SELF-ACCOMPLISHING ABSOLUTE IMAGES

As we have established, images reside in our memories.

When we draw, or learn, we add images to our memories. This adding of images to memory only increases the value of images that are already there. So you might say that learning, or drawing, is simply a multiplication of memory images. And you also might say that the fundamental goal of imagination is to multiply our memory images.

Bachelard takes this a step further by introducing the concept of absolute images. He writes of “…an absolute image that is self-accomplishing…”1

Let’s stop there for a second. Let’s consider a self-accomplishing absolute image. (SAAI) Doesn’t that say it all? We have spoken of holistic images. But an image, or drawing, that is self-accomplishing and absolute. When everything is shown, it certainly is absolute. And when a drawing rationalizes the enclosure, the drawing is self-accomplishing. It shows it all.

Bachelard tells us that a SAAI the truth. SAAI drawings are optimistic. And exactly because an SAAI is a direct product of the imagination, it is real. It is live. It is a product of drawing into and out of the imagination.

By contrast, what we don’t want are images, or drawings, that are post imagination. Representational images are post-imagination. Opaque drawinga are post-imagination. We are not interested in drawings in which thinking has stopped.

Bachelard writes that “…the imagination does not want to end in a diagram that summarizes acquired learning. “

So that pretty much says it all. SAAI images are all we are interested in. We are not interested in dead images that are merely diagrams of an imagination that has ceased. SAAI images live.

1.  Bachelard, Gaston.  The Poetics of Space.  Beacon Press:  Boston.  1958.  p 152.