After Bachelard

Abstract

In this essay, I use autoethnographic exploration to grapple with the critical/cultural studies approach in the work of Gaston Bachelard. I look to anchor past, present, and future with a Bachelardian conceptualization of time in mind.

1. I am wondering, or is it wandering, my way through space. ¹ Where are the walls of the home and what might it mean to walk through them? New spaces are often undefined, both a challenge and an opportunity. Each of those words pull on each other: challenge a wall of its own and opportunity a door through a wall, or something like it. I carry what I can get my hands on, leave the rest for those who will come after me. I demarcate the Internet as a space for being: a place to feel myself through boundaries, a home.

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“Verticality is ensnared by the polarity of cellar and attic, the marks of which are so deep that, in a way, they open up two very different perspectives for a phenomenology of imagination” (Bachelard, 1969, p. 17).

• 2. I pull away from a center, something I always do with pleasure but especially so now. The interpretation of the reader matters to me, which is to say I am trying to make space for the reader to do as they will with this foundation. An invitation for the reader to do the work of assembly. What the reader builds makes my words theirs, too, or at least gives them a certain sort of participation: a way to make my home their home, too. Spatial and temporal boundaries matter, of course, but it is home which offers depth.

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“A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability” (Bachelard, 1969, p. 17).

• 3. I worry that I have already written through the landscape of home in ways that make these words redundant. If that is the case, I apologize, but I lean toward Bachelard to keep reimagining home as a place of/for/into/onto becoming. Let it be an evolving process. Something I can dip into and out of as needed. Home is where I can return to without feeling as though I’ve ever left. Home is where emotional bandwidth might be always replenished. Where I go to charge my soul, or almost something like it. A full feeling, even after days.

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“… the house we were born in becomes imbued with dream values which remain after the house is gone” (Bachelard, 1969, p. 17).

• 4. Yesterday had a home in it. Today has one and tomorrow certainly will, too. Home is a constant present that is never static, because it is always imbued with the feeling of its realities and partial bits. Something like fragments enhance any home. Each slices its own ray of almost sunlight illuminating the homes we feel and inhabit throughout our lives. Doubt carries me as it always does across an adventure of homes as lifelines, geographic, spatial, temporal, and otherwise. A home transcends in a poststructural way, across the reality that I’ve never really built anything in my life.

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“. . . a house is imagined as a vertical being” (Bachelard, 1969, p. 17).

• 5. I construct plenty with words, but I am neither handy nor architectural in nature, which means I am at home with some linguistic boundaries. On what account and with what license do I embark on a walk with Bachelard? Is the fact that his words constructed a home in my heart enough? The translator is the one to whom I owe thanks: my French is virtually nonexistent. I play with Bachelard’s ideas to erect a bridge in critical/poststructuralism, to elevate language in a way that gives (even more) power. Let the words be the thing.

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“To read poetry is essentially to daydream” (Bachelard, 1969, p. 17).

• 6. The where of the contribution of this work might be best placed amidst language and social interaction. What can language do, who can language serve, and in what ways? Can language constitute a public good? How can we know when we see that? What might be the telltale signs of language doing good work? Can its virtues be easily identified? Who are its patrons? What might their goals be? I offer these questions to try and ground the work in a sort of inquiry. I offer them to identify a place worth dwelling, what I have to call a home.

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“. . . a house is imagined as a concentrated being. It appeals to our consciousness of centrality” (Bachelard, 1969, p. 17).

• 7. Outside home might be, for me at least, like stepping outside of culture. I am not convinced such a thing can be done. Home is always in my backpack, in my backpocket, and what a wonderful reality that is. Home is the where I always carry with me. Home is an intrinsic motivation, where the catalog of memories (yours, mine, ours, anyone’s) can feel at peace. Without any other way to put it: what is a home? A place, maybe the only place, I feel capable of making for myself. Home is a place-based retreat: both tangible and geographic.

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“. . . and we should not forget these dream values communicate poetically from soul to soul” (Bachelard, 1969, p. 17).

• 8. In the far away of anywhere that is not here these days, I learn to lean my head out the window long enough to enjoy the view. I wear sunglasses to protect my eyes. I tell you there is nothing certain in a world where communication is too often the blips on the screen. No grasp can hold the weight of text messages, emails and phone calls in our year out of touch.

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“For the house furnishes us dispersed images and a body of images at the same time” (Bachelard, 1969, p. 3).

• 9. I fell in a dream I had, or wish I had, into a hole whose dimensions were too numerous to mention. The fall did not actually happen to me, but it might have, and perhaps it did to you or someone you care about. The last year has been full of second chances unfulfilled or just out of reach for those of us on a plane somewhere between here and elsewhere.

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“… it is not enough to consider the house as an “object” on which we make our judgements and daydreams react” (Bachelard, 1969, p. 3).

• 10. I read once that Tom Cruise got a speeding ticket while filming Days of Thunder in South Carolina. He must have been in a hurry, I suppose, in the way that taking one’s time is a journey, a certain sort of test of patience. Popular culture knows how to make stars rise in order to be able to extinguish them. I am not referring to Cruise exactly or him alone, but to the phenomenon of universe building more broadly. To build a universe is to assign value to specific people, places, and things.

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“Through dreams, the various dwelling-places in our lives co-penetrate and retain the treasures of former days” (Bachelard, 1969, p. 5).