SOURCE: Slattery, Dennis Patrick. “Imagining the Stuff of the World: Reflections on Gaston Bachelard and Ivan Illich.” New Orleans Review 12, no. 3 (fall 1985): 81-7.

[In the following essay, Slattery finds parallels between the philosophy of the imagination in Bachelard's Water and Dreams and Ivan Illich's H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness.]

Have we forgotten the elements of the world, those aspects of the world's body that connect us to things on a level more intimate and important than that of simple possession? And culturally, have we moderns become suspicious of, if not overtly distrusting of, the imagination and its place within the ecology of culture? This ecology is also related to culture's language which may have suffered a similar fate. Roberts Avens has recently written that “beginning with nominalism in the 14th century and culminating in Wittgenstein and Sartre, we have witnessed an eclipse of the magic function of the word and its replacement by the semantic function.”¹ Clearly, what happens to the land happens as well to language.

To these questions and observations, two texts, written some forty-five years apart, attempt to interrogate the play and place of the imagination as well as the human body as points of contact with the world. The first book, written by the French phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard, is Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, published first in French in 1941 and only recently released in English thanks to The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture.² The second work, written within the last year by the cultural critic Ivan Illich, has much the same relationship to Bachelard's book as Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript does to his earlier work, Either/Or.³

What both writers offer is the outline of a symptom, a diagnosis of an illness which might best be described as the malady of literalism both of the human body and what Bachelard was to describe as “the material imagination” (Bachelard 7). Illich's book, which is actually a chapter within a more ambitious and far ranging enterprise on The History of Scarcity, reflects in depth on two sources: a water project called Town Lake proposed by several Dallas leaders in which a flood plain would be made into a large community surrounding a man-made body of water and fed by the Trinity river; and the Bachelard text which asks: what is our relation to matter, to the material things of the world? How do we imagine matter and what is the matter with and within us?

I would like in these pages not simply to describe the provocative contents of these texts, but to reflect on their ripples which extend into the waters of city space, dwelling place, and to the fluids and excretions of our own bodies. In addition, the work of these critics calls us back to some of the important matter at hand: pollution, contamination, excess, waste. But rather than viewing these phenomena from the perspective of statistics or even sociological data, they wish to understand culture through a recovered imagination and a lived body; both Bachelard and Illich wish to rehabilitate a cultural perspective by seeing the stuff of matter in relation to what Illich terms “vernacular dwelling,” a way or style of living in a place such that we leave traces of our presence—odors, stains and residue of our own life. Vernacular living allows us to maintain a history of ourselves in our habitation rather than be “garaged” like our automobiles, in a sterile space within discrete but adjacent units.

The connection flowing through both Bachelard and Illich's reflections is, of course, water. For Bachelard, water is most intimate with language and imagination; for Illich water is aligned with the way we dwell and circulate within a city, the way we clean ourselves, discard our waste, and bleach our living spaces. Now while Bachelard doesn't make a distinction between water or its properties, however, Illich insists on one. His central claim is that we have lost the water that inspires or promotes dreams; the natural, unpolluted liquid free of chemicals and waste, which is quite distinct from the socially-created H₂O, or recirculated toilet flush that is now no more than a cleaning fluid. The stuff coursing through our pipes and discharging through our home taps is a synthetic fluid having more affinities with the commode, according to Illich, than with reveries and imagination—in short, that “stuff” of which dreams are often readily made.

Illich certainly assumes the intimacy of water and dreams that Bachelard describes, so perhaps I would best consider the latter's work first, since Illich's work is a historical meditation on the dream images of Bachelard.

The French writer is at once a literary critic and historian, a philosopher of history and a psychologist of things. For twenty-three years he held the chair of history and the philosophy of science at the Sorbonne (1940-62). Remarkably, he still found time and energy to author twenty-three books on the imagination, language, and the elements. Some of his translated works include Poetics of Space, Psychoanalysis of Fire, Poetics of Reverie, all of which explore the imaginative dialectic between the elements and the stuff of our dreaming.

His writing in Water and Dreams, moreover, is historical, critical, reflective, speculative and always analogical, for he wishes to pay attention to the world's matter in an imaginal way. Bachelard's interest is both synthetic and analytical; he wants to reside in the images that stem directly from matter. We must learn, he cautions at the outset, to reimagine the real. He is not alone in voicing concern for the modern tendency to abstraction and the consequent loss, many believe, of the numinous in matter that, as one psychologist of things has suggested, leaves the truth of things separated from their reality. Bachelard and Illich want, then, to recover the wholeness of the world's body through a renewed sense of the imagination and the body itself. Bachelard in fact is clear about creating a literary aesthetics as well as determining the substance of poetic images and the suitability of particular forms to fundamental matter.

In a lengthy and engaging treatment of Edgar Allan Poe's water images, Bachelard offers that poetic experience must remain dependent on oneiric, or dream, experience; the substance(s) of water, be they clear, spring-like, running, dormant, dead, heavy, maternal, feminine, stagnant, fresh, or violent, will find their corresponding valence or ballast in the substance of dream. The authentic poet, he believes, is that person who actively engages the material imagination, who sees the life residing in matter, and who understands that it is a matter of life or death of matter whether this life is captured in poetic images. The poet's task, he observes, is to bring the reverie of things into language by way of analogy, for the correspondence between soul and sense resides in the matter of the world. Language, itself a liquid element as he will later describe it, is the best and most effective medium by which to express the stuff of things in a formed way. In fact, I should mention here that Bachelard's entire text reflects the wetness of words; his book is liquid, shifting, changing, and as such it invites more meditations with each reading. Indeed, his book is itself a dream work, a text intended to instigate reverie on our own relations to matter. What he reveals, therefore, is the value of meditating on material things; it is most fruitful to stay with substances, for the sensual values discovered in the meditation will provide correspondences, as Swedenborg has described that phenomenon, that will not mislead.

The progression of effect leading to the correspondence is no less engaging, because it sweeps us into the heart of imagining itself. Here he separates the stock image, which has lost its originary desire, and the image created from that desire. Desire is central to image making. He cites, for example, the image of “the woman a her bath” as one which once had the oneiric force to provoke a nature poem, but has since lost its animism. He shifts then to consider the source of the image of the woman, the river itself, and asks from that position the crucial question: “What is the function of the river? It is to evoke nudity” (33). The water of the river “evokes natural nudity, pure, young, white, unblemished, a nudity that can keep its innocence.” With this image as a model, Bachelard observes that “in the realm of imagination, truly nude beings, with hairless lines, always come out of the ocean. … It is an image before it is a being, a desire before it is an image” (34).

I believe that the imaginative progression here is important because it situates the place of desire and image. The stuff of the world, the river, evokes desire, which then gains its image, an image of desire, by way of “material imagination.” We don't desire, and only after, begin a search to discover the objects of desire—to do so would be again to split in twain ourselves from the world; rather, the desire is in the river which then materializes the image of that desire into a being. It is through the material stuff that images become. How this process does not often occur Bachelard illustrates by studying a few of Poe's poems to show that when “a learned mythology or a system of equivalences is introduced, the symbol does not work” because it reverberates nothing in our imaginations (37-38). The same process of ossifying matter occurs, I fear, anytime we institutionalize and so tame into flaccidity the world's body. So when we ask, “What's the matter?” we may be trying to free the world's stuff from the trap of system, or from a force of repression.

Our image of “the woman at her bath,” then, a “culture complex,” can lose contact with deeper complexes and desires because of learned mythical or classical formulas that drain all feeling and desire from the image.

I don't believe Jacques Maritain's observation in Art and Scholasticism is without warrant here when he writes that “the beautiful that is connatural to man is the beautiful that delights the intellect through the senses and their intuition.”⁴ Moreover, the poet's genius is that he grasps the ontological splendor of things through intuition, and then crafts that splendor through the liquidity of language. He adds that art then shapes a sensible matter in order to delight the spirit (27). But Bachelard, while he would accept such a designation, might substitute dream for intuition to reveal how matter, “faithfully contemplated, produces dreams” (51). Imaginative coherence links the image to the reverie in material imagination. The literary work's creation takes place, according to Bachelard, “on the border of the conscious-unconscious” (57).

If we stay with this latter image of threshold or border as the dwelling space of imagination for a moment, we can discern better the double nature of things water reflects, as well as the oneiric quality of matter. As an element of reflection, water “doubles the world, doubles things” (Bachelard 48); water also offers a surface and depth and so is central to Poe's poetry of death contained in his poetics of water. In addition, from water's doubling, Bachelard observes that reflection is central to both imagining and remembering, two acts of consciousness that Illich will reinforce in his study. Bachelard asks: “Is it really possible to describe the past without images of depth?” (56). If we examine the poems of Poe that Bachelard interprets, we might ask if it's possible to discover the past without images of death, for death and water are constant companions in the liquid poetics of Poe's work. I will confess that while Poe is a convincing example of a poet who connects water and dream, I would add another whose reflections on and in and under water allow him visions of death, depth, and birth through the leviathans of the deep and finally in Moby Dick himself. I would here speak of Ishmael rather than Melville. For in that novel we witness the birth of a writer and a poet whose reflections, while on the water, begin to refound the memory, the history, particularly of the Greek and Judeo-Christian traditions, while he does not limit himself to those thick mythic substances.

I draw this admittedly sketchy analogy here because poetically Bachelard and Ishmael are sailing the same waters. What Ishmael's reflections on things lead him to discover is much the same as Bachelard outlines—in the dreamwork and through material things he discovers the forms animating matter. Ishmael's poetic reporting seizes on the coincidence of nature and culture. These two worlds meet and reflect one another, as does death and the act of writing, history and personal experience, tradition and the present. The element of water in Moby Dick is the mucous which binds those themes of death, writing, history and culture; they have, by means of water, “oneiric unity,” as Bachelard describes this experience (76). Water “is an element of death—death is in it, as is suffering, melancholy, dissolution” (80). So we begin to imagine a perspective in which the material imagination reveals the interior terrain of human experience through the elements of matter.

Matter, Bachelard suggests, “is the unconscious of form. It is water itself, in its mass, no longer its surface, which sends us the insistent message of its reflections” (50). Reflection then would seem to break that surface tension of water, that tension which supports water spiders, beetles, and dried dead leaves which graze its surface, to allow a deeper dimension in depth of images heretofore invisible but no less real world material. The poet, Bachelard believes, discerns those forms and so renders them in his poetry which must be continually re-imagined in order to exist poetically (57).

This imaginal way of envisioning matter is unfortunately not part of traditional psychology, or literary criticism for that matter; both offer only a closed experience of things—matter classified or transformed into a manageable idea. Bachelard's intention is to re-open the text, indeed, to re-open the text of the world, again to examine the grammar of things, the rhetoric of relationships to allow matter to dream itself back into the world.

In part, the realms of critical discourse have dissolved feeling (should we read desire?) from the text as experience and from a context in the world. Desire is part of our experience of the four elements, and Bachelard's design is to illustrate that one of the principles of material imagination requires “that one of the primitive elements be at the root of all substantial images” (117). Moreover, for one who truly lives out the evolutions of material imagination, there is no figurative meaning. All figurative meanings retain a certain amount of sense impressions, a certain matter perceptible to the senses (145). The material imagination, then, dramatizes the world in its depths. It discovers in the depth of substances all the symbols of human life (148). He writes, for example, that we all have in our dwellings a “fountain of Youth bursting with energy in his basin of cold water on any morning.” (Certainly Bachelard means the natural water unfettered by chemicals or waste microbes.) And without this trivial experience, he writes, “the complex belonging to the poetic Fountain of Youth could perhaps never have been formulated.” When we splash water on our face, “it is our outlook that is refreshed” (176). So always the temperature and temperament of water ripple out to touch other aspects, dispositions, and values in us that are shared imaginally.

To pollute water (and by extension any of the elements) would then violate our own interior ecology. Through pollution we abort the intimate correspondence of dreaming things and our relation to matter. He writes that to pollute water is not simply to make it unusable or more expensive because it needs cleaning. No, “the crime aims higher than an offense against man. There is, in certain of its characteristics, a sacrilegious tone. It is an outrage against nature, the mother” (157). Water has far greater value for our imagination and dreams that far transcend simple economics or our ever-ebbing liquid assets.

When mixed with other elements of the world, but not polluted, water creates new feelings. For example, water mixed with night can bring terror or fear, a fear that is wet and humid (104). A poet—for Bachelard returns to those artists who fashion the world's substances in language—who knows how to nourish himself in a full sense with images, “will also know the taste of night near water” (104). The elements feed us; we are offered sustenance through substance. Our imaginations are fed the oneiric nourishment of the element.

In our gaining sustenance through the elements, two dimensions of human life are in play here: the body and language. For part of Bachelard's implicit consequence of his interrogating substances is a vision of human embodiment and the importance of language as liquid expression. When we lose the sense of our five senses, we lose reverie and find ourselves instead stuck in rational explanation as the only means of interpretation. The body becomes frozen, anatomical and no longer has the soft quality of flesh to be penetrated by dream. Oneiric knowledge then becomes data. Language too becomes semantic; it loses its moisture and substance.

Bachelard attacks as well that form of criticism that grows like brittle weeds from the hard clay of rationalistic thinking that imposes psychological knowledge on a text. Interpretations of texts, especially ancient ones, become little more than “overly clever readings” (135).

His idea for a more organic play with the text includes returning to those ancient reveries from which the original image substances emanated. “It is, above all, these reveries that we must reconstruct in order to interpret a text from a lost civilization.” We must recover not just the facts but “the weight of the dreams must be determined.” To recover reverie has additional riches, for if it is attached to reality, “it humanizes, enlarges, and magnifies it. All properties of the real, as soon as dreamed, become heroic qualities” (151). Reality we discover through the way we dream the world, not the world given in an abstract anatomical way. Might we ask here about the place of epic in our culture? Is it not readily apparent because the yeast of its heroic nature has been lost with dreaming's absence?

Dreaming and the material imagination are embodied, and so to dream of world substances is to reimagine the body not as object but as a reflection of the way the world has flesh and life. The material imagination is anchored in the senses; for Bachelard, it “brings primitive impressions to substances, like affability, ease, sociability, pliability” (157).

Nietzsche and Swinburne are two examples Bachelard then uses to reveal the embodied nature of material imagination and the act of writing. Nietzsche, an avid walker, and Swinburne, a competent swimmer, both reflect their relation to the elements in their style of writing. Both writers were aggressive toward the elements, a stance Bachelard believes is essential for the activity of material imagination. Nietzsche delighted in walking into the wind; walking was his battle (161). It is precisely this aggressive battle with the wind that, according to Bachelard, “gives rhythmic energy to Zarathustra: he pronounces his doctrine while walking energetically.” Swinburne, on the other hand, as a swimmer, even as an infant, reveals the terror followed by the conquest of the initiate's immersing himself in water. His leap into water reflects a leap into the unknown. Swimming through the unknown is, for Bachelard, a complex one in which joy and terror mingle. He calls this combination of emotions “the Swinburne complex” and is seen in Swinburne's writings. His swimming through violent water, especially, signals a “dynamic imagination” present in his writing. The isolated and ambivalent exercise of swimming alone in violent water becomes a complex that other writers may share; they may write according to “the Swinburne complex.”

Language is part of the elements, but it is more especially connected to water. “Water is the mistress of liquid language, of smooth flowing language, of continued and continuing language” (187). The liquid flow of words relates our body to language and water to expression. In language, Bachelard suggests, we gain a more intimate perspective on the imagination. Metaphor is that flow of imagination between words and things in the corresponding elements of image. The volume of words and water are imaginally related. “Liquidity is a principle of language; language must be filled with water” (192). We see this correspondence best in Bachelard's closing image of the imagination as “sound effects man; it must amplify or soften. Once the imagination is mistress of dynamic correspondences, images truly speak” (195).

It is to these correspondences between the body and the way we are present to stuff, especially water, that Ivan Illich begins his reflection on Bachelard's work and the substance of liquid.

One of our greatest and weakest characteristics, Illich observes, is that we are commodity-intensive, shaping the stuff of world, our own bodies, and the elements into objects, into measurable quantities. What we have overrides in social importance what we do. If historians wish to understand in more than a cursory way what cultures believed, how its people lived, Illich suggests they look at residue and residence: how they inhabited space, what they did with their waste, the sediment of their lives. Each culture “treats” its own elements uniquely, creates its own city space. Space and stuff reveal the dreams a people engage in.

On this last point, Bill Jones, a noted film critic, says culturally today we do our dreaming in the black cool space of movie theatres. The collective dream work, as he calls it, takes place in those films that touch the imagination of millions of people. Films are our fantasies and often embody cultural dreams. “Popular fantasy films allow us to glimpse the soul of a people; we see their inside projected outwardly on that thin stream of celluloid that courses and meanders through the rivulets of the projector and on past the enlarging lens and brilliant light so to carry the image forward.”

Illich might find the dream work in the projector, however, rather than in the film; he would certainly see the “garaging” of America in the theatre, a fitting emblem for the way we inhabit our living spaces—our homes, apartments, condos, cities. We have in large measure, he argues, lost the experience of founding our space, cutting space out for a city or cutting a city out for space. Illich observes that the modern city dweller cannot see space as a substance, even as he understands that the world consists of objective commodities. We don't dwell with things because things no longer have the power to allow us to dream. That oneiric element to which Bachelard addresses himself is largely lost for Illich as well. For to dwell means to be able to draw out of the city's matrix a dreamlike stuff, to spin threads from it, to use these to form a warp harnessed to the city's templum, to weave action into this warp. Here is the invisible side of dwelling that we have lost with the increased inability to imagine, itself a form of dwelling. Part of his plea in the short space of his work is a call to arms against the tendency to geometrize all space, to make it indiscrete, to destroy all intimacy (H₂O 12).

Dwelling with water, however, allows a culture to dream. Water, he claims, has a nearly unlimited ability to carry metaphors. Water has two sides to its nature: what it says reflects the fashions of the age; what it seems to reveal and betray hides the stuff that lies underneath. It is both deep and shallow, calm and murderous, and has the ability to purify as well as cleanse. In such a duality, water carries metaphor into dream and allows us to imagine our sense of place.

Though not a long chronicle, Illich's work returns to examine two historically critical moments in the life of water: the circulation of water in the city, and the circulation of blood in the body. His intention is to reveal first the relation of an oral culture to water and the place of the goddess Mnemosyne to water, to springs, and to origins.

Within an oral tradition thoughts flowed out in language and memory flowed back to origins. We might see this most readily in the epics of Homer wherein what one thought immediately found speech and became simultaneously an utterance. With a shift to a print culture, words became fixed and memory dulled, shortened, drooped because one had no longer to remember so much or so keenly. The printed word took the liquid flow from thought to words. Lost in the process was the source, the wellspring of thought in Mnemosyne.

The next shift or discovery that more critically affected the human body and fluids came through the studies of a British student who studied medicine in Padua in 1603: William Harvey. His staggering claim that the heart was indeed a pump that “circulated” the blood through the entire body created a radical shift in perceiving the body. Illich describes this shift as one which saw the body as a “quivering, symbol-laden flesh of tradition” to an apparatus, a system of “filters, conduits, valves and pumps” (H₂O 22). With the circulation of the body's primary fluid came the liquid circulation of money, newspapers, ideas, social movements at parties. The body's new image transformed the way we saw much of the phenomenal world. The body's liquids moved through the highways of arteries to cleanse poisons, those sediments of waste from the corpus. Cities slowly began to adapt the new image. Waste, which had for centuries been allowed to collect as sediment inside Western cities, now became offensive. Water began to flush the city of its impurities; the toilet and the body's excretions became offensive and were hidden in a closet. Odors became social taboos as the nose was educated to be offended by the waste stuff of culture. The city's dead, once buried within the walls of the community, were now put out of smell's way.

What is astonishing about Illich's “treatment” of waste and water reflected through a new image of the human body is that all of what he describes happened within the last 150 years. The unfortunate consequence of such a shift was that water's circulating and flushing properties overrode its dream qualities and soon, in less than 100 years, was transformed into a cleaning fluid, “recirculated toilet flush” filtered then filled with chemicals and recirculated back to the tap. Water was transformed into a cleaning fluid while the body shed all of its odors and sediment to exist finally without an odor. It could, however, adopt a fragrance permitted by fashion, but then the smell of the body simply reflected a social convention. Deodorants and perfumes, as well as underwear, all served to kill the natural odors or at least camouflage them. Soap and shame at smelling entered hand in hand, so that all “auras,” according to Illich, were domesticated.

Water was also domesticated into a cleaning agent, requiring now “technical management” even as all of its qualities that would invite dream were drained from it (H₂0 38). Along with the human body and its fluids, water was literalized. Tapped of its dream stuff, water, along with the human body and its fluids, was made to represent more an idol than an icon. Water became H₂O and made possible the plastic heart, the kidney transplant, the pacemaker, and the beginnings of the bionic era.

The complete literalizing of the body, however, Illich writes in another context, has only recently occurred “through drugs, medicine, and the medical profession.”⁵ Modern folks now live in geometric abstract spaces where no sediment is allowed to accumulate, neither private nor communal. The modern inhabitant of space has his water, his waste, his health, his fashions, his reading interests, and often his beliefs technologically managed. Even his dreams may be dreamed for him on celluloid or Beta-tapes and his desires are tamed by fads and surveys on what is acceptable to wear, be, think, have. These last observations are my own reflections on the logical conclusion of Illich's observations.

Finally, if Illich and Bachelard are correct in their assessing our relation to the world's stuff, to the matter at hand, one which does not allow things to mirror the water of our dreams, or for water to reflect the stuff of our reveries, then might we best be suspicious of those reports that so glibly assert that George Orwell's apocalyptic vision failed to mater-ialize? For the matter of the world and our inability collectively to dream through it, signals possibly that we have taken the Orwellian metaphor too literally.

Notes

1. Roberts Avens, Imagination is Reality: Western Nirvana in Jung, Hillman, Barfield and Cassier (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1980) 85.

2. Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, trans. Edith R. Farrel (Dallas: The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1983).

3. Ivan Illich, H₂O and the Waters of Forgetfulness: Reflections on the Historicity of “Stuff” (Dallas: The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1985).

4. Jacques Maritan, Art and Scholasticism and The Frontiers of Poetry, trans. Joseph W. Evans (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1962) 24.

5. Ivan Illich, Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982) 78.