Bachelard, Poetics of Space, "house and universe"

""Winter is by far the oldest of the seasons. Not only does it confer age upon our memories, taking us back to a remote past but, on snowy days, the house too is old. It is as though it were living in the past of centuries gone by. This feeling is described by Bachelin in a passage that presents winter in all its hostility, "those were evenings when, in old houses exposed to snow and icy winds, the great stories, the beautiful legends that men hand down to one another, take on concrete meaning and, for those who delve into them, become immediately applicable. And thus it was, perhaps, that one of out ancestors, who lay dying in the year one thousand, should have come to believe in the end of the world."

For here the stories that were told were not the fireside fairy tales recounted by old women; they were stories about men, stories that reflect upon forces and signs. During these winters, Bachelin writes elsewhere,"it seems to me that under the hood of the great fireplace, the old legends must have been much older than they are today," What they really had was the immemorial quality of the tragic cataclysms that can presage the end of the world."" (Bachelard)

This book continues to surprise me in its depth, its cross-references, its intuition about places, its descriptions of how it feels to live in a structure of any kind. Memory and nostalgia have become wrapped around the physical reality of places we live, places we have inhabited in our youth. These things like the quality of the light falling, or the sound of rain on the roof when we were children have infiltrated the timbers and beams of the house because they have become wound together inextricably in out memories.

I have never heard anyone else articulate this, but it resounds with me fully. When storms would roll over the Front Range in Colorado, at 12 or so, I would take my stack of books and a blanket, candles, and swaddle myself into the swing on out front porch. The house I grew up in was just the right kind of "old", 1907 I think, reddish orange brick, creaky wood floors, and the swing was pretty rough and splintery. Why I felt the need to rush outside and watch the entire storm is kind of strange, or why I was so deeply drawn to it as an event to be witnessed. I remember the smell of ozone/creosote in the air, darkening clouds through tree branches, thunder.... these sensory memories are now the shell around my childhood house. I don't remember one with out the other.

On the cusp of Spring here in New York, I feel like saying goodbye to winter, with this above passage, with gratitude to its sentiments, with memories of reading John Berger's 'Labors of the Earth' trilogy, of reading Colette's early books about her childhood home (Sido, My Mother's House), old Nordic fairytales, and a nod to the magic and alchemy of the things I have learned this winter. ***Post-note: I just learned that Rene and Agnes Mosse plant stag horns in their vineyards for certain parts of the season**** magic****!!!!!

new

I found an old remnant of writing this morning (reworked a bit, below), and can barely remember writing it. It's uncanny how things, once articulated, have a way of making themselves true. The wish of a dry and dusty desert landscape life has always threaded itself through my day-to-day life, (under-conscious hazy cloud backdrop), but never have the details (once specified, thrown into the wind) so obviously become the track that my life runs along.


'I am ready for that open space I have always looked for. I am ready to face a landscape that is bare, windblown, sparse, and scrubbed. I am ready to face the wind on sharp intake as I come around the side of the trailer-- I am ready for the scratches and dark hollows under my own eyes. I am ready to turn into something new, into something old, something that I was in my own mind before anyone else saw it coming. I am ready for red dust on my skirt, and jeans and off-white velvet sweatshirts stretched thin. I am ready for the lonesome whistle of wind, for distant train calls, for sharp corners that recede into infinity, for blue sky and yellow earth. I can examine these things now, and think to myself that they are strange, I am strange, I have been building an arsenal of vocabulary and voice, of tumbled, shorn bits of words that make sense now in their new combinations. I have been collecting bits of stone and rock, in each pocket they click together, hanging down at the lowest part, against my leg from the inside. I have been collecting these bits, pieces, flakes, scraps, and now I can string them together into a new alphabet.'

I once admired a (textile) artist in Seattle who went on walks around the area collecting small objects. When she got home she arranged these objects into a new personal lexicon for herself-- each thing a letter-- their groupings turned haphazard into poetry. (In art school I made a board game like this once-- a player would arrange objects onto a haiku pattern grid, spin a spinner that linked object with word-- I think I called it the "random poetry generator"??? Not many people could appreciate the subtleties of haiku (you were supposed to write it down and take it with you!) that centered on recurring words like 'taxidermy', 'neon bar sign','smoke','darkness', and 'dirty ashtray'.....)

I am tired of ideas around the edges... am tired of skimming the surface of things, of exploring the safe remnants around the edge. If I were to go to the heart of the matter would it seem scary? Is the process different, would it seem too big-- would I be able to recognize my ideas from the center, instead of noticing their outside contours first?

These are questions I hope to answer from the desert....

Last night I dreamed of mountains, greenhouses, castles, and snow. I read somewhere that when you dream of exploring buildings, houses you are really examining the twisting passageways of your own brain. It is a strange place indeed, I had been to some of these places in dreams before but I had never been able to access certain parts of the landscape-- now suddenly I was "behind the walls"... a pathway in/through. I have been reading John Updike like mad lately-- an image of a green house from yesterday lodged in my brain-- at the time I thought "there's my novel".... how strange. Of course the ideas would be housed (dark green painted walls and wood trim), cold and creaky wooden house, cold but full of books... steps up to another story... I'd like to hold on to this shell of story. I know I will recognize it when I see it again.

The House on Bishop Street (rita dove)

No front yard to speak of,
just a porch cantilevered on faith
where she arranged the canary's cage.
The house stayed dark all year
though there was instant light and water.

(No more gas jets hissing,

their flicker glinting off
Anna Rettich's midwife spectacles
as she whispered 'think a baby'
and the babies came.) Spring
brought a whiff of cherries, the kind
you boiled for hours in sugar and cloves

from the yard of the Jewish family next door.
Yumanski refused to speak so
she never bought his vegetables
at the Canal Street Market. Gertrude,
his youngest and blondest,
slipped by mornings for bacon and grits.
There were summer floods and mildew

humming through fringe, there was
a picture of a ship she passed
on her way to the porch, strangers calling
from the street 'Ma'am, your bird
shore can sing!' If she leaned out she could glimpse
the faintest of mauve-- no more than an idea--
growing just behind the last houses.

(from 'Thomas and Beulah')