Marisa Malone

Bachelardian Reverie #4

Winter qt. wk.8

Word Count: 100
“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.”

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

“How the object we dream helps us forget time and be at peace with ourselves!” -Bachelard (163)

….

My reveries run through me, wild with my spiral thoughts. My body is a constraint to dream through to make with to work from. My reveries trace the edges never the whole until I dream again and slip into that space where time lets go and my thoughts fall free like the words falling free on the page only there is never freedom in the page only tiny bursts of relief from my thoughts as they lock with an others. My reveries move through me with the gusts of traffic, pushing from my skin unfinished thoughts that tangle like leaves in the tree.

Word Count:168

 “Then there lives within us not a memory of history but a memory of the cosmos. Times when nothing happened come back.” (Bachelard, 119)

“The pure memory has no date. It has a season.” (Bachelard, 116)

 “a whole vanished universe is preserved by an odor.” (Bachelard)

 *The poems correspond in order of the three quotes.

1)

the eruptions

of reverie,

the micro-pulsations,

cause our skin

to dream

of a time

when nothing

happened.

2)

I slip between a time of now and when

the days light lasted long into the night,

and the sun broke apart and scattered

across the sky and everything was possible

and nothing was done in the thick heat

of my body sticky with pollen and petals,

and the tangy earth-like sweetness of my

humid skin stretched over lazy summer

bones.

 3)

This house is old. I smell its old age in the cobwebbed history of its bones (old books, sun bleached photos, antique furniture, dusty wood, empty dresser drawers, lavender, loose wall paper). It holds a heat that warms the deepest part of me, a part of that pulsing piece thats hidden between my spine and rib cage. The cotton bub breeze carries traces of river and moves through lace curtains and through my mind, kicking up forgotten feelings, suspending me in this moment of pure memory. 

Reverie on Reveries on Reverie:

“There are reveries where I am less than myself. Then the shadow is a rich being.” – (Bachelard, 80)

I’ve always known that I contain multiples. I’ve felt the sides of my sides and seen their shadows. Shadows that stretch their way over a city sidewalk, contorting to read the misshapen text of the ground, and curve against the corners. They reveal the shape of my body, the shape of my state of mind as I am forced to move along the contours of buildings, stepping off and on to curbs, yielding to the traffic of machines and other bodies and puddles of rainwater gathered at the corner of the street I walk every day, shining with the slick mix of oil reflecting a self idealized. 

Reverie Prompt:

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 is a great service of language?

Words ornamented to hang on the body

as they spill from a tongue?

There is no language to describe a body

in now now now.

We speak only the echos of words

lost in translation from the intake

of breath, construction of thought,

then exhale.

What is language without the body?

Where do the words fall if not on the flesh?

The sensation of the senses

come alive from what surrounds us.

I feel the language as it penetrates

even if I don’t understand.

A body understands the vibrations of earth

more than that of machines

though I once mistook the crash of construction

for an earthquake.