THE POETICS OF SPACE 1

A great advantage to having your daughter study architecture is that you are exposed to books that you did not know existed. Our daughter was reading from Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space this Thanksgiving. I started reading the introduction, and immediately passages jumped from the book that speak to our mission here at Transparent Drawing.

So for example, regarding our goal to subjugate the renaissance picture plane mentality:

“I have come to realize how difficult it is to break away from this “prudence.” To say that one has left certain intellectual habits behind is easy enough, but how is it to be achieved? For a rationalist, this constitutes a minor daily crisis, a sort of split in one’s thinking which, even though its object be partial-a mere image-has none the less great psychic repercussions. However, this minor cultural crisis, this crisis on the simple level of a new image, contains the entire paradox of a phenomenology of the imagination, which is: how can an image, at times very unusual, appear to be a concentration of the entire psyche?”

Yes. An image that is a concentration of the psyche.

And although Bachelard is talking about poetry, how about this passage describing the great intuitive act of creation:

“One must be receptive, receptive to the image at the moment it appears: if there be a philosophy of poetry, it must appear and re-appear through a significant verse, in total adherence to an isolated image; to be exact, in the very ecstasy of the newness of the image.”

Or how about this regarding the primacy of the visual over the word?

“To specify exactly what a phenomenology of the image can be, to specify that the image comes before thought, we should have to say that poetry, rather than being a phenomenology of the mind, is a phenomenology of the soul.”

Drawing, just like poetry, is a phenomenology of the soul.

Obviously, we have a new Transparent Drawing champion in Bachelard. More to follow. But I had to immediately share this incredible find.

All of the quotes above taken from the introduction.

Bachelard, Gaston.  “The Poetics of Space.”  Beacon Press:  Boston.  1958.