An old house, a porch in shadow, some tiles, a faded Arabic decoration, a man seated against a wall, a deserted street, a Mediterranean tree (Charles Clifford's "Alhambra"): this old photo moves me: quite simply that it's there where I'd like to live.  This longing touches me deeply, at roots that are unfamiliar to me: the heat of the climate? Mediterranean myth, Appollinism? Defection? Retreat? Anonymity? Nobility? Whatever it may be (regarding myself, my motives, my fantasy), I want to live there, en finesse, a finesse that will never be satisfied by the tourist photograph.  For me, landscape photographs (urban or rural) must be habitable, and not visitable.  This desire to inhabit, if I observe it closely in myself, is neither oneiric (I am not dreaming of some extravagant site) or empirical (I'm not looking to buy a house from the views of a real-estate agency); it is fantasmatic, relating to a kind of seeing that seems to carry me ahead, towards a utopic time, or to bring me back, I don't know where, inside myself: the double movement that Baudelaire praises in Invitation au voyage and La Vie antérieure.  Before these landscapes of predilection, everything takes place as if I were sure of having been there or of going there.  Freud says of the maternal body that "there is no other place of which one may say with as much certitude that one has already been there."   Such would then be the essence of the landscape (chosen by desire): heimlich, awakening in me the Mother (not in the slightest bit worrisome).

from Camera Lucida             

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"           

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.  

     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}