Where Imagination Lives

Reading Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space

We have been talking about creative autobiography—first about Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space and then about lived, remembered, events. One might say they are two sides of one coin: There is what we remember and there is how we remember. The “what” are the events we single out and the details we notice. The how is the way we cloth them in imaganation.

Think of a child hiding behind a couch, a writer sitting in the corner of a library. Bachelard claims that we don’t merely inhabit spaces; spaces inhabit us. He believes that the childhood home is the first and most important storehouse of dream images and a place of memory. Unlike clinical psychologists, who use memories to construct a psychological profile, Bachelard asks us simply to experience these images and doesn’t believe that these images need to be explained. They existed as they were: the mystery of the dark the secrecy of the unopened drawer. Poets have described Bachelard as “Required Reading 101”.

you need to have 1. a desk 2. a window m 3. the view from the window

His book, The Poetics of Space, then, is not a book about architecture. It is a book about how houses are lived, and how the space in these houses become part of the imagination.An attic feels different from a cellar bcause spaces transform the imagination. And these experiences belong to everyone. Whether we realize it or not, we re aexperiencing the poetic life of space..

Since Bachelard grounds the imagination in the house of childhood, it is the place where where one first experiences solitude, where memories are formed, and where we find the freedom to imagine. When ordinary cellars, corners, or rooms are imagined, they become a poetic space.Understanding these intimate spaces reveals something fiundamental about human experience.

And he is less interested in actual houses, than in the image of shelter.

Bachelard grew up in a modest house in Bar-sur-Aub. He did not come from a family of means, but his homelife was stable. At times, when I’ve read his description of the house, I’ve. had a sinking feeling, because my homelife was far from stable. And then I think of writers who had unstable homes, including Jack London, Jean Genet, Maya Angelou, Truman Copote, Jean Rhys, and countless immigranat writers. What, in fact, were there memories of home?

Bachelard assumes a continuity of dreams and adult imagination. But many writers develop imagination not from stability but from a ssense of dislocation. Their greatest repositroy of dreams may not be the house.

It may be:

trains

roads

hotels

libraries

churches

landscape

temporary rooms

For some writer, imagination is not rooted in a childhood house, but in the repeated experience of leaving the house.

This was certainly true for me. I spent a lot of time in a vacant lot that had lilies of the valley in the summer. I called this lot The Secret Garden and invited friends as though I was inviting them to my house.

And yet, if I simply allow myself to go back in time, I do find something in the house of my childhood. In my room, I had a little table, where I would sit, looking at the ribbon of avenues. I could see people walking down the avenues, people in far-away houses. And ever since that time, I have always wanted a desk by a window. This memory surprised me. There was, after all, a place in the house to dream.

Some things to try:

1. Chilhood House

   Describe the house you remember most vividly as a child. Ignore chronology. Move through it as memory moves through it.

2. Unstable House

   If you moved often, what object appeared in every house like a touchstone? Write about that object as though it was the true house.

3. The Lost Room

   Describe a room that no longer exists but shapes your imagination

4. Portable Shelter

   Where did you go mentally when you needed refuge. Is it a place, a memory, a book, a meadow?

5. Anti-Bachelard Prompt

   Write about a childhood in which a house offered no shelter. Where did reverie happen?

6. Corner Prompt

   Sit in a corner and describe it

   Notice: walls, sounds, comfort, confinement, safety

7. Bachelard’s Corner

   Write about a corner as a place of refuge