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.