more to cherish.
After my encounter with Bachelard, I was often awed to find myself responding to things so very differently, be it reading literature/philosophy, or everyday chores such as doing dishes and cooking. You will, for instance, never read Poe in the same way. While his most unforgettable essay on Poe appears in Water and Dreams (1942), this book too has excursions to him here and there.

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Forget about The Poetics of Space (for now) and immerse yourself in The Psychoanalysis of Fire. Watch Bachelard circle and destroy modern rationality through a proto-rationalistic, Socratic assault on the concept of fire. Bachelard's subject is the 'concept' rather than the real thing, fire itself, the number one immaterial 'substance' prefiguring even light. Read, in amazement, as scientific scrutiny of this primordial phenomenon approaches farce. But pay very, very, very close attention to the section on Novalis, "Psychoanalysis and Prehistory: The Novalis Complex", and you'll find Bachelard's genius swooping in for the kill. "These scientific explanations originate in an arid and cursory rationalism which claims to be profiting by recurring factual evidence; but which is, however, quite unrelated to the psychological conditions of the primitive discoveries." Bachelard is not the prophet of surrationalism for nothing! It is this book (first published in 1938) that locates his critical method at the forefront of philosophical critical idealism. Unlike Ernst Cassirer, Bachelard is more than willing to take the plunge into the abyss of imagination - that Coleridgean imagination that is the mostly unacknowledged source of our collective intelligence.

ten quotes from gaston bachelard's the poetics of space: the classic look at how we experience intimate place

“I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.”


“Rilke wrote: 'These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased.” 


“We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.” 


“When the image is new, the world is new.” 


“For a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates.” 


“Here is Menard's own intimate forest: 'Now I am traversed by bridle paths, under the seal of sun and shade...I live in great density...Shelter lures me. I slump down into the thick foliage...In the forest, I am my entire self. Everything is possible in my heart just as it is in the hiding places in ravines. Thickly wooded distance separates me from moral codes and cities.” 


“Actually, however, life begins less by reaching upward, than by turning upon itself. But what a marvelously insidious, subtle image of life a coiling vital principle would be! And how many dreams the leftward oriented shell, or one that did not conform to the rotation of its species, would inspire!” 


“We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.” 


“The philosophy of poetry must acknowledge that the poetic act has no past, at least no recent past, in which its preparation and appearance could be followed.” 


“We must listen to poets.”