Category Archives: bachelard

Pil – Week 7 Bachelard

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“What a tension of childhoods there must be, held in reserve at the bottom of our being, for a poet’s image to make us suddenly relive our memories, reimagining our images by starting from well assembled words. ” Bachelard 115

 

Darkness clouds through the grey starlight

Twinkles in the wide open sky

Worlds across the ether open to the night

As dawn rises the fog shrouds the earth’s mask

Slowly covering all in the shroud of morning dew

Waking to the dim light covered in warmth

slow to rise for the dreamscape lingers

Dreams of the sunlight

Dreams of the dark

As eyes open the sunlight beckons

the warmth of the every shining star

burns the sheet of grey and the world awakens

soft chirps sound in the distance

Soft rousing

Awake…

It is morning

and the dark is but a memory

 

P – Bachelard Week 6 – Pounding postures of obsession

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“The Soul and the Mind do not have the same memory…

O memory the soul renounces

Frightened to conceive you.”

The Poetics of Reverie, pg 104

I was also partly (perhaps mostly) inspired to write this poem by reading Marissa’s lipogram sem pass yesterday, and decided to leave out the letters in the word ‘Calm.’

Artist’s Note: When we are trying to escape fear and the other less pleasant sensations, are we not just fleeing from feelings painting the truth before our eyes?

 

Pounding postures of obsession:  Without C A L M

Fright pushes through the nests

Words wove with the twigs of bright

Spring visions.

They exist wedged into the rigidity of eons.

They writhe – they require progress in twists.

        Stroke this identity with your fingers

        Soothe the pounding postures of obsession

Never sensing the deep keys to these eyes

Or the devious keys to the birds of sight.

For I drive the ties of now

To drop off, drop down

        Surround this body in the stone surf

        Press your body into serene eternity

The ten gripping digits shorten ‘now’

To ‘no’

        Brush your retort in red behind you

        Sweep the beyond to the future

So the first returns to the end.

        Speed by this worry, hurry.

        Write with the severed pens of desire

To see fresh wings.

We weren’t designed to bend

So we now drown in depths

Of egrets dripping fibers of hope

To destroy the hue of truth

        Rub up, ruin the injury.

        Wed the poise of terror

– In her iron nest of spines you know

You know your tests.

Ta – Week 6 Bachelardian Reverie

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“Androgeneity is not buried away in some indistinct bestiality at the obscure origins of life. It is a dialectic at the summit. Coming from one and the same being, it shows the exaltation of the animus and the animus and the anima. It prepares the associated reveries of the super-masculine and the super-feminine.” (Bachelard, pp. 79)

Gradients of light – breathing,
Open up a vast pool before me.
A warm kiss embraces my very being.
The Sun, whose gift is so bold and penetrating,
Commands reverence from every creature that dwells within my soul,
Yet, it is the Moon whose presence holds invisible sway over the tides of my ocean.
The Sun’s double – the Moon – has its own Sun.
This Divine Constellation is a Mirror of a Mirror,
As if sun were reflected in sky and pool and Moon in pool and sky;
And sky in pool and pool in sky…

How can we know the name of this Goddess, were it naught for the Sun’s kiss?
Reverie.
Reverie comes, in dripping beauty,
When I and image merge.

Separation is the birth of Thought, the birth of Sun…

 

Q- Beehive/Dream/Reverie/Prairie #2

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“Reverie-and not the dream-retains mastery over its splittings” (Bachelard p79)

I am trying to make a quilt, a beautiful cohesive quilt, that represents all of these aspects of my self

but

I don’t like quilting

I mean, I like quilts plenty

But I really do not like quilting.

“I dream of becoming a master quilter,” (bullshit)

today I just like cacao

 

I don’t even want to go into what I was about to say about colonialism, slavery, and how quilting is a reverie

I am sickened by my

sweet utterings, that stretch

way too far

Trying desperately to make the quilt dream happen

as beautiful

trying desperately to like the stupid fabrics that are around me

and turn them into something that is dream-like, in this way that

Is not ”My” Reverie.

The fabrics that are scrappy and gross and sticky are just strewn about my whole room and I  don’t even want to do it

anymore

I don’t want to touch them, they are soiled

Quilting is about scrap fabrics that are no longer worthy as clothing anymore,

sewed together to make some greater meaning but it is still with a bunch of cloth that you don’t want.

My fabrics are split up, around my room, around my dream of this quilt metaphor

My fabrics are just pieces of my reverie.

My screaming, stupid, reverie.

My quilted reverie looks like this:

Oh, my reverie, ohhhhh my reverie,  o my reverie                                                 Oh reverie, oh my reverie, oh

my reverie, oh, my, reverie

reverie

my reverie

my reverie

my reverie

counting sheep

in my quilt

in my dreams and then my morning coffee

my reverie

in my reverie

in my reverie

my reverie

music

in my reverie

reverie

 

oh home, home on my reverie, a reverie

 

“To make a prarie it takes a clover and one bee—and reverie. The reverie alone will do, if bees are few”

– Emily Dickinson, fragment 93

 

 

a quilt is a beehive….

to be continued….

 

Hope in the Ruins —Bachelardian reverie #2

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I come from broken buildings
all crumpled over in despair.
I come from penniless pockets
and broken dreams, It’s a hard
round world, constant infinity,
the you is I,
and I is U
and we are nowhere near
a true end.

The world is broken, bruised an
fair. She is that porcelain vase that
all to unwittingly we break,
yet still life continues.

Nature claims what
we lay wasted, she puts
to use the weak and weary walls
and soon they too are the womb of
life, they thought they would never be.

We are the ruins of
this modernity, we too
can be reborn, the
stones are not alone
and neither are we.

I suppose,
what I’m getting at
would be that.

From ruination comes new life,

So lick the ruins and don’t think twice.

P(r) – Bachelardian Reverie #2

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“The man who loves a woman “projects” upon that woman all the values which he venerates in his own anima.  And in the same way, the woman “projects” upon the man she loves all the values which her own animus would like to conquer.”  (Bachelard, 73)

this vision of two conquers and divides and creates us.  we are nothing without the other. two sides to every story, two sides to every coin, two dimensions in space. many faced gods wringing their many hands as they make and unmake themselves. apotheosis. we are the gods that make and unmake themselves. our creations mirror the creator more than our autobiographies ever could. our desires are plain in our actions but muddled by our words. the only fools we are fooling are ourselves but we turn a blind eye and continue because knowing yourself too well might be just as bad as not knowing yourself well enough.  why do i keep thinking of anais nin?

O – Week 6 Reverie

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“Constantly moving in a dance that mirrors the tempo of the human body, waves break in time with the beating of our hearts, the in and out of our breaths, like a metronome marking the present moment: now, now.”
                –Ran Ortner, artist statement (http://www.ranortner.com/#!/statement)

“This idealizing psychology is an undeniable psychic reality. The reverie idealizes both its object and the dreamer at the same time. And when the reverie lives in a dualism of the masculine and the feminine, the idealization is concrete and limitless at the same time.” (Bachelard 58)

What do I idealize about the ocean? What do I idealize about myself when I daydream of the sea? 

Luminosity. I idealize the light and clarity where the sea rises and thins to peaks and waves and collisions and spray. I idealized that moment when the low-angle sunset light and east wind gale split the green whitecaps and they burst into spray to illuminate the entire sky with salt particles which stuck in my wind-curled eyelashes. I idealize the way water takes light and bleeds it into its vortices. I idealize the fusion of light and liquid on the surface, and how the deep blue of darkness blends in from the bottom up. I idealize the way water holds sky and how water holds depth and dark in the same body.

Ferocity. I idealize the way waves are violent yet gentle. How they are chaotic and unpredictable, yet rhythmic and beautiful in their morphology. I idealize the necessary violence in the dance between wind and water and how it seeks to deconstruct all that is of earth. I idealize the shapes that waves take in the collision against shore. I idealize the strength and persistence of waves that continue in the same rhythms whether illuminated or dark, whether warm or icy, whether now now now or eons ago. 

Sensitivity. I idealize the tides. I idealize the great salt-water sensitivity to the moon as this body of connected seas around our sphere-planet ebb and flood around the continents to follow the pull of the moon. I idealize water’s ability to form sensory organs with motion, in each swirl and ripple, that catalogue the cosmos of that moment. I idealize water’s properties of stagnation and preservation and its ability to provide life through movement and interaction. I idealize the generosity of water in how it is capable of filling the smallest gaps along a shoreline and the deepest trenches of the Pacific Ocean. I idealize its capacity to engulf all that enters it (except air which always pushes upwards to rejoin the sky).

Ta – Week 5 Bachelardian Reverie

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“The poet’s room is full of words, words which move about in the shadows. Sometimes the words are unfaithful to the things. They try to establish oneiric synoymies between things. The phanotmalization of objects is always expressed in the language of visual hallucinations. But for a word dreamer there are phantomalizations through language. In order to go to those oneiric depths words must be given the time to dream. ” (pp. 49)

Light casts meaning in its absence. Shadow. Does one meaning exist only in opposition to another? The light from a fire, cast against a man’s flesh and onto cave walls, is not the man. What does this mean? The object lies dreaming, its own dream; floating in the space between thoughts. This space is pregnant with possibilities, like the fertile soil of the Indus River or Mesopotamia – The Cradle of Civilization. Words, like people, must be given time to dream. Dreams open parallel dimensions; rifts in space-time (whose fabric becomes permeable, like the membrane of a cell). It is said that we spend as much as a third of our lives sleeping; and whilst asleep, no doubt, dreaming. Do words sleep? Do they lead plural lives between Conception and Imagination?

Wo bachelard #2

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“And in free reverie, they (man and woman) speak in order to admit their desires, to communicate in the tranquility of a well harmonized double nature.” – 59

“…the human psychism is, in its primitive state, androgynous.  For Jung, the subconscious self is not a repressed consciousness, it is not made of forgotten memories; it is a primary nature.  The subconscious, then, maintains within us forces of androgyneity.  Whoever speaks of androgyneity is brushing the depths of his own subconsciousness with a double antennae.” – 59

in reverie of man and woman

woman and man are so beautiful, the shape of their forms, flowing curves and sharp ridges, fitting together like puzzle pieces.  looking into their eye sea souls, they become warmed. the cold blooded lizard brain is moved to act kindly.  after all these years of evolution, the asexual, amorphis single celled organisms split into separate species, into plant and animal, predator and prey, to finally reunite in the depths of our subconscious?  it was never really gone though… i mean not really.  the predator and prey have an intimate relationship, and they ultimately reunite in the final conflict.  this relationship keeps them in harmony.  the wolf needs the rabbit to live, and in turn he keeps their population balanced.  but are we the first organisms since the single celled amoebas able to individually reach this harmony?  what a gift…. that is why I am thankful for our physical forms, here to remind us to balance our duality…

P – Bachelard – Ode to the PIANO

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P     I   A                               N                                                                   O

the graceful letter P am I. And you should have No questions as to my gentle character, but Oh!

How I have longed to be more than a breath of air forced from puckered lips;

Loved for my graceful shape, rather than reviled

For the spittle I have speckled on the back of many poor, unsuspecting necks…

I have been misused! Stuck in to words in the most preposterous places!

But in some, chosen with care, I am in perfect, peaceful harmony.

One of my favorite places to be is holding up the edge

Of the sympathetic and patient Piano

~ Especial the Grands – already poised in my pleasing and shapely image.

 

You might think I’m a bit pompous, and perhaps I am,

But I know my proper place,

And take on an appropriately unpresuming post

When I am brought to someone’s lips or pen tip

In the romance of the word ‘Piano.’

Ah! What joy pulses through my portly body

As I reminisce about her supreme purity,

The adorable plumpness of her, my dear panda-colored piano…

 

My simple and pedestrian nature, compared to the

Supreme compassion and pull of my tempting partner

Her pedicured pedals made of perforated metal

The pens scratching out compositions to her captivating presence.

Oh! I cannot compare!

 

I am hypnotized by her receptive and perceptive disposition

I am but the peduncle upon which the pleasant piano can perch…

I am but the peel, from which her precious pearl charisma can appear…

 

As I wrap up, and prepare to complete this compilation of words

I penitently proffer my apology for all my skipping and flipping about,

I assure you, it wasn’t for pretentious display out of pride

But more precisely, in order to persuade you to

Realize my importance, balanced

With my appropriately peaceable and prudent disposition.