160.

As we center our reflections on the problems of lived space, 
miniature raises for us images of vision exclusively.  

But the causality of the small riots the senses, 
and we must make, apropos of each sense, 

a study of its 'miniatures'.  For sense, 
as for taste and scent, the problem will be 

perhaps even more interesting than that of vision.  
Vision cuts short its dramas.  But a trace of perfume,

an infintesimal odor, can determine 
a genuine climate in the imaginary world. 

  poetics of space,         

"miniature"             

99.

And the threshold, here, is the welcoming threshold,
 the threshold that does not impose by its majesty.  
The two images: the calm nest and the old house, 
weave on the loom of dreams the thick web of intimacy.  

And the images are entirely simple, with no concern 
for the picturesque.  The poet has rightly felt that a sort 
of musical harmony would take hold in the soul 
of his reader by the evocation of the nest, of birdsong, 

of the charms that remind us of the old house, the primary dwelling.  
But by so gently comparing house and nest, have we not forgotten 
the house of happiness?  There is an alas in this song of tenderness.  
If we return to the old house as a return to the nest, it means

that memories are dreams, that the house of the past has become 
a grand image, the grand image of lost intimacies.  

the poetics of space               

Every great, simple image is revelatory of a state of being.  The house, even more than the landscape, is a "state of being."  Even as a reproduction of its exterior aspect, it speaks of an intimacy.  Psychologists, Francoise Minkowska in particular, have studied drawings of houses done by children, and have made of them a kind of of a test.  This house-test has the advantage of being open to spontaneity, since many children spontaneously draw while dreaming, pencil in hand, of a house.  And so, says, Mme Balif, "Asking a child to draw a house is to ask him to reveal the most profound dream in which he wishes to shelter his happiness; if he is happy, he will know how to draw an enclosed and protected space, a solid and profoundly rooted dwelling."  The house will be drawn in its form, but almost always, some trait will designate an inner strength.  In certain drawings, it is evident that, says Mme Balif, "it is warm on the inside, and there is a fire, a fire so strong that it can be seen escaping from the chimney."  When the house is a happy one, smoke softly dances above its rooftop. 

the poetics of space,            

"house and universe"           

In this drama of intimate geometry, where shall we live?
Does not the philosopher's advice to retreat into oneself  
in order to become situated in existence lose its value, 
even its meaning, when the most supple image of being-there 
has just been experienced as the poet's ontological nightmare?
 Let us take note that this nightmare does not. . . {unintelligible}. . . 

Fear does not originate from the outside.
Nor is it made from old memories. 
It has no past.
It has no body.
Nothing in common with the philosophy of breathlessness.
Fear here is being itself.  

If so, where to flee, where to take refuge? 
Into, towards, what refuge may we escape?  

poetics of space               

"the dialectics of outside and inside"       

The reader who is not in a rush -- the only reader we could ever hope for -- will surely enter into the reverie of miniature.  This idle reader has often enjoyed such daydreams, but never dared to write them down.  The poet has given them literary dignity; we wish -- grand ambition! -- to give them their philosophical dignity.  For, in the end, the poet is not mistaken, he has discovered a world.  "Here, too, existed a world."  Why should the metaphysician not confront that world?  It would allow him, at little cost, the experience of "opening to the world," "entrance into the world."  Too often, the world designated by philosophy is nothing but a non-self.  Its vastness is a mass of negativities.  The philosopher passes too quickly to the positive and appropriates the World, a unique World.  The formulas: being-in-the-world, being of the world are too majestic for me; I can't manage to live them.  I am more at ease in miniature worlds; they are, for me, dominated worlds.  Living in them, I feel world-making waves pouring from my dreaming self.  The vastness of the world is no longer anything for me but the jamming of these waves.  Miniature, sincerely lived, detaches me from the surrounding world, helps me to resist the dissolution of the surrounding atmosphere.   

poetics of space           

"miniature"             

Take note that few dreamers of nests are fond of the nests of the swallow, made, they say, of saliva and mud.  We ask ourselves, where could these swallows have lived, before there were houses and cities?  The swallow is not, then, a "regular" bird; Charbonneaux-Lassay writes: "I've heard peasants in the Vendée claim that a swallow's nest could scare the night-devils away, even in winter." 

poetics of space, 

"the nest"    

And so, values transform facts.  As soon as an image is loved, it can no longer be the copy of a fact.  One of the greatest dreamers of winged life, Michelet, offers us proof of this: while he consecrates only a few pages to "the architecture of birds," these pages think and dream at once.  

The bird, says Michelet, is a worker stripped of all tools.  He has neither "the hand of the squirrel, nor the tooth of the beaver."  "The tool, in fact, is the bird himself, his chest that presses and squeezes its materials until they are made to surrender, blend and adapt to the work as a whole." And Michelet suggests to us a house constructed by the body, for the body, taking its shape from the interior, like a shell, in an intimacy that physically works.  It's the inside of the nest that demands its form.  And the instrument that imposes on the nest its circular form is nothing other than the body of the bird.  By constantly turning and turning the wall from all sides, it comes to form its circle.  The female, like a living tower, hollows out her house.  The male bring from the outside the disparate materials, solid twigs and pieces.  From all this, by an active pressure, the female makes felt. 

Michelet continues: the house is the bird's person himself, his form and effort in the most immediate sense: I would even say, his suffering.  The result is achieved only by the constantly repeated pressure of the breast.  Not one of these blades of grass that, to keep and protect the curve, hasn't been pushed a million times over by the breast, the heart, certainly accompanied by trouble in breathing, perhaps even palpitations.  

What an unbelievable inversion of images!  Is this not the breast created by the embryo?  Everything is pressure from the inside, with intimacy physically dominating.  The nest is a fruit that swells to fill, to press against its limits.  

From the depths of what reveries do such images rise?  Do they not originate from the dream of the protection closest to us, a protection tailored to our own bodies?  Dreams of the house-garment are not unknown to those who indulge in the imaginary exercise of the function of inhabiting.  By working at our dwelling in the way that Michelet dreams of his nest, we would not be wearing the ready-made garment so often marked as a bad sign by Bergson.  We would find the personal dwelling, the nest of our body, tailor-made to our form.  When, after life's tests and trials, Colas Breugnon, the hero of Romain Rolland's novel, is offered a larger, more accomodating house, he refuses it as if it were a suit that was the wrong size, saying, "Either it would gape all around me, or I would make it burst at the seams." 
  

poetics of space, 

"the nest"    

The nest-house is never young.  Once could say, in a pedantic way, that it is the natural habitat of the function of inhabiting.  One returns to it, once dreams of returning to it like the bird returns to the nest, like the lamb returns to the fold.  This sign of return marks infinite reveries, for human returns occur in the grand rhythm of human life, a rhythm that transcends the years and that, by dreaming, battles with absence.  As the images of house and nest are drawn together, an intimate composition of fidelity takes hold.     

Everything happens, in this domain, in simple and delicate touches.  The soul is so sensitive to these simple images that it hears all of its resonances in a harmonic reading.  On a conceptual level, the reading would be insipid, cold, linear; it would ask us to understand the images one after another.  And in the domain of the image of the nest, the traits are so simple we are surprised that the poet could become enchanted by them.  But simplicity grants forgetfulness, and all at once we are grateful to the poet who finds, with a rare touch, the talent to reimagine it.  How could the phenomenologist not respond to this renewal of a simple image?  And so we read, with a full heart, the simple poem written by Jean Caubère entitled, Le nid tiède [The warm nest].  The poem seems even more meaningful when we consider that it appeared in an austere book written under the sign of the desert (Jean Caubère, Deserts):

The warm, calm nest
Whose bird sings

Recalls the songs, the charms
The pure threshold
Of the old house.

The threshold, here, is a welcoming threshold, a threshold whose majesty does not impose on us.  The two images, the calm nest and the old house, weave a thick web of intimacy on the loom of dreams.   They are completely simple images, with no concern for the picturesque.  The poet rightly sensed that, with the invocation of the nest, of birdsong, the charms that lead us back to the old house, the primary dwelling, a sort of musical chord would strike in the reader's soul.  But, in order to compare house and nest with such gentleness, mustn't we have forgotten the house that sheltered happiness?  There is an alas in this song of tenderness.  If we return to the old house as if to a nest, it is because memories are dreams, it is because the house of our past has become an image, a great image of lost intimacies.  

Just as I was having these thoughts, just as I was having these dreams, I read in the Cahiers G. L. M. a page which supports my axiom that makes a world of the nest, that makes the nest the center of a world.  Boris Pasternak speaks of "the instinct, with the aid of which, like the swallow, we construct the world -- an enormous nest, an agglomerate of earth and sky, of death and life, and of two kinds of time, one that is available and one that is lacking to us."  Yes, two kinds of time, for what a long time, in fact, it will take for us to be able, from the center of our intimacy, to spread waves of tranquility that will travel to the limits of the world.  

      {poetics of space, the nest}                  

     We have no need, in order to live this trust so profoundly inscribed in sleep, to ennumerate the material reasons for it.  The nest, as much as the oneiric house, and the oneiric house as much as the nest -- if we are at the origins of our own dreaming -- are not familiar with the hostilities of the world.  Life begins for man in deep sleep; all of the nest's eggs are well covered.  Our experience of the world's hostility-- and by consequence, our dreams of defense and aggressiveness -- will come later.  In its germinal form, all life is well-being.  Being begins with well-being.  In his contemplation of the nest, the philosopher calms himself by meditating on his being in the peaceful being of the world.  If we were to translate the absolute naiveté of his reverie into the metaphysical language of today, the dreamer might say: the world is the nest of man.  

     The world is a nest -- an immense force keeps the beings of the world in this nest.  In his History of Hebrew Poetry, Herder gives an image of the immense sky resting on the immense earth: "The air," he says, "is a dove, who, resting on his nest, warms his children." 

     Delving deeper into our dreams of nests, we soon collide with a kind of paradox of sensibility.  The nest -- we understand this right away -- is precarious, and yet it triggers in us a reverie of security.  Why does this evident instability not shut down such reverie?  The answer to this paradox is simple: we dream as phenomenologists, without knowing it.  We relive, in a sort of naiveté, the instinct of birds.  We take pleasure in accentuating the mimicry of the green nest in green foliage.  We saw it, certainly, but said it was well hidden.  This center of animal life is hidden by the immense volume of plant life.  The nest is a bouquet of leaves in song.  It participates in the peace of the vegetable kingdom.  It is a mark in the ambient happiness of tall trees.  

     A poet writes: 
           I dreamt of a nest whose branches repusled death

     And so, while contemplating the nest, we are at the origin of trust in the world, we obtain the beginning of a trust, a call to the cosmic trust.  Would the bird construct his nest if he had no instinct of confidence in the world?  If we hear this call, if we make of this precarious shelter that is the nest an absolute refuge -- paradoxically, no doubt, but the imagination impels us to do so -- we return to the sources of the oneiric house.  Our house, understood in its oneiric power, is a nest in the world.  We will live there in a native confidence if, in our dreams, we truly participate in the security of the primary dwelling.  

     Nature has a very simple way of amazing us: by enlargement.  With the shell commonly known as the Grand Bénitier, we see Nature enacting an immense dream of protection, a delirium of protection, ending in a monstrosity of protection.  The mollusk "weighs only 14 pounds, but the weight of each of its valves is between 250 and 300 kilograms, measuring from one meter to a meter and a half in length." (Armand Landrin, Marine Monsters, 2nd edition, Hachette, 1879, p. 16.)  The author of this book, part of the famous Library of Marvels, adds, "In China. . . wealthy Mandarins own bathtubs made from these shells."  What a mollifying bath must one experience in the house of such a shell!  What capacity for relaxation must an animal of only 14 pounds feel while occupying so much space!  I know nothing of biological realities.  I am only a bookish dreamer.  But when I read a page of Armand Lanrin I am possessed by a grand, cosmic dream.  Who wouldn't feel cosmically comforted by imagining taking a bath in the shell of the Grand Bénitier?

         {the poetics of space, shells}           

I always feel a little shock, a little linguistic pain, when a great writer uses a word in a pejorative sense.  First of all, words, all words, honestly perform their duty in the language of everyday life.  And then, the most common words, the words attached to the most commonplace realities, don't lose their poetic possibilities because of it.  When Bergson speaks of a drawer, what disdain!  The word always appears as a polemical metaphor.  It orders and judges, and always in the same way.  The philosopher does not like arguments in drawers.

The example seems to us a good one to illustrate the radical difference between image and metaphor.  We will dwell a bit on this difference before returning to our investigations into the images of intimacy that are in solidarity with chests and drawers, in solidarity with all of the hiding places where man, the great dreamer of locks, enfolds or conceals his secrets.  

the nightmare is radical because it is simple

and if we are in the hell realms, and if
we are in the hell realms, a part of us is always
in the hell realms, mired as we are
in the world of bad intentions

by what naive intuition did we situate ourselves
in this realm whose evil finds no limit? 

this soul, this shadow, this racket
of a shadow who, the poet tells us,
seeks its unity head on from the outside
knowing with no certainty what lies
                                                          inside

in this horrible terrible of words unformulated
being, at the self's interior
slowly digests

this becoming nothing that will take centuries

and we may, certainly, avoid walking
through the door of such a poem

the true houses of memory, 
the houses where our dreams
lead us, the houses rich
with a faithful oneirism, 
recoil at all description.

to describe them would be to visit them:
the nuance hence speaks the color

we must, to the contrary, 
transcend the difficulties 
of description to discover
the antediluvian eggshell

she is truly a cosmos
(and is she not beautiful?)

so far-out that memory and imagination forget

their surroundings, 
their shoes, their names. 

Must we not render fixation 
her virtues?  How we trace 
ourselves, day in and day 

out, in our corners 
of the world?  

in its millions of alveoli, 
space is composed of compressed 
time. space is about
                                  that

all of our shelters, all of our refuges consonant
with the true histories, eggshells that once housed us

even after we trailed off from the hunting party 
to pause on a rock by the side of the lake

the lake was not man-made
the lake twirled a necklace
                        
twice 'round your neck in a gesture 
so shocking we thought it a firework 
lit by the hand of a still-innocent child

who refused 
to take off her gown
once Halloween 
had come and gone 

or to surrender 
the holiday tree until, 
finally, it fell into 
a heap of dust

on the first day 
of spring
 

Here, in effect, we touch upon a reciprocity whose images we should explore: 
every truly inhabited space carries the essence of the notion of _______________.  

We will see, during the course of our work, how the imagination works in this sense 
when a being has found the slightest shelter: we will see the imagination construct herself 

with illusions of protection -- or inversely tremble behind walls, doubt 
the most solid ramparts.  In brief, in the most interminable of dialectics,

the sheltered self feels out the limits of her shelter, sees 
________________ in its reality and its virtuality, 

through thought and through 

 {24}                                                     

here, then, is our central problem. 

to resolve it, it is not enough that we consider ____________________
as an "object" on which we can make our judgements and reveries spin.  

our task is not to describe our mansions,
to detail their picturesque effects or analyse 
why we are comfortable in them.  

we must transcend description's impasse --

whether objective or subjective, that is to say, whether speaking
facts or impressions -- to attain the primary virtues, those 
in which in some way an adhesion is revealed that is

native to the very primary function of living.  
we make the necessary effort to grab hold 
of the seeds of happiness, immediate 

and sure.  in every dwelling -- 
in the castle, even -- the initial 
eggshell may be found.  

this is our primary task.

to a new year toute bonté de coeur

gaston bachelard, 1961.

VO:  First of all, because he is all goodness of heart and all smiles,
         and also because he resembles the kind of philosopher 
        we dreamed of when we were children.  

Interviewer:  First of all, tell me, do you call yourself "Master"?

GB: Do I what?

Interviewer:  Would you like to be called "Master"?

GB:  No, not at all, not at all, not at. . . never, never!  No, my name is 
Gaston Bachelard, Bachelard, that's all, oh no no no, not, NOT "Professor,"
no, no, no kidding, no no no, that's enough!  I'm a man absolutely. . . 
free. . . no, everyone calls me Bachelard.