What Language Can I Borrow?

Somewhere in Columbus, Indiana, there were two people standing in front of a building, talking quietly. Their figures were reflected through an all-glass building, the trees surrounding the landscape seemed to diffuse the relentless sun so the effect of the scene was to evoke this calm attentiveness, something quiet but never passive.

In the midst of the scene, the man asked,“Do you love this building intellectually because all of the facts?”

There was a sudden, contemplative pause that followed before the woman replied,“No, I am also moved by it.”

“Yes, tell me about that. What moves you?”

She took a deep breath and there was a recognition almost immediately that the film went mute then. Just when we thought we were entering something profound on why such space and building moves her so deeply, the sound was silenced so we can only see through the Motions.

We can see someone in her deepest being enamored by space – her hands gestured to some kind of shape, her eyes went soft and a little bit misty, dazed perhaps by her own revelation on how that building stirs something deep inside her. It is as if this film is saying that words can be subdued in this kind of stillness. We are allowed here to feel abundance in silence. Kogonada shows precisely this in Columbus (2017), there is a suggestion that our interiority is probed not through language but through the senses – tender hand gestures, eyes that are drenched in fondness, a sigh of relief at the end, a longing perhaps of some kind of deliverance.

Gaston Bachelard was a highly revered philosopher during his time in the French academy. His academic origins were those of epistemology and the philosophy of science, in which he had spent a large part of his career on the examination of science and the philosophy of knowledge. It was no surprise then, when the Sorbonne offered him the inaugural chair of history and philosophy of science in 1940.

There was a shift, however, which appears almost radical which concerns the subjects of his inquiries when he switched from his work on science and the pursuit of objectivism and rationalism – stripped of all possible remnants of the irrational and the unconscious – to turn to the study of poetics and the imagination instead. Bachelard was struck by how little imagination, and the poetic takes place in the study of science itself — such neglect disturbs Him.

He re-evaluated his methods and found that psychoanalysis is no longer appropriate to his purpose and delves instead into what he termed as the phenomenology of imagination, or he commonly referred as poetic image – which he wrote extensively through his work The Poetics of Space where he found his own distinctive philosophical voice.

Poetic image, to Bachelard, is not only about picture, or space, or metaphor. It goes deeper, it is the very stuff of consciousness, which he calls as “phenomenology of the soul”. We may encounter moments similar to that scene in Columbus: feelings and emotions experienced in vignettes where we stand in front of a work of architecture, a solitary house in a winter night, a painting, or when we watch those films that do not have a narrative, do not seem to be about anything other than scenes or landscapes of one image to another. Experiences that carry deep emotional charge familiar to those who are so inward with themselves.

Poetic image, argues Bachelard, arises from a mind that is foreign to its own process of creation, eluding its own origin, is not concerned with causality. He as far as calls a “doctrine” that is timidly causal like psychology or psychoanalysis would shift the emphasis to the various pathological complexes that give rise to the poetic image itself, rather than focusing on it as a direct experience of the human consciousness.

Here is the place where Bachelard resides, the very focal point of his exploration of poetic image or the poetics of space. He explores space by transcending its geometrical dimension, envisioning it as more than a purely theoretical idea. At a time when there is so much that has been said about the gap between the poetic and the rational, Bachelard is probing its axis through poetic image – something that is so distinctive, rare, and special.

This tension is not new though, imagination has always been perceived as a kind of obstacle in scientific thinking and understanding. They hang from a different axis that has been said to be opposed to one another rather than complimentary. The imaginative and the poetic traffic in the realms of the subjective, meanwhile the rational and the scientific traffic in the realms of the objective.

Such disinterest attitude disturbs Bachelard. It does me too – the poetic is not peripheral. He powerfully phrase in the introduction to this book:“A philosopher who has evolved his entire thinking from the fundamental themes of the philosophy of science, and followed the main line of the active, growing rationalism of contemporary science as closely as he could, must forget his learning and break with all his habits of philosophical research, if he wants to study the problems posed by the poetic imagination.” (Bachelard xv)

He seems to be saying that the poetic image doesn’t always have to be potent or valid through referents of psychic investigation. It does not need to be credible through an explanation of the past, infantile experiences, or psychological (traumatic) events – in order to take root inside of us. Rather, it’s something warm and familiar that you feel, nostalgic in its universality, more like a hum or a pang that reverberates in your chest when you encounter something that doesn’t have a name.

Bachelard is special in this way, exploring the poetics – perhaps it is fitting to call it poetics of epiphany – through spaces and images. It is concerned with image as it emerges in its fullness before we can identify it with any structural, psychological, or rational considerations. It is not to pit science against the poetic, he only wants us to reside here for a while, to the richness of our experience and reality that so easily pass us by.

Phenomenology has a fitness to explain this limit of understanding, to explain moments and realities where our experiences move beyond the grasp of rational thought, that rare glimpses of 'otherness' when we are in the middle of such experiences. It is something distant from articulation and closer, I think, to that hum we feel in our chest.

When phenomenologists investigate the poetic image, it has little to do with analysis or mind-bending paradox, and has more to do with the experience itself, with the phenomenon of things as they emerge. For rationalists, this might sound like a crisis. One has to admit that these are not easy concepts: it is very vaporous, heady, and hinges on the breaking point of language itself. And here is exactly where poetry comes forth.

At the threshold of the limit of our understanding, poetry is a language that can approach this mystery – the one language that we can borrow.

A language that does not rigidly attempt to express something absolutely to show its depth, but one that is grounded in experience and imagination, that does not bludgeon the mysterious aspect of our existence, that functions as a living corpus and not one that is stagnant and fossilized. To register an experience as it is, to offer witness.

Poetic language is not merely a linguistic decoration, as Eugene Peterson once wrote,“Poets tell us what our eyes, blurred with too much gawking, and our ears, dulled with too much chatter, miss around and within us. Poets use words to drag us into the depth of reality itself. Poetry grabs us by the jugular. Far from being cosmetic language, it is intestinal.” (Peterson 11)

There are in total twenty-five paintings of haystacks that Monet painted at different times of day. It was arguably one of his most extensive works series. He wanted to capture different ways the light shines through the haystack at different times of day. There are ones that capture the light on the late summer evening, one just before dawn, or one bathed in the misty light of a winter day.

I was struck by such sight, of that black and white haystack painting with deeply visible contrasting brush strokes of the shadows. There was something so piercingly abundant in what I witnessed, something the was much closer to wonder than clarity, that at the time I could only recall a poem that Robert Bly wrote:

“When Monet glimpsed the haystack shining in fall dawn,

knowing that despair and reason live in the same house,

he cried out: ‘I have loved God!’"

And he had