Andrew's Wiki
Poetics Space (changes)

Notes

• Topoanalysis: “the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives”
• What is space for? “At times we think we know ourselves in time, when all we know is a sequence of fixations in spaces of the being’s stability—a being who does not want to melt away, and who, even in the past, when he sets out in search of things past, wants time to suspend its flight.” 8
  • This shows something beyond Bergson: “Memory…does not record concrete duration, in the Bergsonian sense of the word. We are unable to relive duration”
  • It is in this sense an alternative to the endless stream of time, a psychological coping mechanism
  • “and if we want to go beyond history…we realize the calendars of our lives can only be established in its [space] imagery.”
• Emphasis on solitary experiences of space
• House
  • “psychological elasticity” of our image of the house has capacity to provoke profound emotions
  • as a unity and as complex set
  • imagination will always add to it: you can have illusions about the safety of your home, thinking the strongest the most dangerous or your flimsy house of straw a castle
  • “our house is our corner of the world” 4 “our first cosmos:” so that your consciousness arises not out of the dialectic of I-not I but instead … by living in a home b/c inhabited space is the “not I” that protects that “I”
    • it is the first metaphysics of being, the “being-well,” which is before the secondary metaphysics of being cast out into the world (which people erroneously assert is the first consciousness)
    • being-well: “Within the being, in the being of within, an enveloping warmth welcomes being. Being reigns in a sort of earthly paradise of matter, dissolved in the comforts of an adequate matter.”
• Method: finding some “intimate, concrete essence” about all your memories of homes that would JUSTIFY the significance of images of such intimate spaces
  • beyond description
  • phenomenology: experience of the house isn’t about positivist stuff (about description of decor) but about how your thoughts and imagination and sense of self and your own history come together to make you experience the house
  • a native attachment to home: “primitive” (me: like psychoanalysis wants to find too)
• Dreams allow a new house to keep the memories of the old ones, so that all your houses “co-penetrate” 5: “we are never real historians, but always near poets” 6
  • the house is what lets people DREAM 6 and day-dream: and he cares about dreaming b/c he thinks it’s just as important as thought and experience
• Memories + dreams = experience of house
• House = past, present, and future – all together, “Stimulating one another”
• House “trusts aside contingencies, its councils of continuity are unceasing. Without it, man would be a dispersed being.” 7
• He says there should be people thinking about exterior space, but he just would rather focus on interior, “attractive” space
• Funny: he notices that everytime you attempt to “read a room” you end up thinking about your OWN room instead of the one that you’re officially reading about. Hence the link to daydreaming.
• Astonishingly not metaphoric: house you were born in is still inside you, in the form of “organic habits…physically inscribed in us” 14 (you know exactly how to open that latch, step on the stairs): on your body, can be exercised by your body revisiting that house
• Stability: “a house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability” 17
  • House has a centrality and a verticality (cellar w/its fear and irrationality to attic w/its safety and thus rationality)
  • Modern city creates houses that don’t have “cosmicity:” can’t feel the weather, no natural surroundings; but you can make it a home again by a turn of thought that makes city sounds sound like your ocean, your natural site (think of your apartment as shell, and the surrounding noise as the noise of the ocean wave or perhaps a storm)
    • So that while the home in a rural area seems to encourage intimacy and stability more easily, you CAN create strategies to make the city congenial to the dreams and memory making of the archetypal House by an act of will to conceive of the city as something more nature, that is coherent 27-8
• Corners, nests, shells: all as bits of universes and yet an entire universe on the other hand
• Lots of natural imagery
• “concrete metaphysics:” where the person notes multiplicity and changeability of images, yet nonetheless says they prove the permanence of being