Bachelard is a dualist. No doubt about that. And of course I am not. For me there is no “soul” as distinct from the corpus. There is no “mind” as distinct from the body. Yet I find Bachelard’s book useful, insightful, a mine of things to think with.

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.
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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.
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For about a year and a half, when I was fourteen to fifteen, I lived in Pittsburg. I didn’t like the school in which I was enrolled very much so when I left the house in the morning I usually just didn’t go. Instead, I went to the museum, the Carnegie Library, the zoo and the various parks within reach of my feet. It was in the library that I first recall seeing a picture of the Venus of Laussel. I don’t remember reading the text of the art book I held. I presume it was on Paleolithic, Mesolithic and/or Neolithic art. What I remember is the shape of the book in my hands, the press of the metal walkway under my bottom, the gloss of the page and the sense of space that opened up as I sat and stared at the picture. I knew nothing about the statue, nothing about art or the human history of the Paleolithic but in that space I felt a connection knitting between me, the statue, the sculptor and the crescent horn-moon in her hand.
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I have been writing all day. Trying to anyway. I have been working on a piece that talks about the Venus of Laussel bas-relief. The piece refuses to stop drifting off and I can’t seem to corral it. So finally in desperation I went into my files and copied all the bits of writing that talk about that carving or the person who created it. I found a lot. Can’t keep it all clear in my head so I created a little table with the titles and the first lines so I could see what issues were prompted by Laussel.

Mozart’s Symphony No. 35 in D is playing – the Allegro con spirito. I can feel myself like the music, a powerful current running but it’s skipping from instrument to instrument, like sparks of static jumping from roof top to roof top. A power that is beautiful, but not that coherent, and writing needs some form of coherence.
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