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The Resonant Soul: Gaston Bachelard and the Magical Surface of Air [PART I]
This month's eletter is the continuation of a contribution to the understanding of imagination in the work of Spiritual Psychology. Part II will be in next month's month's eletter. In November 2002, The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture sponsored a conference titled "Matter, Dream, and Thought: A Symposium of the works of Gaston Bachelard." What follows is Part I of Robert Sardello's contribution to that Symposium, a paper titled "The Resonant Soul: Gaston Bachelard and the Magical Surface of Air." For nearly twenty years, Dr. Joanne Stroud of the Dallas Institute has directed the translation from French of the works of Gaston Bachelard. Bachelard was a gifted philosopoher of science who 'fell' into the imagination as he was trying to show that it had no place in science. He then spent the rest of his life developing an imagination of the elements - Air, Fire, Water, and Earth. He is an extraordinary thinker and writer because he does not write about the imagination, he writes from within imagination. You cannot read his work without undergoing a transformation of your very being. He makes one imaginatively capable.
The books that have been translated under the direction of Dr. Stroud are:
This month's eletter is a contribution to the understanding of imagination in the work of Spiritual Psychology. In November 2002, The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture sponsored a conference titled "Matter, Dream, and Thought: A Symposium of the works of Gaston Bachelard." What follows is Part I of Robert Sardello's contribution to that Symposium. For nearly twenty years, Dr. Joanne Stroud has directed the translation from French of the works of Gaston Bachelard. Bachelard was a gifted philosopoher of science who 'fell' into the imagination as he was trying to show that it had no place in science. He then spent the rest of his life developing an imagination of the elements - Air, Fire, Water, and Earth. He is an extraordinary thinker and writer because he does not write about the imagination, he writes from within imagination. You cannot read his work without undergoing a transformation of your very being. He makes one imaginatively capable.
The books that have been translated under the direction of Dr. Stroud are:
The Resonant Soul: Gaston Bachelard and the Magical Surface of Air [PART I] I approach the work of Gaston Bachelard as a depth psychologist who has for some twenty-five years been interested in determining the practices needed to develop conscious, embodied soul life that is open and receptive to the spiritual realms. I would say that my interest is in the spiritual soul. In addition, as an individual having an astrological chart with the Moon, the Sun, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus, all in air signs, my choice of Air and Dreams as Bachelard's work most concerned with the spiritual dimension of the soul comes as no surprise. Nonetheless there are five other major factors in my chart in earth signs, so what I want to present, I assure you, will not be all up in the air. Rather, the desire to know more what the soul's proclivity for ascension is all about belongs to the alchemical imagination of the distillation process, the circulation concerned with the spiritualizing of matter and the materializing of spirit.
I ask you to enter with me into the tension of two opposing characteristics; aerial ascent and earthly engagement - simultaneously. Nature engages in this simultaneous opposition of movement all the time. For example, the perfume of the flower in its aerial ascent cannot be separated from the earthly weight of the seed. This tension of forces is expressed in the perfection of the flower, beings of the air and the earth all at once. Or the tree as a giant being of air and earth. Bachelard quotes Paul Gadenne's meditation on a gigantic walnut tree:
And he quotes La Fontaines' lines concerning the oak tree:
Our imagination of depth, our depth psychology needs, I propose, to go not only deep into the underworld, but also deep into the cosmos. Let us let Gaston Bachelard be our guide. The elemental image of air concerns the soul's motion, soul as motion. It is not about motion in the soul but the soul itself as active movement, all movement, not something that moves. Of the four elements, Bachelard says that elemental images of air are the most rare, but always exemplify the dynamic imagination that is by far more significant than the formal imagination. More significant and more primordial because dynamic images are never about content but are the "how" of the content. If we do not have a deep sense of elemental air, the images produced all the time that are the mark of the psyche - the fantasies, the dreams, the memories and even our perceptions of the world, seem to us to be cinematic pictures, inner things to be looked at. Even the brilliant formulation of James Hillman that images are not things seen but what we see through, is not strong enough to overcome the tendency to confine the imagination to set forms. To catch the air of the soul requires sensibility to the subtle, sensibility to the "how" of the image. There is nothing visual about the aerial imagination. It does not concern motion perceived visually. Motion perceived visually is not dynamic imagination but cinematic. Elemental air images compel us to realize images as creators of their own motion. The cinematic imagination, which views images as pictures, unwittingly reduces the motion of images as something caused by some invisible, outside force. The soul as motion is the basis of psychic images of every variety and element being activity and not static pictures. But it is the element of air that is the source of image as activity. Bachelard focuses, for example, on dreams of flying, quintessential images of the aerial soul, as the model of the air element.
We might think, for example, that a dream of flying in which one has wings and floats through the air would be a dream typifying the aerial imagination. We might think that here is an instance of the soul revealing its dynamism, soul imagining itself as activity. Such a dream more likely shows a memory of seeing pictures of angels, or it is dreaming a concept of what we think concerning how humans might fly. Wings on the human are a static form. They suggest the concept of flying rather than invoking the action. This truth is easily tested. All you have to do is imagine a human being with wings and try to set that person, in your imagination, into flight. You can perhaps do so, but the wings on that human form will not be flapping nor even necessary to the flight. Bachelard says: Soul is not some kind of unsubstantial thing that moves but rather qualities of motion. The primary qualities directly expressing soul's motion are buoyancy and lightness of being, often showing, for example, in dreams of flight in which I may find myself flying without wings but with the just right tilt of the feet that suggests motion. A buoyancy of the feet, launching one into air with the pure delight of being an air being, not with any projected goal toward which one seems to be headed. The lightness of matter shows in all dreams of flight, for the soul's motion is not a work of resistance against anything heavy. In a dream of flight, the whole form is light and there are subtle details, which if noticed, reveal this image as the soul's motion. In addition to the slight movement of the feet, the form itself is buoyant, and light, and movement occurs freely and spontaneously, not mechanically. In such images it is clear that the flying form is not some kind of projectile in the air, but the form is the condensation of the air itself, a kind of consolidation of air currents. Such a dream form also moves in the air in a way akin to a bird; the body form stretched out horizontally, rather than our usual vertical posture, now moving up and down. This resemblance to the bird also conveys that the form itself is airy. In a dream of flight, we are never our 170 pounds. Dreams of flight are one of the archetypal images of the spiritual soul. Soul is essentially vertical motion. Soul seeks both the heights and the depths. I do not intend to suggest that the soul as motion only seeks the heights; only that this necessary upward aspect of soul has been sorely neglected in depth psychology, showing up only as purer pathology. Bachelard, however, has almost nothing to say of the downward flight of the soul because, he says, the aerial imagination concerns the primordial desire of the soul to ascend. For Bachelard, all depth psychology is spiritual psychology.
Rather than hand spirituality over to religion or to the spiritual initiates or to cults of spirit or to the New Age, depth psychologists perhaps needs to encourage its sister discipline of spiritual psychology with its interests in elevation, and the resonant images touched off in all images of motion and elevation - gentleness, the embrace of light, the sky, infinite space, silence, contemplation, the motion of the stars, nebulae, the milky way, freedom, clarity, ideas. These qualities do not exist on their own but are the tropisms of imaginal matter under the valorization of air. Bachelard quotes Gasquet: And "In rarified air, at the summit of the soul, does God not float like the dawn on snow as it grows whiter?" (Air and Dreams, pg. 57) Spiritual psychology concerns the soul's aerial attraction to God, and God's breath as a wind gently pulling on the soul. This attraction belongs inherently to soul, but can be attended to only through practices focusing on the soul's motion. Because our prevailing notion of images is that they are some sort of form, different certainly than the forms around us in the waking world of usual consciousness, but nonetheless forms, let me try to give an example of speaking an image as form and speaking that same image as activity. Let us, for a moment, engage the aerial imagination in a heightened way so our visual prejudice will not sneak in and infect the air. First, an image spoken in terms of formal imagination. Suppose I look at a painting on a wall. It is a landscape painting. It pictures a strong, flowing stream, blue, stirred into whiteness, moving from a higher region to the left, and down toward the right. On the far side of the swiftly flowing stream is a hill, a beautiful hill of dark green tall grasses, sloping steeply down to the stream. And on this side of the stream, more dark green grass, filled though with small blue flowers sitting atop long green stems. A hint of the blue sky forms the background of this pleasant painting. All images, like all matter, are composed of the subtle elements of earth, air, fire, and water. This present image is of the preponderance of the water and the earth element, but I am going to try to draw out and emphasize the air element, which is also present, and, more than present, makes this painting tend toward a living image rather than just a photographic representation of a pretty mountain scene. The aerial imagination would have to be spoken something like this: downard flowing white capping blue rushing, cutting through greening sloping hill ushering a welcoming field of flowering blue reaching toward its sky blue likeness. The first image concentrates the formal imagination. The second image concentrates the dynamic imagination, of which the aerial imagination is the prime example. The animation of the image, we can see when we bring it out and let it speak loudly, comes from the aerial imagination. The formal imagination always risks missing the animation or makes animation a matter of cinematic movement rather than subtle qualities interior to the image. Besides being present to the animation within images, there is yet a further reason for intense interest in the aerial imagination. It is the only passageway between images and imaginal thinking. The aerial imagination induces thought, to put it in Bachelard's terms. In the esoteric spiritual traditions, spirit first reveals itself as mind, and soul is always a lesser level of the manifestation of mind, and more or less a hindrance to spiritual progress. Thus, there is always a strong tendency in spiritual practices to neglect soul. But in Bachelard, as in depth psychology, soul is first. And with Bachelard, because he is a phenomenologist who lets the world speak through him rather than concocting a theory about the world, we are allowed to begin where we are, as ensouled beings, receptive to the currents of upwardly deep spiritual forces and as well, receptive to the currents of archetypal forces going as downwardly deep as the underworld.
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