Category Archives: bachelard

Week 6 Bachelardian Reverie

Reverie 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.'”

 

We can want and will ourselves to grow and to change, to be making all the right steps towards happiness, success, love and any of the many of the things people seem to be after in life. Unfortunately, dreaming of a future self is not enough. It takes acting upon that dream to see changes and results. This seems like such an obvious statement but I notice how blindly I walk through existence sometimes, expecting things to turn out the way I want them to. Perhaps the most prominent idea that has been settling into my mind during this journey is this: you have to give what you want to get. I believe that being overly comfortable for too long can make this statement seem less true. When you are desperate for the things you want (love, happiness, company, etc.) it becomes so much more crucial to put yourself out there. During this month off I have noticed how we sustain our(dream)selves by sustaining the world and those around us. No love will come to me, no matter how badly I want it, if I don’t show love or compassion to others. There are so many people who want someone to love them but don’t smile at strangers on the street. There are so many people who want to be happy but make others unhappy daily. This prompt, this idea of “constantly dreaming the values of being whom one would love”, makes me think of an experience I had this week as I was standing on the side of the road with my thumb out. I had been waiting for a ride for a while when a man in his car slowed next to me and lowered his window. I expected him to ask me where I was headed to but instead he offered up his middle finger to me, screamed a nice loud “FUCK YOU!!”, and began to drive away. During the last second of our eye contact I smiled and threw him the peace sign with my hand and I am certain that he saw it. That man must have been so full of hurt that he needed some sort of release on someone helpless. I wonder if he wants love (I believe he does) and I wonder if this is how he goes about life, expecting to find it. I felt strangely powerful as I stood there on the side of the road with my peace sign up, his blue convertible running away from the love I want from the world.

Week 8 – Bachelardian Reverie #4

**sorry for the lateness, I lost my book and just acquired a new one

“What an invitation to dream what one sees and to dream what one is…Who is existing?  What a relaxation for our own existence!”  (161)

My existence is exhausting. whirling, turning, maelstrom, never resting, never ceasing, never silent.  Words and dreams and moments spinning in a vortex, nothing sorted, nothing orderly.  I try to control the internal with the external but the one doesn’t translate well into the other.  If I can only know who I am when my mind is quiet, how will I ever know who I am?  If I don’t exist as a static being I can be reborn every moment, a phoenix shaking its feathers afresh every nanosecond.  There is freedom in the ether, but can there be freedom without captivity?  Who is looking out at me from my own eyes?  Can these eyes see the many faces of the many-faceted gods who cannot exist without me to dream them into creation so that they can in turn create me?

Week 7 Bachelardian 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.”

 

Everyone has a smell, a scent, a biological perfume that is unique to their individual. I consider myself to have an extremely capable sense of smell so throughout my career of being close to people I have noticed the subtle odors that waft off of unwashed clothes, slip into my nose as strangers pass, and radiate from necks and nape and navels during intimacy. And it is so true that an entire “vanished universe” within us can be revisited with an inhale through the nostrils at the right time and place.

 

(Your) pheromones

passed my nostrils

and melted all but my skin.

 

Everything liquid

I’m in there somewhere,

swimming

sinking

diving

drowning.

 

And suddenly I am drained and my body is dry

and thirsty

and I am a fish flopping on a desert dune

and my body is so desolate

and thirsty.

and I wish I could have held my breath

for a just moment longer

or for forever.

 

 

Week 8 Bachelardian Reverie

“The night dream does not belong to us. It is not our possession. With regards to us, it is an abductor, the most disconcerting of abductors: it abducts our being from us. Nights, nights have no history. They are not linked to one another. And when a person has lived a lot, when he has already lived some twenty thousand nights, he never knows in which ancient, very ancient night he started off to dream. The night has no future. There are no doubt nights which are less dark when our day being still lives enough to traffic with its memories.”

 

-The Poetics of Reverie, Gaston Bachelard, pg. 145

 

 

I had a dream but it slipped away. So did the word on the tip of my tongue that was abducted and forgotten in the desolate storm of train of thought. Hah, “train of thought.” How I would love to see the railroad that our outward spreading, spiraling moves along. And what is my role around the train of thought? I want to say that I am its conductor, but it is more likely that I am a passenger or even more likely, a car stopped on the road as the barriers drop down and the train passes. Have you ever seen a train as it derails itself and for an instant is free and unstoppable? It does not last long without the railroad grip. It trips over itself and crumples and piles up and EXPLODES! My mother was no songbird, but she used to sing me the sweetest lullaby about a train headed for Morning Town. Its whistle is blowing, the travelers are sleeping, I am the conductor. “Train whistle blowing, makes a sleepy sound…” As long as the morning lives somewhere, the night is less dark. On my twenty thousandth morning I will wake up with a hangover from dreams; that lullaby playing in the distance. The sound of mother-sings-to-baby skating sadly, sweetly from my tongue.

O – Week 8 Reverie

A poetic force leads these phantoms of reverie. This poetic force animates all the senses; reverie becomes polysensorial.” (Bachelard 162)

Ah! how a passage which pleases us can make us live! …one learns that … at certain times, internal lights render opaque bodies translucent…” (Bachelard 162)

One learns that at certain times, internal lights render opaque bodies translucent. Internal lights render opaque bodies translucent. Reverie is an opening, a softening into the internal worlds of things. Reverie is the spill of light into water at the rising crest of a wave. Reverie is a depth where light flickers in curtains. Reverie is the palpitating shoreline of a descending night tide. Reverie is the wind-shift of oval-shaped reflections in ripples to jagged-edged wavelets. Reverie is backwards-bent curl of beach break spray. Reverie is the lace offering left by a wave at the land’s edge. Reverie is a ripeness, a fullness, an opening. So is art.

M – Reverie #4 Week 8

Gabrielle Gribbin

Bachelardian Reverie #4

Winter qtr. wk. 8

Work count:100

“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.

I finger the nape of my neck, brushing the peachy

fuzz sprawled across Me

here starts the palpation.

Strumming the superficial layers of skin and muscle

with ardent care.

Detaching from the whirring of thought and incessant

prodding, stimulated touch assures my heart to open

allowing lashes to meet allows anterior eyelids to

Open

Able now to tune-in to my humming vibration and

gingerly place palm to solar plexus to feel

Triangles meeting, creating a light to project

Outward.

A shiver corrects my posture as I continue to enjoy

my palpable skin.

“Its beauty comes from the ability to manipulate”

M – Reverie #3 Week 7

Gabrielle Gribbin

Winter qtr, wk. 7

Word count:100

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.”

An inhalation leaves nostrils singling with the whiff

of a familiar scent.

Swift friction glides over the hairs that stand upon me

in attempt to stabilize my core

My body produces: sweat

sweet sweat

The odor of my movements, of the capacity that my

petit frame holds and the remembrance of

my un-faltering heart, both of my hearts one located

slightly left in my chest cavity and the other just behind

my knee pumping blood against gravity.

I lay comfortably in the musky cloud I emanate.

to hell with deodorant and fruity spray,

Let me be!

An inhalation settles me.

M – Reverie #2 Week 6

Gabrielle Gribbin

Bachelardian Reverie #2

Winter qtr. wk.6

Word count:100

“Reverie 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.”

Think of that weight that you hold,

the force that you create downward. Your feet, ever aware of the

gravity of you.

The motion on our propulsion starts

from heel to toe… ponder this thought.

Continuing your forward thought place toes first to

meet with the earth, ease into the placement of self,

then only after insuring this is the route you wish

to take lower your heel.

The intention of the slightest

inching joints is where we begin, from these inches

gain feet, strides, bounds, and leaps of expression.

The body is my temple, I will it to be.

 

M – Reverie #1 Week 5

Gabrielle Gribbin

Bachelardian Reverie #1

Winter qt. wk.5

Word count:100

“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?”

Oh, Fluttering feet (m. pies), bounding with ease as the

hardened ground waits to lick fallen limbs.

How the flick of the wrist may will you to come nearer

or keep your distance.

An arched swaying of lifted arms

propels my core forward as the ever fluxing gate of

flexed calves (m.terneros) and thighs (m. muslos)

send my spine (f. espina)  a-tingle passing one

another to the rhythm of my breath (f. respiracion), my

thought.

Weight shifts as a halt to steps is forced, a need for

balance leaves mind (f. mente) focused dictating each

part of me to hush.

Y – Bachelard Reverie #4

“”all the fruits of the apple tree are rising suns,” […] “celebrate” the apple. ” -156

 

Claim your woman

Claim

flame, mane, fame, name, pain, frame, train, brain, drain, vein, rain, sane, crane,

Claim your sane insanity

and watch your wings grow

Flying flying in the whole, in the name of your reveries

Claim your wings, spread them along the winds of your reclaimed body

My woman body

My woman

builds log cabins that stretch along the seas of hills, like the depths of her insides,

Stretching like the depths of her roots, stretching like the body of her yoni.

My woman

listens to the trees surrounding her cabin,

Listening, surrendering to their wisdom

My woman

Expands and extends her will to the cottonwood stands,

As they give breath to the dissinigration of her knowing.

 

Craving the whole

Labyrinth of

Arousing her

Inner beaming

Moon body

 

Do not censor the body, do not sensor the speech

And do not sensor the breath

For when you censor, you take away your authenticity, your you, your whole.

Claim your whole,

claim your woman.

Claim