response to: Gaston Bachelard

Bachelard, Gaston. Trans. Maria Jolas. The Poetics of Space: The Classic Look at How We Experience Intimate Places, Introduction and Chapter Nine: The Dialectics of Outside and Inside. Boston: Beacon Press, 1958.

Bachelard equates reality-enhancing imagination with images of “protected intimacy” such as home. His discussion of memory, time, and space indicates that our memory is collected in pockets of space holding compressed time and that when we visit our memory, we are trying to suspend time: “memories are motionless."

He connects space, solitude, movement or suspension, and time in relation to the creative, which connects to my way of considering wonder as action.

“And indeed we should find countless intermediaries between reality and symbols if we gave things all the movements they suggest.”

“Thus we cover the universe with drawings we have lived…Space calls for action, and before action, the imagination is at work.” Active wonder is movement related and relating to the place of the imagination. Below is an unmanipulated photograph - the grey and black - using old film and pushing and pulling the camera to its limits. It's an image of the light reflected on the surface of a moving stream.


tracks of light, water's calligraphy, I remember breathing there with gold light pulsing water, heavy camera, cold feet in suspended ice.

In addition, he connects the voice with memory and what is secret and poetry with the expression of our dreams. My camera dreams below the surface.

photos ©2007 Rebekah West. All rights reserved. Intimate places near my home at the top of St Vrain.

response to: Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram

Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous. Chapter One: The Ecology of Magic, A Personal Introduction to the Inquiry. New York: Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, Inc., 1996.

He begins his book: “Humans are tuned for relationship,” which speaks directly to the kind of wonder act that interests me. He specifically discusses our use of language to mediate human connection to nature and to each other, suggesting that from the edge, margins, or boundaries is wisdom of a metamorphic nature and one that changes those boundaries. I view his writing as emanating from a wonder perspective because he uses personal perception and story to indicate his direction and make his point.

Chapter 1 looks at the relationship of the magic-makers, in this case shamans or magicians, to both their community and the natural world, in fact, making the case that these people live purposefully between both; this edge itself is a spatial symbol. He sees the role of these magicians as intermediary and for those who work with equilibrium.

He suggests we have an indivisible relationship to and with nature, that there are people positioned and trained to guide others to understanding or deepening this relationship, and that by relating, if I understand him correctly, change occurs which affects both humans and nature.

I chose this picture in relation to contemplating this chapter because movement is a language directly transmitted; a dialogue occurs both within the dancer and between the dancer and an audience. This image reveals an emotion or sensation that I know and am reminded of. It is whole to me the way a verbal image can be whole, both the key and what is behind the door.

At Boulder Ballet's performance of Nutcracker yesterday with my 5-year old niece and other family members, I watched the ballerina snowflakes who open Act 2 speak in the language of snow. It was obvious to me, a visceral or remembered experience. I could remember playing in the snow and how it moved and I could imagine the snowflakes as dancing individuals affected by my presence.

Yet, I sadly realized that for many viewers of the ballet, or the poetic photo above, or the modern dance this photo came from (choreographed by Wade Madsen), the "language" was lost on them. What does it mean? they ask plaintively or even furtively. Once having had a conversation with snow by playing in it, catching it, scooping it up, making snowballs with it, watching it swirl behind our run, being mesmerized by snow snakes on the road, or listening to its sluff or crunch or crackle, how can we forget? How do we forget the language of knowing, the language of our inner nature?

I leaned over to my sister-in-law and said to tell my niece they were snowflakes. In response, my niece nodded wide-eyed and sat on the edge of her seat to pay keener attention.

Everyday shamans might be young women in tutus "pretending" to be snowflakes and appearing, my niece reports, as princesses, an inexplicable woman in white shaking up our emotional waters, or a photographer sensing a moment seen but impossible to see and showing it to you not to bewilder you in the confusing sense but to take you to a place perhaps less under your control but where, it turns out, you are already conversant.

Wonder is a dialogue, a conversation, communication between ourselves and the worlds in which we live and imagine. As art-makers working with metamorphoses of our inner worlds, we are some of the magic-makers.

Try this: Play in the snow, again or for the first time if you have to. Notice what it feels like to do that. How the cold feels, or the weight of a snowball or the hush of snow falling, whatever you are physically, sensationally aware of. Later, go in your living room, turn the lights down so you're not too self-conscious, put on music and dance that playing with the snow. It's not complicated. You remember and you act upon it. Why do this? To remember part of your humanity, that's all, the part that dances, the part that knows because it has experienced.

Photo of Lyra Mayfield dancing in "Sweet Release" in a concert by 40 Women Over 40 ©2007 Rebekah West. All Rights Reserved.

Wonder Wears Many Masks

Does wonder have a definition? If we dig deeper, can we say whether wonder has a structure? We think it is simple because we have been taught that it is simple.

Wonder is difficult to discuss precisely because it is experienced in such individual ways, but also because of its complexity, and further, even though it remains personally worthy (we love to feel wonder), it has been obscured and devalued in our contemporary culture by belittlement, ignorance, or avoidance. Or, it can be surrounded with a false glow of mystery as a way of tossing off a too-vast subject thought to be impossible to address: The Wonder of Life.

To be contrary to common simplistic thinking then, let's take a broader view. We'll put all kinds of possibilities and observations about wonder in the mix without forcing it to occupy a smaller definition.

Wonder seems to desire newness compelling curiosity and learning. Wonder is ever related to the thinking, witnessing, curious mind, and the mysterious forces of the imagination.

Wonder, it seems, is an endless system of perpetual motion compelling us forward. We can perceive tension in wonder, a mysterious x-factor that keeps it moving.

Our understanding and use of wonder comes from the sublime, awe, horror, curiosity, and objects or places of wonder.

Wonder taps into internal sensation: a feeling of immediacy, attention, heightened awareness, change in experience of time or perception, impermanence, intense intimacy or grandness, and illusion.

Wonder is often synonymous to the marvelous: wonder cabinets, their history, purpose, ramifications, and relationship to reality or creating reality; to the fantastic: wonder beasts like dragons, gryphons, and hippogriffs. Related to the sublime are ecstasy, erotica, and psychology.

Wonder is used as a rhetorical device, a power in drama, and central to the illusion of magic. Wonder has association with the conditions of seeing and the unseen embodying extremes in seeing, super-microscopically and universally, until you know longer know what you are looking "at."

Wonder appears in conversations of time, space, infinity, vanishing points, story structures and "fractalizing" where the edges prove to have more expanse and information at each deeper look.

Topics like death, learning, and religion bring out wonder's affinity with the unknown, negative space, blackness, mystery, and fear.

There are examples of wonder's ability to animate, that is, to enliven or bring to life. Images of the living-dead abound in wonder's relation to terror and horror.

Wonder seems to be located "somewhere" yet experienced in terms of site or non-site; wonder has relevance to both alienation and familiarity. Where does wonder exist? Does something outside us "fill" us with wonder or evoke it, like igniting a latent fire?

In agreeing on a definition, we might inadvertently constrain wonder. Letting questions hover, we allow wonder's structure or form to unfold.

Nina Rolle in Zen Cabaret. Video still by RW. Copyright 2006 Nina Rolle. Used with permission.

Why write on wonder?

I consider wonder a valuable, essential force prepared to be part of our lives in an active, lively way. However, it has been introduced to us as childish, naive, and worthless, as discretionary fluff, or as only a suspended moment of awe-struck. Real wonder is not being cultivated or taught properly.

I suspect wonder originally correlated to such threatening human endeavor as true learning, discovery, expression, and an ongoing co-creative relationship between humanity and the mysteries of life. Later, its relational vitality was split for violent purposes of power : silencing and separating the body from the mind, women from leadership, the artist from society, the voice from the teller, the song from the throat, the mask from the masked, and belittling the child as something other than the already human and adult-in-progress; at each level associating its force with uncontrollable and disposable fools, thereby reducing wonder to nothing more than a spoonful of s____.

I write on wonder to give its full power back to humanity where it belongs.

photo ©2006rebekahwest of her lotus sculpture