Just because Bachelard thought his experiences meant there must be a soul doing the experiencing, doesn’t mean that what he experienced was itself useless for an old atheist like me. 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. Mind is of the world, so is the soul, so is creativity and love and belonging. Bachelard did experience the relationship between self and space that provided the starting place for that wonderful little book; and since there is no “soul” (as distinct from the corpus), nor “mind” (as distinct from body), it must be so that Bachelard’s body moving through the world was the source of these experiences. That’s my starting place with a text like this.

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. This is something in which I can participate, which I recognize.  I have had similar experiences which his book brought to mind, to my attention. But to share these (laregely pre-verbal) experiences with us, he had to work from the non-linguistic to the linguistic, constructing the story. In the process, he used a conceptual foundation for his experiences with which he was comfortable and familiar. He built a verbal house for us so we could share his experiences, but because of who he was, his time, his place, this foundation had to do with souls and creativity and mind distinct from the forms (the things, the bodies) through which such experiences come 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 that sees a corollary between imaginative/cognitive space and the spaces of the world that we experience, which I find fertile ground for thought.

So I agree that his analysis of what his experiences mean, 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,” that these are nigh-on useless. 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. 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 (as over-cooked spaghetti is weak), but they are also unnecessary to the intrinsic value of the experience the text communicates.

I read about the house and the universe in Bachelard and 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 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. And of course, there are other ways to think about the relationship between our representations and the bodies that generate them; the Archetypal universe is not necessary even if it is easy.

Where to go from the experience itself? It’s 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. That’s not me! That’s the Other, the Shadow! Through this play we can come up with all kinds of neat ideas about how these things we can do — these experiences of self in space, of time and timelessness — all these creations of ours can help us think about who and what we are.  (This is what I do with Laussel. Those Venus figurines are a bit of an obsession with me, a “doll” of deep resource, of images and experience that bear nearly constant fruit.)

Our “dolls” can help us learn about where we are now, and how to live well with ourselves and others. These dolls of ours, these imaginings, these moments when we take our experiences, categorize them, and decide what they mean, they are as useful as they are fun. The key, I suspect, is not to mistake the doll for anything other than she is. She is not the meaning. She is not the category, nor the resultant universe. She is only herself: twigs that can be tied and retied.

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.