In Gaston Bachelard’s book The Poetics of Space, he says, in describing the phenomenology of the home, that “space is everything.” Time, he says, “ceases to quicken memory.” I don’t know if you’ve read Bachelard, so I don’t know if you have the context of his project to flesh out what he does with this during the course of his book, but in part at least, he describes a topography of human solitude by reference to the spaces we create.

Thinking of the implications: reading Bachelard reminds me of a paper I read some years ago called “Self-Representation in Upper Paleolithic Female Figurines” by LeRoy McDermott. In it he argues that the “Venus” figurines of the time represent women’s views of their own bodies. That is, these figurines were accurate, direct self-portrayals of pregnant women. What this means to me is that these “self portraits” were done without the intervening step of imagining oneself from a distance.

McDermott’s pictorial evidence is compelling: if not of the Paleolithic woman’s sense of self, at least of a possible reading of one’s sense of personal extension.

What links the two pieces of writing for me is what I sense about the reading of home-space in Bachelard. It seems to me that his phenomenological reading is made possible by orienting to space, not through the sense of distance (and time  linked to distance) that the eye prefers, but sensing space by reference to where one sits, how one negotiates the doorways, by  the sense of a hand reaching into a drawer. This seems to me the same kind of reading suggested by McDermott. My question is ‘what does the reading’ for those sculptors and for Bachelard? Of course the obvious answer is the hands or the body moving, and only latterly, the eye: the world read first by touch and by the kinaesthetic sense which privileges the rule of the moving body and how it senses the world.

I’ve talked about this in other posts (category, senses) so I won’t go into it here, but how I read Bachelard, and most Phenomenologists, is that they assess the world through the rules inherent in the non-visual senses. The feeling of being alive, of experiencing what it means to move through the day, is something deeply kinaesthetic and most often, non- or pre-linguisitc. When one assesses the world by these “other” rules, it suggests analytical categories very different from those of the eye, or of what we traditionally call analysis.

I think about the figurines and how what is represented of the self comes first from the spaces the hands can touch. The use of the eye in these cases is directed by what the hands conscribe and not the other way around. It seems important that these figurines are not descriptions of the localized self from a distance. It suggests that the eye has yet to take precedence in the description of space, or at least that precedence is not yet determined. With these women’s bodies as representations, what is described is immediacy, the relationships between the elements of the body as they are sensed from the point of origin of the body itself, of the hands.

This is, I think, at the core of Bachelard’s sense of the home as primarily spatial; why this intimacy is atemporal. What he says of his project: “for a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates.” What, I wonder, is the connection between our sense of time as distancing and our movement from the intimacy of the Venus figurines to the distance-based spatial awareness of the Lasceaux horses and the Tanumshede dancers?

Solitude, to return to Bachelard, is perhaps a return to primacy of this kind of intimacy – a sense of self localized in the body, immediate, atemporal, comforting and creative.