As a person who has never believed in the soul or mind as entities apart from the world, I approach books whose authors’ depend upon such a demarcation (and the vast majority do) with my “translator” on automatic: since the soul and mind do not exist, it must be the body working itself out in space and time. This is how I approach Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space.

Most authors have an experience that they want to communicate to others but given the private (or pre-linguistic) nature of most experience, it must first be clothed in a delivery system that allows it to be shared with others. This clothing process is (of course) narrative. Bachelard had a particular set of experiences which link home spaces, nests, boxes, drawers with reverie, poetry and a deep sense of pregnant solitude that he wanted to communicate and this experience is something in which I can participate.

To share these experiences with us, he worked backward, constructing the story all the way down to the foundations (what I called the delivery system). Because of who he was, his time, his place, this story had to do with souls and creativity distinct from the forms through which it comes to us. Because, for me, these notions are sterile, I ruck them up, and start again from the experience that, under it all, he still communicates. It is that experience – the one of enclosed space, of safety and fertile shadows, of storage and memory – the one that sees a corollary between imaginative/cognitive space and the spaces of the world that we experience, which I find fertile ground for thought.

I think that his analysis of what his experiences meant, that images have no past, that “poetry is a soul inaugurating a form,” perhaps even that “the poetic image has an entity and a dynamism of its own,” is too much of his base narrative and too little of the experience itself. Or his disdain of metaphor due to the fact that it “gives a concrete substance to an impression that is difficult to express” or that metaphor “is related to a psychic being from which it differs”, these things are simply not true of how metaphor works in human society. He says “An image, on the contrary, product of absolute imagination, owes its entire being to the imagination…metaphor (can) not be studied phenomenologically,” These are things that, in my opinion, are logically weak, but that are also unnecessary to the intrinsic value of the experience the text communicates.

I read about the house and the universe in Bachelard. I concentrated on the feelings that he is communicating about how space effects him. It makes me think about the differences between living in a house with angles and a round house (I have a tribal background) and how that affects the sense of self that develops there. I wonder about the propensity to gather belongings, and all the trunks and cabinets that this entails, or how being migratory reduces belongings to a cherished few, and how the oneiric self responds to these images and activities. Really what Bachelard does is interpret the world as if it were a dream and comes to the same conclusions Jung did about the need for Archetypes to explain how we humans seem to have such similar repertoires of communicable imagery. This is why, for him, time is not a constructive force in the emergence of the image (as he defines it), because the image emerges from the imagination in the same way as does an expression of an Archetype – in response to the world but not of the world.

For me, the question is can what Bachelard experienced be lifted off its old foundations and re-sited on something less dualistic? Since things that emerge as a response to the world must also be of the world, I think that must be possible. Bachelard did experience the relationship between self and space and since there is no soul, nor mind (if you think of that as something distinct from the body), it must be so that Bachelard’s body was the source of these experiences. That’s my starting place with a text like this.

Where I go from there is a bit like dressing up bits of tied wood to make them appear human. Dress them and redress them and see what happens: take them as children do and they become a projection, an extension of self, an homunculus that allows emotional and mental exploration and learning, with the added benefit of deniability. We can try things out, clothe and reclothe the moments of our experience, and if we are lucky, we will find or create icons and symbols in the world that resonate with us, help us imagine in such a way as to open us up to greater complexity and sophistication. Laussel is that to me. She is a particularly successful “doll” with which I have had great fun thinking about what it means to be human. The key, I suspect, is not to mistake the doll for anything other than what it is while at the same time honoring the impulse to play dress up.