The Poetics of Space | 
Happy Valentine‘s Day litsy! Killing some time in a cafe before meeting my boyfriend for the cinema and im reading this absolutely beautiful bit of philosophy about how we understand space. Im reading it for a masters essay but it‘s so wonderful I‘d absolutely read it for no reason again!
pickI picked up this classic work of philosophy because of a zoom event with Myra Shapiro. She mentioned participating in regular online meetings during the pandemic to discuss each chapter with other poets. It took me 9 weeks to get through it—my brain needed to be fresh to digest the contents—and I loved it. It‘s worth the effort. I have a new way of thinking about what happens internally as we read & daydream. #Translation by Maria Jolas.
George Sand, dreaming beside a path of yellow sand, saw life flowing by. “What is more beautiful than a road?” she wrote. “It is the symbol and the image of an active life.”
Poetic revery, unlike somnolent revery, never falls asleep. Starting with the simplest of images, it must always set the waves of the imagination radiating.
A tower is a creation of another century. Without a past it is nothing. Indeed, a new tower would be ridiculous. But we still have books, and they give our daydreams countless dwelling-places. Is there one among us who has not spent romantic moments in the tower of a book they have read?
Such an attitude could hardly be achieved on first reading, which remains too passive. For here the reader is still something of a child, a child who is entertained by reading. But every good book should be reread as soon as it is finished. After the sketchiness of the first reading comes the creative work of reading. We must then know *the problem* that confronted the author.
Indeed, in our houses we have nooks and corners in which we like to curl up comfortably. To curl up belongs to the phenomenology of the verb “to inhabit,” and only those who have learned to do so can inhabit with intensity.
If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.
For it is a fact that poetry possesses a felicity of its own, however great the tragedy it may be called upon to illustrate.
In poetic revery the soul keeps watch, with no tension, calmed and active. To compose a finished, well-constructed poem, the mind is obliged to make projects that prefigure it. But for a simple poetic image, there is no project; a flicker of the soul is all that is needed.
I don‘t know how far I will get in this classic, but the passage above in Mark Z Danielewski‘s foreword has brought Piranesi strongly to mind.
Everything is a result from actual meditations on the ultimate essence of everything. The mind is the all-encompassing entity that breathes and knows the actual world in which we live. If we can capture the mind in concrete categories, we become aware of a smart and living eternity that is the ultimate cause for all action and that makes us artists. This process cannot be denied: it is simply what happens when people learn to see past the limited.
For our house is our corner of the world. As has often been said, it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word. If we look at it intimately, the humblest dwelling has beauty.
"If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace."
#dream #QuotsyNov17 @TK-421
(Painting: "At The Window", Carl Vilhelm Holsøe 1900)
pickI've been reading this book for like...2 months. Reading philosophy doesn't come easy to me, but Bachelard's writing about space and memory is 💯
