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.

I saw pictures form in my mind and I felt a surge of something moving through my body: pictures of the woman whose body was rendered; pictures of the woman staring at the moon, her hand on her womb feeling (as I imagined it at the time) the contractions that would result in blood between her legs. I imagined her being caught as I had been by the fulgent moon. As I continued to stare at the picture in the library, these imagined similarities of life explained to me the horn she held and probably the marks cut on its crescent curve. The fact that she held it in her right hand meant to me that the moon was waxing. Interestingly, I did not connect that observation with the possibility that her hand on her womb might mean she felt the movements of a child, but then I was fourteen and not at all in favor of the idea of pregnancy. Staring at the picture, it was if I was also staring at the moon inside the eyes of the woman who carved that bas-relief and a woman it was, of that I was sure. I lost sight of the book as it was swallowed up in the overlay of her eyes in a face with broad cheeks and black hair.

These moments are transfixing for me. They alter my perception of myself, of my place in the world and my sense of just how big the world really is, especially in time. I learn from them, and later when I read the text, or study the topic, these experiences help me comprehend the humanness of the social and scientific history. They don’t, I hasten to say, replace the study but they do augment it.

When I looked down again at the book in my lap it was if I could see her belly superimposed on my shirt and jeans. I could feel my hands on her skin and simultaneously it was as if I could feel her stirring deep inside me, moving into life through my body. It was profoundly comforting and deeply connecting. It was proof, to me, of my existence, although despite the sensations, I still didn’t click that the woman was pregnant.

Did I ever think that somewhere a sentient Laussel existed outside her time and place and that somehow I had contacted her? No. I never did. By some quirk of cerebral and bodily oddity I fall into profound imaginative states with the greatest of ease. I think it is maybe a kind of hyper-empathy. It’s as if my body acts as an amplifier for what is probably a completely normal process of connection to life outside oneself. Nevertheless, even as a very young child, I understood that what I could do was of this world because what is of this world is all that there is. Luckily, I also understood that this world is enough. The world (and its evolved creation imagination) is the source of the magic and the wonder. This world is the origin of both the experience of ecstasy and the ability to feel it. That is bloody magic.

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.

Laussel has been like that in my life since I came across her as a child. I have been overwhelmed by her beauty and her implications for what it means to be human. I have never been able to get the distance from her that coherence requires.

Is there a “should” here I asked myself after writing the last paragraph? “Should I try, now?” Is there a “should” here? Does it matter? Is it something that I can force? Will it work if I push against the beauty of it? Will it make the incoherence worse?

I feel like I am trespassing on the grounds of the spirits which may strike you as odd coming from an atheist but it isn’t. I use the terms because they most closely evoke the sensation of fear and awe that I feel in the face of a symbol as powerful as Laussel, especially backed by the con spirito.

How symbols like Laussel come to have such power is only marginally interesting to me. What really fascinates me is the power itself. I know that the bas relief is a carving – just limestone. I know that the person who created it was just another human being, and probably one I wouldn’t want to meet since we would have so little in common socially. Still, in my mind-world, Laussel – the stone and the carver – have melded into one human-like spirit that touches me like a bit of lightning. She leaves marks. Scortched experience. Remembrance of intense beauty. A trace of the sublime, I suppose.

Power like this is not within my control for all that it is a consequence of my existence in the world. The power’s surge comes from my brain, from the body’s chemicals, from my life as it has been lived. Still, it is not in my control and the experience of it, and my response to those experiences, have changed me. To be immersed in situations beyond our control triggers fear in people, so like any human being I make of the disparate experiences a story and project it out onto the world. Laussel becomes a spirit: a human being embedded in the land. It is my way of trying to comprehend a part of the void out of which the spirit that is Laussel issues.

This attempt is an act of power. It is one that says “this is my life.” And of course, in that act I align my life with the carver and the carving. That act of power embeds me in the world out of which I have come. It makes of me a spirit too.

Perhaps that’s it…I have to stand to speak to Laussel hand to hand, take a deep breath, keep my notebook near, my attention on her and wait for her to speak. Just like I would with any other human being.

And of course, being who I am, I have just disgusted myself with all this sloppy “spirit” talk. And as I experience that short-tempered response to myself, I can feel Laussel retreating into the cave that is my unconscious. I imagine her face holding an expression of the resigned frustration an adult feels when trying to teach a particularly slow learner to whom one is particularly attached. And of course both bits are myself. Ah well. Thank the stars this atheist won’t be dead today. I can try to contact the spirit world again tomorrow.