Poetics of Space – current reading

davis — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 00:20:06 +0000

I’m about 30 pages in to Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space. I may just be overly involved in the link between spaces and imagination (and therefore blind to what a normal person would read), but this one looks like it’s going to be a “must” for our thinking. The main thing I’m getting so far – other than great ideas about how poetry happens – is about the imaginatively shaping work of our childhood homes. They are a sort of “first universe” for our imaginations – a place in which we learn to dream, and to which we often return in revery and thought. I see plenty of direct relation to our earlier post on Lewis’ ideas on medieval cosmos – an inhabitable universe. Both Lewis and Bachelard seem to be getting at an amazing idea: we cannot imagine and live within a void, even if it is more “real” than our value-laden experience of spaces.

In Cube terms, this type of work gives us insight into what shapes our imagination – as well as some of the how and why (embodied, inhabited, childhood spaces versus those that we experience in general). In some ways, it perhaps is a work that offers some direction in terms of large-scale film: it can’t get “thin” in terms of physicality and what James Wood calls “thisness” – the quality of particularity that we look for in fiction. At the same time, with projects like Olafur Eliasson’s, it seems equally clear that experiences of extreme simplicity (say, a monochromatic room) can still meet this criterion (I think) by virtue of their focus and sensory particularity.

Artistic Energies » gaston bachelard

Poetics of Space – current reading