The Keen Stars Were Twinkling

I’m still reading The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard.

It is very difficult to know all that he was attempting to accomplish in this work. Certainly there is meditation on houses as structures, and houses as homes. That I was expecting. There is a chapter on daydreams. There is writing about the process of creating. Bachelard quotes French writers I didn’t read in college.

“An artist does not create the way he lives, he lives the way he creates.” Jean Lescure

Interestingly Proust, whom I have read, is also quoted. The reason this is significant to me is that in describing this book briefly to a friend in the gym, he said, “sounds a little like Proust.”

Poetry is the thread that unites the chapters. Though not on every page, Bachelard has sprinkled verse throughout the text, and when he does, he gives the poem in French followed by a translation in English.

Mainly Bachelard attempts to deconstruct poetry.

Bachelard considers the imagery of doors and forests: “On May nights, when so many doors are closed, there is one that is just barely ajar. We have only to give it a very slight push! The hinges have been well oiled. And our fate becomes visible.”

The forest represents a “limitless world.”

I made use of a forest setting in two chapters of “Acoustic Memory”—one where the lovers are together and one where Raven longs for Gray. The glass walls of the Chapel Hill Public Library allow a view of a forest and facilitate work on pastoral scenes.

But back to Bachelard, in deconstructing poetry, he considers imagery and also sound, but not rhythm (at least not that I have seen yet—I confess I am not reading this book sequentially). He writes pages about Baudelaire’s use of the word vast and the phonation of the word vast. In the middle of this long rant, there is a gem of a metaphor for the human voice. The voice is a “delicate little Aeolian harp that nature has set at the entrance to our breathing” and it “is really a sixth sense, which followed and surpassed the others.”

More about Bachelard another day.

I look out the window of my airplane and see darkness penetrated by a strobe-like, red light that momentarily illuminates the wing—flicker, flicker, flicker. I’ve just flown over Chicago.

And here I will leave you with one of my favorite excerpts from a Shelley poem with a much more romantic take on the voice of a beloved:

"Though the sound overpowers, sing again, with your dear voice revealing a tone of some world far from ours, where music and moonlight and feeling are one."