Wednesday evening. Rainy with falling temperatures, 74 degrees.
We have Olivia today, and I had a hair appointment this afternoon, so not a lot of time for a long post. I did come across the passage below by Gaston Bachelard, which prompted me to do some searching on the interwebs, where I found a PDF of the entire document, which I gave a quick perusal. Heady stuff. The kind of stuff I used to read all of the time, once upon a time. If you’re interested, you can find it here.
Anyway, here’s a sample:
And all the spaces of our past moments of solitude, the spaces in which we have suffered from solitude, enjoyed, desired, and compromised solitude, remain indelible within us and precisely because the human being wants them to remain so. He knows instinctively that this space identified with his solitude is creative; that even when it is forever expunged from the present, when, henceforth, it is alien to all the promises of the future, even when we no longer have a garret, when the attic room is lost and gone, there remains the fact that we once loved a garret, once lived in an attic. We return to them in our night dreams. These retreats have the value of a shell. And when we reach the very end of the labyrinths of sleep, when we attain to the regions of deep slumber, we may perhaps experience a type of repose that is pre-human; pre-human, in this case, approaching the immemorial. But in the daydream itself, the recollection of moments of confined, simple, shut-in space are experiences of heartwarming space, of a space that does not seek to become extended, but would like above all still to be possessed. In the past, the attic may have seemed too small, it may have seemed cold in winter and hot in summer. Now, however, in memory recaptured through daydreams, it is hard to say through what syncretism the attic is at once small and large, warm and cool, always comforting.
~ Gaston Bachelard, from The Poetics of Space (p10)
Music by Enya, “Boadicea”
Solitudes
For today, I will memorize
the two trees now in end-of-summer light
and the drifts of wood asters as the yard slopes away toward
the black pond, blue
dragonflies
in the clouds that shine and float there, as if risen
from the bottom, unbidden. Now, just over the fern—
quick—a glimpse of it,
the plume, a fox-tail’s copper, as the dog runs in ovals and eights,
chasing scent.
The yard is a waiting room. I have my chair. You, yours.
The hawk has its branch in the pine.
White petals ripple in the quiet light.
In the quiet, a necklace of gourds on the fence.
A mourning cloak on a seeded spray of crabgrass.
An undulant whine of cicadas.
~ Margaret Gibson
Lola's Curmudgeonly Musings 