Category Archives: bachelard

Ml – Week 8 Reverie

Reverie Prompt:  p 189   “If there are ‘gorges’ (French = ‘throats’) in the mountains, isn’t it because the wind, long ago, spoke there?” In Bachelard’s understanding of poetry, a “light delirium makes the dreamer of cosmic reverie pass from a human vocabulary to a vocabulary of things.” He admires poetry in which “human and cosmic tonalities reinforce each other.”

Here is an example: “Listening to the trees of the night prepare their tempests, the poet will say: ‘The forest shivers under the caresses of the cristal-fingered delirium..’ That which is electric in the shiver—whether it runs along man’s nerves or along the fibers of the forest—has met a sensitive detector in the poet’s image.  Don’t such images bring us the revelation of a sort of intimate cosmicity?  They unite the outside cosmos with an inside cosmos.  Poetic exaltation—the crystal-handed delirium—makes an intimate forest shiver within us.”

Use this prompt to evoke through a poetic image a light delirium in which your nerves run along the “fibers” of your field study.

Sound carries the voice

Through a cavern of the soul

Plucking strings and chords

Creating elaborate vibrations

From the diaphragm to lips

Into air, respiration, spirit

Recycled to more sound

Air in

Sound out

Breathe in spirit, breathe out sound

As thoughts run across a plane of consciousness

Like grass stretched across a field

Nature’s instrument

Organic animate mechanics

Bring sound into the planet

Then breathe it back in

 

Ml – Week 7 Reverie

Reverie Prompt:  pp 139, 141  Create your own reverie in response to Bachelard’s reverie:  “When I read this line by Edmond Vandercammen: ‘My childhood goes back to that wheaten bread,’ an odor of warm bread invaded a house of my youth.”  Create a reverie to demonstrate how in your own life “a whole vanished universe is preserved by an odor.”

Our Car Smell

The car had a smell

It wasn’t a bad smell

I can’t pinpoint what the smell was

Where it came from

If it had been there the whole time

It could have been the carpet

or the interior

But when I remember that smell

Maybe it was the fading new car smell

When I remember that smell

I hear the music we listened to

I remember that smell

I see everything we drove past

Remember that smell

Everything they told me

That smell

Roll the windows down, hang my arm out as I

Smell

O – the Cosmicizing I

For every appetite, there is a world. The dreamer then participates in the world by nourishing himself from one of the substances of the world, a dense or rare, warm or gentle substance clear or full of penumbra according to the temperament of his imagination.”
(Bachelard 178)
  

The appetite of my imagination that craves the ocean craves the sublime depth, width and fury of the sea. The ocean is a waterbody of movement in waves, rivulets, curls, vortices, currents, storms, tides. Reverie with the ocean is one of diffusion as the substance of thoughts follows the rise and fall of tide and wave and intensifies along the thin slip of horizon. For there is always horizon with the ocean, always the love-affair between sea and sky. Ocean reveries are dreams in color: emerald green-gold light, white blurred beachbreak spray, the tiny sky-colored mirrors on every water surface, and the soft blue wash of memory. Ocean reveries illuminate the breath of salt water through bodies and within bodies as currents and tides. This water-breath is a reverie in creation and creativity and adaptation and generosity and gestation and sensitivity and ferocity and luminosity and life and salt and blood and art.

Week 5 Bachelardian Reverie

“‘There is something marvelously soft in the study of nature which attaches a name to  every being, a thought to every name affection and memories to every thought'” (page 31)

Wow. Marvelously soft… I suppose all things do have that nature. As I write this, I am on the back porch of an internet cafe on the banks of the Puget Sound. The ocean is so soft. The ocean is so rigid. It can be a smiling mother with its coral reefs, its gentle, lapping waves, its reflection of the dim sunlight. It can also be a beast, a monster. The ocean topples cities, and sucks apart ships, and drowns a newborn baby without a second thought (or a first for that matter). What a marvelously merciful and remorseless body that I am sitting next to. Now a sea breeze blows through me, a soft nudge, a rigid shiver.

Ta – Week 8 Bachelardian Reverie

“Reverie is an oneiric activity in which a glimmer of consciousness subsists. The dreamer of reverie is present in his reverie. Even when the reverie gives the impression of a flight out of the real, out of time and place, the dreamer of reverie knows that it is he who is absenting himself –  he, in flesh and blood, who is becoming a “spirit”, a phantom of the past or of voyage.” (Bachelard pp. 150)

The faces of the dreamer form an infinite corridor of pillars facing a ubiquitous center . A sea of eyes see all and nothing. The dream navigator knows this place, where thresholds of awareness open and close perpetually. The dream navigator explores this labyrinth – this corridor we know as night.

The unconscious night is the birthplace of myth; it has no end and no beginning, no history, no future – it is timeless. It is a place of knowing – knowing which knows no bounds. The onieronaut explores the realms of night and day. He journeys to destinations unknown, along a fan of never-ending, never-beginning roads. He travels along both sides of a  great mirror. Reverie is the dream waking within us; for if the lucid dreamer finds clarity in the hall of pillars – the unconscious night – the dream finds lucidity in the life of the waking dreamer.

Ta – Week 7 Bachelardian Reverie

“A glimmer of eternity descends upon the beauty of the world. We are standing before a great lake who’s name is familiar to geographers, high in the mountains, and suddenly we are returning to a distant past. We dream while remembering. We remember while dreaming.” (Bachelard pp. 102)

One may say, “I have lived many lives”. Who is this “I” they speak of? Is it the “me-now”? Perhaps this “I” is all the pearls of “me-now” strung together by the thread of memory. Why the separation, why differentiate between self and other? I’ve heard this called the Lucifer Experiment. What more true a place of innocence (where Adam has not yet bit the apple) than that of childhood? At the nucleus of our being is the child-poet. Child-nature is a perpetual state of wonder and of dreaming that lies at the heart of every poet. In adulthood, it seems, one is always seeking to return to child-nature. When the poet seeks childhood in their reverie, they are not seeking for the memories of childhood but for the experience of childhood. They are seeking freedom! Freedom, not from the external world, but from the confines of the auto-biographical self. Reverie, by its nature, is timeless. When lost in reverie, the poet sits at the confluence of three great rivers where past, present and future coalesce. This is where the “me-now” sees with the “I” of a child-dreamer, and “A glimmer of eternity descends upon the beauty of the world.”

C- reverie 4, week 8

Prompt:  p 189   “If there are ‘gorges’ (French = ‘throats’) in the mountains, isn’t it because the wind, long ago, spoke there?” In Bachelard’s understanding of poetry, a “light delirium makes the dreamer of cosmic reverie pass from a human vocabulary to a vocabulary of things.” He admires poetry in which “human and cosmic tonalities reinforce each other.”

Here is an example: “Listening to the trees of the night prepare their tempests, the poet will say: ‘The forest shivers under the caresses of the cristal-fingered delirium..’ That which is electric in the shiver—whether it runs along man’s nerves or along the fibers of the forest—has met a sensitive detector in the poet’s image.  Don’t such images bring us the revelation of a sort of intimate cosmicity?  They unite the outside cosmos with an inside cosmos.  Poetic exaltation—the crystal-handed delirium—makes an intimate forest shiver within us.”

Use this prompt to evoke through a poetic image a light delirium in which your nerves run along the “fibers” of your field study.

Whisper of the myst gives me a kiss from all around

I am standing on the grass, and I hear nothing, not a sound.

And this is what it’s like to be encased in mystery.

I’ve been looking out the window for a while,

I see what’s coming. This is me.

Echo of a voice from far away, guiding day over the land

My spirit shines at the guidance of the crystal in my hand.

When I close my eyes now, I still see

when I defocalize

I see glowing, and my nose

I see through my Spirit Eyes.

Trust me, trust me when I say

That this is nothing yet

The myst around is getting thick

But shadows loom ahead

Everyone knows that this is nowhere

This is life, and this is dead

Just because you close your eyes does not mean that you are blind

Welcome to the Forest.

Your mind has crossed the line.

C- Reverie 3, week 7

Prompt:  pp 139, 141  Create your own reverie in response to Bachelard’s reverie:  “When I read this line by Edmond Vandercammen: ‘My childhood goes back to that wheaten bread,’ an odor of warm bread invaded a house of my youth.”  Create a reverie to demonstrate how in your own life “a whole vanished universe is preserved by an odor.”

The Trophy in my room. First Place. The worst player on the best team.

I speak of the smell of my mitt. It is unique; I am left-handed, proudly so. I assume the smell–nothing else like it in my world–is the result of a very complex compound of leather and oil chemicals. To me, it smells like running around. To me, it smells like the Summer in the Grass. To me, it Smells Like Kid Spirit. That was the summer I literally never swung the bat once all season, though because of some well-timed errors, I bunted a home run during a practice game. We made the playoffs–only lost one game all year, to Jay Buhner’s Mariners. At least he gave me a high-five and a couple autographs. The first playoff game, I got pegged in the ankle. it kinda fucking hurt. But then I stole second. Then third. Then went home on a groundout. I was safe, but the umpire “wanted to be fair” or something. My coach argued. it took a long time. “Can we speed this up? My ankle’s falling asleep,” just to clear the mood. the dugout exploded in laughter. We won that game. We were eliminated by (go figure) the goddamn Yankees a few weeks later. Those kids were bigger than us and threw faster. Some might say they were older than our team, I say steroids are leaking into Little League. Jay Buhner expects way too much from his kids.

C- Reverie #2

Prompt:  pp 88, 93  Create your own reverie in response to Bachelard’s reverie:  “Reveries of idealization develop, not by letting oneself be taken in by memories, but by constantly dreaming the values of being whom one would love.”  Great dreamers dream their double.  Can you create a reverie to demonstrate how and why the passion of your current field study sustains you?  How is your “letter” (e.g., c is for cacao) your magnified double?  (E.g., While tasting Kallari chocolate can you re-member how C might idealize cacao?) “”Tell me whom you create and I shall tell you who you are.'” Suggestion: Use your reverie on an idealized passion to create a poem that evokes the sensation of how your passion is sustaining you.

Since I was a boy, I’ve been afraid of the Ocean, open and bare with miles of darkness and unknown beasts below my fragility. even wading in shallow was uncertainty; rip currents come from out of the blue and sweep you out into the unknown, far from home. But in the last couple of years, I’ve lost my fear, gradual though it may have been. For better or worse, I crave Mystery. I beg for understanding, I cry to know that there is something more than mechanics and protons above my head, aeons of primordial soup and pure chance behind me. I have always known, it seems more than most others, the sense of the language of the Wise Ones of old. And now I’ve found the Druids, my ancient forefathers, guardians of ancient truths, tellers of legends. I will create the Druid’s Grove, he will tell me I am strong.

 

C- First Reverie

Prompt: pp 38-39, 47  Create your own reverie on the engendering of words in response to Bachelard’s reverie:  “Look out for the flamboires, little girl! Look out for the flambettes, booby!” In your experience does a romance language such as French do a “great service” by being a “passionate language” that has not wanted to  preserve a neuter gender, but rather multiplies occasions for choosing/coupling? What words, for you, “love each other?” Can you create a reverie to demonstrate words that, for you, have sexes re: the passion of your current field study?

Words: 110

It is easy: the Goddess, who silently sings dark subtleties that somehow ring. She’s married to Magick, to Music, to Madness, to Moon and Mystery, and gives birth to the Stranger who rides on a black stallion out of the forests from a distant, Shining Realm which can only be reached by the light of the silvery moon. The Music of Goddess casts a spell from the silent melodies of her soft fingers gliding upon the Neural Lyre, as graceful as raindrops tapping and sliding upon the window of Consciousness. She is not a beast as you have been told. She is a dark lady with eyes made of gold.