SOURCE: Nakell, Martin. “The Last Image.” New Orleans Review 15, no. 3 (fall 1988): 49-59.

[In the following essay, Nakell uses Bachelard's psychoanalytic criticism to interpret the image and its origins, and investigates his concept of reverie.]

Well they'd made up their minds to be everywhere
          because why not.
Everywhere was theirs because they thought so.
They with two leaves they whom the birds despise.
In the middle of stones they made up their minds.
They started to cut.
Well they cut everything because why not.
Everything was theirs because they thought so.
It fell into its shadows and they took both away.
Some to have some for burning.
Well in the morning they cut the last one.
Like the others the last one fell into its shadow.
It fell into its shadow on the water.
They took it away its shadow stayed on the water.

—The Lice, W. S. Merwin

Although in our common culture we store and have access to a host of associations and connotative relationships to the images of a shadow, or a race of people with “two leaves,” and although Merwin draws on these associations, nonetheless the poem is original, and not derivative, i.e., it cannot be explained on any other basis, in any terms other than itself. The image must be apprehended and swallowed whole.

Certainly poetry contains content which is open to interpretation, but its content, its meaning bears a close relationship to the atomic particles of Heisenberg's observations: as we observe the image we change it so radically that we cannot pretend to an “objective description.” Neither can we pretend to an analysis or interpretation which leaves our observation out of the picture.

Backtracking a bit, we need to examine what an image is, and where it comes from. In a paper which will rely heavily on Gaston Bachelard's work, it may seem strange to begin with a psychologist, or a psychoanalytic critic, for Bachelard saw a misdirection in psychoanalytic approaches to the image, recognizing that the psychoanalyst, in looking for the cause and the origin of an image in the history of a poet's life, and particularly in an examination of the poet's neurosis, was both looking in the wrong place, and destroying what Bachelard called the “reverberation” of an image. Bachelard refers to Minkowski for an explanation of his term reverberation. I agree with Bachelard that Minkowski defined the term exquisitely, and, like Bachelard, I'd like to quote the whole passage from Minkowski:

It is as though a well-spring existed in a sealed vase and its waves, repeatedly echoing against the sides of this vase, filled it with their sonority. Or again, it is as though the sound of a hunting horn, reverberating everywhere through its echo, made the tiniest leaf, the tiniest wisp of moss shudder in a common movement and transformed the whole forest, filling it to its limits, into a vibrating, sonorous world. … What is secondary in these images, or, in other terms, what makes these images only images for us, are the sonorous well-spring, the hunting horn, the sealed vase, the echo, the reflection of sonorous waves against the sides—in a word, all that belongs to the material and palpable world.¹

What is secondary, what is primary? And what is the relation between them, if there is any at all? Jeffrey Mehlman, in an article entitled “Trimethylamin: Notes on Freud's Dream,” deals with a dream which Freud had and recorded in a way which will help us to understand our problem. For we want to know how an image sets up a reverberation, and what it is that reverberates, before we can accept Bachelard's assertion that the function of an image is this very reverberation. Freud's dream involved a patient whom he met at a party. The patient was still sick. Freud examined her, and in the dream, in the process of that examination Freud saw that her problem involved the use of a drug, Trimethylamin, whose chemical formula Freud saw written out in large, bold letters. Freud records and analyzes his dream. But here, before we begin to question whether Freud's analysis of his own dream is “correct” or not, we have to examine the nature of dreams themselves. Mehlman finds that Freud makes a distinction between symbol and origin. In Interpretation of Dreams, Freud writes:

… the dream content seems like a transcript of the dream-thoughts into another mode of expression, whose characters and syntactic laws it is our business to discover by comparing the original and the translation.²

Further, Mehlman says:

It will be noted that in coming to terms with the dream element Trimethylamin, Freud has shifted his focus back to the dream-work, which … constituted—in opposition to the latent dream-thought—the ‘essence’ of dreams.³

The content, or symbols, in a dream (in this case Trimethylamin) are not the essence of the dream. That essence is something else, which Freud called dream-work. Mehlman defines the difference:

Yet we have just examined Freud's insistence that the reduction of dreams to a semantic core constitutes an important and characteristic psychoanalytic error. For that misreading consists in assimilating the transformation process of the unconscious to the bound, stable constructs of the ego.

(180)

Robert Young goes one step further, the final step, it would seem, anyone could take in this heady process. Young says: “… if interpretation is repression, then repression is interpretation—and all texts are interpretation” (177).

So all texts are repression. What they repress I will tackle in a moment. For now, we must follow Mehlman's argument to its furthest reaches, and conclude that if all texts are repression, then there is no truth in them at all, that all poetry and all literature are mere lies. Well, this is not such an old idea after all. We have it presented to us here, by Mehlman, via Freud, in a scientific, logical, step-by-step proof. Except for the fact that Mehlman relies too heavily on psychoanalytic, scientific jargon, I could agree with him. His over-reliance, however, is pivotal, for he uses the term “repression” incorrectly.

If “dream-work” is the essence of dream, and the symbols of the dream present themselves to the dreamer as the manifestation of that essence, and those symbols can be used by the psychoanalyst to understand the dream content, we have a process which can be seen, if we remember its root in dream work, not as a process of successive repressions, but rather of a tiered, three-layered phenomena of human experience and expression. At the bottom of our tier, from which all else generates, lies the dream work, or dreaming. We can easily generalize this, for dreaming is only a specific instance of a particular kind of human awareness, made possible by the fact of our lying more or less still, closing our eyes, and “losing consciousness.” Surely, a component of this dream life is present in our consciousness at all times. I don't want to call it an “unconscious” or “subconscious,” and will save myself some merely semantic difficulties by avoiding those terms. What Mehlman indicates without specifically stating so, is an energy, ineffable, unnamable, infinitely human and infinitely divine at the same time. We, as humans, are the vessels of this energy. (More particularly, we are this energy, and, in Mehlman's terms, the battle of interpretation is the battle of the ego against this energy, i.e., “bound” energy (interpretation) vs. “free” energy. But how does this energy move? How do we sense it moving? As the waves in Minkowski's jar, it moves within us, and we feel it. But the matter is ineffable, inexpressible, eternal. If we can see it at all, as Pythagoras suggests that we can, we know that it expresses itself constantly. It is the Pythagorean “music of the spheres” at work in ourselves. But the phrase “music of the spheres” already intimates to us that we must find ways outside the ordinary range of our prosaic language to express this ineffable thing. Surely the spheres, whatever they are, have no instruments on which they play symphonies and sonatas to us. Pythagoras' phrase also tells us what that special language is, for it is the language of poetry; it is image.

II

We are not restricted to either silence or lies if only we recognize the limitations of our speech and the limitations, as well as the origins, of our images and our poetry. “Poetry,” says Heidegger echoing Vico, “is the primitive language of a historical people.”⁴ He does not say that poetry is merely primitive. It is also a language of history whose roots sink into the primitive, the eternal and the ineffable, whose origins cannot be interpreted.

All poems, all images translate. The language of those translations may carry beauty, emotion and power. Certainly their beauty and power derive from their ability (and are relative to their ability) to recall the unnamable original. In any case, they point back to the original, partake of the original—and, if we want, ultimately, to know the meaning of an image, of a dream, of a poem, we must refer to the original, about which we cannot speak (“What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence”).⁵

However, we live in two worlds at once, the absolute and the relative. Freud's “dream-work” is an aspect of the absolute. It goes on with or without our awareness. And the word “meaning” lives on two levels, one absolute, one relative. So, to speak of the impossibility of interpretation in an absolute sense not only is quite correct, it is an essential negation. To play the game on the relative side not only intrigues us, but attracts and draws us by our own psychological and soulful needs. Whether interpretation is repression or not, we interpret. The question becomes how faithful we remain to the original, how undogmatic, open, and essentially curious and multifaceted we can remain vis-à-vis the original. How much can we remember that we work with translations not of one language into another, but of pre-language into language.

By so saying, we seem to come to a difficult logical problem. If poetry itself is interpretation, and I am making a case for the validity of poetry, as indeed I would, then how can I not make a case as well, and as vigorously, for the interpretation of poetry. There are two issues here. First, I do not accept Mehlman's term of “repression.” To abide with my own preferred concept of “inclusion,” I can faithfully say that poetry is manifestation rather than repression.

Secondly, and simply, interpretation is variable, at best, and interruptive, at worst. For what poetry hopes to do as manifestation is not to establish a particular truth, but to refer us back to the dream work, to the ineffable process of energy, to provide a place for us, a condition where we meditate, without resolution, on a life which we find ourselves wanting in some sense not so much to express, as to manifest. We do not consciously express, or manifest our dream work in dream images. That simply comes to us. So it is with an image, with a poem. Longinus, to whom I will return later, reminds us that “… a figure is at its best when the very fact that it is a figure escapes attention.”⁶ An image should be produced in much the same way that a dream image is produced, naturally and in close relation to the original.

If poetry points us back to the ineffable, then interpretation should point us back to the poem. The business of each, poetry and interpretation, is different. Each points: one points to the source, the other points to that which leads to the source. Interpretation has a different function than poetry. Within the scope of that function it develops its own design, its own intentions and its own method. Interpretation engages our intellectual proclivities for investigation and for truth. But it can never arrive at truth, for truth, as I have hunted it down so far, is in what the poem points to, in the original dream work, in the act of dreaming, or, as Bachelard would say, in reverie.

III

Within this notion of reverie we will discover both the answer to our inquiry and the direction we need to follow with further inquiry, i.e., with the poem, the image itself. By such investigation we may arrive at an understanding of how to approach the poem, how to allow the poem to approach us in all its significance.

Bachelard's reverie revels in dialectics. In The Poetics of Space Gaston Bachelard mentions reverie, though he concentrates in that book more specifically on the notion of reverberation, which I have elucidated. In The Poetics of Reverie he attacks directly and at length the problem of reverie, a distinctive human experience which may, at times, take us beyond what we often consider to be “the human,” that is, beyond personality, into the realm of the cosmic and the universal and the ante-psychological. For now, I want to begin our investigation of reverie on a more simple level. In one sense Freud's idea of dream work and Bachelard's idea of reverie are related; in another, significant and active differences separate them. This difference constitutes one aspect of a dialectics which operates fervently in the life of the image and the poem. Unlike Mehlman's “repression,” Bachelard's dialectic assumes a more Blakean posture in that it includes all elements, and the possibility of all interpretations, at once. Dream and reverie are two different animals.

… in contrast to a dream, a reverie cannot be recounted. To be communicated, it must be written, written with emotion and taste, being relived all the more strongly because it is being written down.⁷

Reverie accrues strength and force by virtue of its written linguistic capacity; indeed it attains presence only by that capacity. Like dream, reverie “goes in the opposite direction from any demand” (Reverie [The Poetics of Reverie], 63). It delivers us into our own consciousness, into an essential freedom. The difference between dream and reverie arises in that in dreaming we lose the sense of ourselves:

… nocturnal dreams, those dreams of extreme night, cannot be experiences in which one can formulate a cogito. There the subject loses his being; they are dreams without a subject.

(Reverie 147)

Dreaming, we drown in an ocean of consciousness and being in which we, as distinct dreamers, lose our awareness that we are the subject of the dream.

Hasn't the water of sleep dissolved our being? In any case, we become beings with no history upon entering into the realms of Night which has no history.

(Reverie 146)

As Heidegger informed us, “Poetry is the primitive language of a historical people” (151). Both elements—history and the primitive, culture and freedom—are essential components of poetry. There must be a cogito for there to be poetry; there must be a will, a self which knows itself, for there to be poetry. History implies language implies writing, and Bachelard has just told us, strongly, of the significance of written language to reverie, and hence, of course, to poetry. “Poetry,” says Heidegger, “is the act of establishing by the word and in the word” (34).

We wish to study not the reverie which puts one to sleep, but the working reverie (reverie oeuvrant), the reverie which prepares work.

(Reverie 182)

Furthermore, the relationship of cogito and reverie, cogito and poetry, reverie and poetry is circular, for “the image awakens us from our torpor, and our awakening is announced in a cogito” (Reverie 152).

This circular or, perhaps more precisely, this intersubjective relationship secures the fertile birthplace both of the cogito and of the image. The significance of this intersubjectivity glares at us when we ask the question, what does this propose about the nature of this cogito? It cannot be the limited cogito of Descartes. That cogito sets itself apart from and in opposition to the world. That surely is one kind of self, one kind of cogito. But it cannot be the cogito of poetry. The cogito of poetry, while aware of itself, necessarily present in reverie as opposed to dream and hence essential to poetry, depends on the image derived from the concrete world for its existence. It is the cogito of the relative, rooted in the being of the absolute. Bachelard, though at times confused and contradictory on this point—as well he might be, for it is a subtle, if not absolutely Gordian point—recognized this:

The dreamer (of reverie, not sleep) is the double consciousness of his well-being and of the happy world. His cogito is not divided into the dialectic of subject and object.

(Reverie 158)

The poet in reverie becomes the image, the image becomes the poet; likewise, the reader of a poem is the image, and that image or poem takes over the reader.

It (the image) becomes a new being in our language; expressing us by making us what it expresses; in other words, it is at once a becoming of expression, and a becoming of our being. Here expression creates being.

This last remark defines the level of the ontology towards which I am working. As a general thesis I believe that everything specifically human in man is logos. One would not be able to meditate in a zone that preceded language. But even if this thesis appears to reject an ontological depth, it should be granted, at least as a working hypothesis appropriate to the subject of the poetic imagination.

(Space [The Poetics of Space], xix)

What Bachelard proposes here is almost self-contradictory, and certainly it challenges my own thesis that poetry, while it expresses itself in the image or in poetic language, partakes of the non-linguistic, the pre-linguistic, the dream, or, as Freud would more accurately have it, the dream work—“Even if this thesis appears to reject an ontological depth,” says Bachelard. And it does reject an ontological depth if we take the image as the last stop on the train into consciousness, into human life. But it is not. Indeed, it is perhaps only the very first station, that place where we get on, arranging our baggage of language and of cogito, our tools of perception and our machines with which we dig out and bring forth our perceptions into language where they establish a presence. Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space, seems almost to dig the hole deeper out of which we must climb:

The phenomenological situation with regard to psychoanalytical investigation will perhaps be more precisely stated if, in connection with poetic image, we are able to isolate in a sphere of pure sublimation; of a sublimation which sublimates nothing, which is relieved of the burden of passion, and freed from the pressure of desire.

(xxv)

A little too simplistically, but for the sake of a minor summary at this point, we might say that the dream work absent a cogito is this region of pure sublimation; the poem, while relieved of the burdens Bachelard speaks of, must use them, must speak in the language of the “burden of passion … the pressure of desire.” The poem, as I indicated earlier, points backwards or downwards into that region of pure sublimation. I don't know that I agree with Bachelard as he sets up a dialectics of sleep (dream) and reverie. It seems to me that there is a reverie (awakeness) in dream, and a dream (cogito-less) in reverie. Nonetheless, his categories are useful and move us forward. Bachelard struggles with this problem, trying to disentangle the threads, only to find himself entangling them inevitably again:

The mind is able to relax, but in poetic reverie the soul keeps watch, with no tension, calmed and active.

(Space xviii)

Part of the problem, surely, is that Bachelard attempts a philosophy of images which he acknowledges is literally impossible. We must respect, however, and be open to learning from the attempt. His philosophy maintains the integrity of moving toward the poem, not away from it, and that is a substantial achievement. In the end, we can understand images only through images. That is reverberation. “At the level of the poetic image,” Bachelard writes, “the duality of subject and object is iridescent, shimmering, unceasingly active in its inversions” (Space xv).

“Inversions” suggests at least two questions. First, how can we hope to pin down inversions? Secondly, can we understand by “inversions” the process of intersubjectivity by which the poet, the poem and the reader exchange reverie among them?

IV

Using Bachelard's word “inversion” freely, meditating on it as Bachelard himself meditates on words to find their possibilities, I find yet another meeting, less precise, but useful to follow. When I imagine the poetic image, the “duality of subject and object,” I see two forms, contrary, yet braided together in a kinetic spiral. The image describes the nature of this Bachelardian dialectics, of what is necessary for poetry, of the interplay of the inversions.

In speaking on another subject, Bachelard says that “concepts and images develop on two divergent planes of the spiritual life” (Reverie 52). We will soon follow Bachelard's thinking on that point. But I quote him here, in another context, to understand the nature of his dialectics.

Thus, images and concepts take form at those two opposite poles of psychic activity which are imagination and reason. Between them there is a polarity of exclusion at work. They have nothing in common with the poles of magnetism. Here, the opposing poles do not attract; they repel. One must love the psychic forces of two different types of love if he loves concepts and images, the masculine and feminine poles of the psyche.

(Reverie 53)

Each, concepts and images, always and continuously seeks to cleanse itself of the other. The self does not try to reject one or the other; on the contrary, by that process of cleansing the self comes to possess, as Bachelard formulates it, both masculine and feminine. The notion of masculine and feminine vis-à-vis poetry and reverie, which I shall explore in a moment, can almost be seen themselves as images, as metaphor. Any set of dialectical oppositions may be set here in their place: concept and image; silence and language; mind and soul; meditation and calculation; movement and immobility. Bachelard chooses to operate on the level of the masculine-feminine polarity, and it works in understanding the nature of reverie and hence of image, for ultimately the exploration of reverie is a primer, in this paper, for an exploration of image. We must explore the dualisms involved here, for the result of their counter-force interaction is the image, and is where we live in our most whole selves. To state it pragmatically, this is the use of poetry.

Bachelard recalls the psychologist Buytendijk who reminds us that “normal man is 51 percent masculine and the woman is 51 percent feminine” (Reverie 60). So, concept is but 51٪ concept, image 51٪ image; silence is 51٪ silence and language only 51٪ language.

Previously, I quoted Bachelard from The Poetics of Space on ontology. He said that “everything specifically human in man is logos” (xix). I want now to turn him around, to quote from the same work at a place only three pages earlier:

To specify exactly what a phenomenology of the image can be, to specify that the image comes before (emphasis mine) thought, we should have to say that poetry, rather than being a phenomenology of the mind, is a phenomenology of the soul.

(xvi)

It seems that either one of two things happens when we hold these views against each other: either images are not specifically human, which is, at best, a useless conclusion, if not an obviously incorrect one; or we have to realize that Bachelard is mired in a confusion he has not realized, cannot control, cannot extricate himself from, and which—within three pages of each other—he solidifies by his own contradictions.

These last conclusions are partly true. Bachelard, were he alive, might even read them and smile with some amusement. I would like to think so. If we are willing, however, to follow the spirit of this intense phenomenology, we can find our own way out of this mire, for, if the masculine is 51٪ masculine, etc., etc., then the relationship of thought to image is that thought is 51٪ thought which arises after the image. Our scientific tools of measurement will have to become far more sophisticated and precise before they can measure these phenomena. In the meantime, when Bachelard writes that “the image came before thought,” the 1٪ difference in this dance of dialectics becomes the catalyst of creativity, the fomenter of the élan vital, of the poem, the image.

We could not have poetry without reason, without, in the terms we have used here, both mind and soul, both image and language, history and the immediate. The difference we have so far discussed—the presence of a cogito in reverie as opposed to the loss of cogito in sleep—interestingly enough posits the more rational aspects of reverie. Without that self-awareness we would not have the possibility of reason and language, and worse, we would have the object, the image of the poem divorced from the personal impulse behind it. That would indeed be an empty art. That self, that essentially aggressive or assertive aspect of reverie is what Emerson pointed to as the sine qua non of our admiration for works of art.

You admire this tower of granite, weathering the hurts of so many ages. Yet a little waving hand built this huge wall, and that which builds is better than that which is built.⁸

Emerson not only affirms Bachelard here, but elucidates him and offers us an opportunity to deepen our understanding of this dialectics involved in the image. For the essentially masculine cogito necessary at the base of the image, the prime mover of this “tower of granite” evolves into the essentially feminine purpose of empathy. To know that “waving hand” is to know your own hands.

Hence Bachelard says that although “every force has sex; it can even be bisexual,” image, poetry, “reverie is under the sign of the anima” (Reverie 35-36). The dialectics, for Bachelard, continues beyond this. Although “reverie (issues) from the anima” (Reverie 19).

It is in no way astonishing … then that in solitary reverie we know ourselves in the feminine and masculine at the same time.

(Reverie 58)

Nonetheless, the argument is important, for the feminine aspect of receptivity makes possible the birth and the manifestation of the image: “One must be receptive,” says Bachelard, “receptive to the image at the moment it appears” (Space xi).

That way of reading poetry leads us to find the meaning, or a meaning of a poem. Discourse, interpretation, concept is another matter, removed by 1٪ into another field of endeavor.

V

And so we are receptive, we are awake, attuned to the intersubjectivity (interobjectivity) of the subjective-objective world within and around us, we are willing to contain oppositions, to become Keats' principal of active waiting, an open vessel. Whence arises the image? If, as Heidegger says, the poem is both history and immediacy, where do we seek the source of this paradox? When we have examined that question we will be able to satisfy our inquiries enough to take that one step more which will return us to the poem itself, the step through interpretation.

Heidegger writes oftentimes with such an ease of self-contradiction it staggers us. How, we ask ourselves, does he achieve such clear lunacy? Yet, by the very ease with which he does so he gains our confidence, initiates our leap into faith, and activates the possibilities of our vision. In his essay “Holderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” Heidegger says:

Poetry is the act of establishing by the word and in the word. What is established in this manner? The permanent. But can the permanent be established then? Is it not that which has always been present? No! Even the permanent must be fixed so that it will not be carried away, the simple must be wrested from confusion, proportion must be set before what lacks proportion.

(34)

… to fix the permanent? Okay, that is not too difficult to conceive nor too audacious to accept. But when he wants to ask whether the permanent has not always been present, and to answer emphatically that no, it has not, we must pause and reflect. If we turn the language a mere few degrees in one direction or another we have before us the questions of origin: What is present? What does poetry make present? Where does it come from? Where has it been that it has been absent? Why, in fact, do we need poetry, why do we need Emerson's “granite tower” to make us see?

These questions refract through a prism and their answers emerge many-colored, many-faceted, even as, in the end, they seem one answer: that original, unrefracted light itself.

We have two questions before us, really. The first is historical, the second is phenomenological, ontological. They involve each other, but looking first at the historical question, Vico recounts the development of poetic language beginning with Adam. “The ‘sacred language,’” says Vico, “invented by Adam, to whom God granted divine anomathesia, the giving of names to things according to the nature of each” is the language which poetry, the language of the image, the language of the dream as opposed to the dream work cannot be.⁹ Poetry approximates and touches the sacred language. We cannot say, simply, with some critics, that language floats and has no fixed meaning, no attachment to the world, no connection to the original. Although in some sense that is true, it is too reductive and fails to account for the spontaneous arising of image and poetry.

“… A cogito emerges from the shadows …” says Bachelard (Reverie 18). This cogito can separate us altogether from the original. Insofar as this cogito is born of the image, then by that much is the breach healed. “When we wish to give utterance to our understanding of spiritual things,” writes Vico, “we must seek aid from our imagination to explain them and, like painters, form human images of them” (128). This language comes far afield from that original potent, magical and totally simple language of Adam.

Two things are needed: one, the spiritual understanding; two, the need to give utterance. The first implies the possibility of original language; the second implies the impossibility of original language. Poetry speaks in both tongues.

This places us along the line of another dialectic. But clearly poetry comes from an original source, not a secondary one. We might almost say, but for the fact that it is such an evident tautology, that poetry originates in the origin. As with all tautology, it is not untrue, merely self-evident.

The new-born poetic image—a simple image!—thus becomes quite simply an absolute origin, an origin of consciousness.

(Reverie 1)

Thus does Bachelard, with this statement, begin The Poetics of Reverie. The issue is that central. Two pages further on he says:

poetic image is simple: it returns to putting the accent on the original quality, grasping the very essence of their originality, and thus taking advantage of the remarkable psychic production of the imagination.

(3)

Vico reminds us of a displacement which takes place with poetic trope. This displacement is a non-essential event for Bachelard. As Bachelard throughout his work deflects the influence of psychoanalysis, so he does here, in reflections on the question of origins:

The poetic image is in no way comparable, as with the mode of the common metaphor, to a value which would open up to release pent-up instincts. The poetic image sheds light on consciousness in such a way that it is pointless to look for subconscious antecedents of the image.

(Reverie 3)

I would argue that the same is true for metaphor. But that is another long and involved argument. In the poem “The Last One” we have an image which fits this description by Bachelard. It “sheds light on consciousness,” and for whatever else its value, that is its effect. From the knowledge of that effect, which begins in receptivity to the image and proceeds to the reverberation Bachelard describes, we can proceed to discuss varieties of meaning. Remove that knowledge and we merely babble. Bachelard says that,

reverie, slow reverie discovers the depth in the immobility of a word. We believe that, through reverie, we can discover within a word the act which names.

(Reverie 48)

Further, and more directly yet he says:

Poetic reverie revives the world of original words.

(188)

Bachelard echoes Vico, intends to state boldly that poetic reverie partakes of the original naming, Adam's language. He does not suggest that this is poetry, but that poetry's source lies there in the reverie which connects us with origins and establishes knowledge of the beginning.

In Mehlman's terms, perhaps in Freud's terms, reverie returns us to the dream work, revives us in the original nameless poetry. The manifestation of that process is image and poetry. How can poetry not partake then of the force of that process, endless and inexhaustible as it is, and from which issues the “child God” who

is Son of the world. And in the face of this child who represents a continuous birth, the world is young.

(Reverie 133)

This is what we have of presence. It is a linguistic slight of an existential hand to call it absence: it includes absence.

VI

In that presence, in that reverie where we arrive by poetry and in which we connect with origins, we come into contact with the poet; we, the reader, are the poet, and, in fact, we are the poem. As Bachelard required the connection of poet (cogito) with object (image), and the intersubjectivity of the two for the production of poetry, so we encounter the same process in reading poetry. As we may connect with our origins, we cannot complete them. Completion is the work of closure and of the final assignation of meaning. Though we have a sense of closure at times, and though we sense meaning on several levels all at once, at the same time we find that the light of the cogito is “a glimmer which does not know its origins” (Reverie 126). This does not mean that it does not contact its origins, but merely that it does not know them in the sense of their being complete, closed, finally held.

Poetry, then, is a continuous birth. If we take the origin of poetry as the source of the sublime, and root ourselves in Longinus' definition of the sublime, then we find in Longinus the way to acknowledge and represent this origin and its relationship to poetry. “Sublimity,” he says, “consists in elevation, while amplification embraces a multitude of details” (85).

This formula corresponds to Bachelard's reverberation and resonance, the ocean and its waves. Although we say that in poetry we participate in the origins of language, we must be careful not to confuse that sense of origin with originality. It is a quirk of our language that the words origin and originality have come to take on such separate meanings.

… another way (beyond anything we have mentioned) leads to the sublime. And what manner of way, may that be? It is imitation and emulation of previous great poets and writers. And let this, my dear friend, be an aim to which we steadfastly apply ourselves.

(Longinus 85)

First acknowledge not so much our influence, or, as one critic has it, the anxiety of our influence, as our participation in the world of things and of images. The force of the phenomenological inquiry recognizes the origin of images and poetry in a common share of experience. We are, again in Heidegger's terms, of history. And each of us again is “primitive.” Hence, Longinus can say, in his famous statement:

For, as if instinctively, our soul is uplifted by the true sublime; it takes a proud flight, and is filled with joy and vaunting, as though it had itself produced what it has heard.

(80)

“Sublimity,” says Longinus, “is the echo of a great soul” (81). Sublimity, or Bachelard's reverberation, is an intersubjective activity.

Then in an exaltation of the happiness of seeing the beauty of the world, the dreamer believes that between him and the world, there is an exchange of looks, as in the double look from the loved man to the loved woman.

(Reverie 185)

More simply put, in The Poetics of Space, Bachelard aligns himself directly in the tradition of Longinus:

But what does the phenomenological attitude advise? It asks us to produce within ourselves a reading pride that will give us the illusion of participating in the work of the author of the book.

(21)

I don't know why Bachelard holds back here, why in this early chapter he equivocates with language which will become stronger, and says that this reading pride will give us the illusion of participating. As the author participates in the image, the reader participates in the image. Without that participation there is no sublime, there is no reverberation.

In The Poetics of Space, the first space Bachelard talks about is the house:

For a house to presume such powers it must be both comfortable and stimulating. It must have, not the dolorous quality of sleep, but the lively quality of reverie. We want to live in this house of integration with intensity, with life. As in reverie, we want in this house that “all the senses awaken and fall into harmony.”

(6)

For this house is, Bachelard says, a space of “protected intimacy.” This reminds us of Heidegger's term for Holderlin's dialectical purifications which lead to intimacy. Bachelard's house does the same thing in the same way: it collects and energizes disparate energies, it gives the inhabitant the space and ease to allow contraries their process of purification and cohabitation. In The Poetics of Space Bachelard recalls moving into a new house, and the associations that go with the event:

… after we are in the new house, when memories of other places we have lived come back to us, we travel to the land of Motionless Childhood, motionless the way all Immemorial things are.

(5-6)

Likewise, the image collects, then purifies, then embraces the world's oppositions, to weave them into the same kind of protected intimacy, the same “motionless childhood,” the same “immemorial” sense where we collect ourselves. This collecting is a different thing from Mehlman's idea of the fixed ego. In order for this sense of wholeness and concentration to operate we must in fact step through the fixed ego, which does not participate in the immemorial, but stands apart and aside, trying to deny it. Bachelard's goal is to realize the synthesis, so that when he speaks of it he does so with power and emotion:

We should so much like to be able to demonstrate that poetry is a synthesizing force for human existence! From our point of view the archetypes are reserves of enthusiasm which help us believe in the world, love the world, create our world.

(Reverie 124)

Bachelard helps us make the leap from the house to the image: “A house,” he says, “constitutes a body of images” (Space 17).

And later, in The Poetics of Reverie, while his mind is on something else, he reminds us again:

‘The sun on the lake lingers like a peacock.’ Such an image brings everything together.

(200)

VII

Between the concept and the image, writes Bachelard, “there is no synthesis. And there is no filiation either” (Reverie 51).

Conceptualization is the business of interpretation; images are the business of poetry. As between all dualities there is no synthesis, but there is a dialectic and a dialogue which moves us forward. The poem becomes that one realm of materialism which is without synthesis, which is eternally unresolved, constantly renewed.

What is the shadow in Merwin's poem? First and foremost we must say it is a shadow. What does it mean that the people in the poem want to cut down “the last one”? Again, it means that they want to cut down the very last one. What does the poem mean when it discovers a shadow is bigger than the intentions of any people in the poem? Again, and not reductively, it means that the shadow is bigger. When we sit and talk about this poem, or any poem, about any significant images, when we write about poems and images, when we investigate their meanings, we engage in a process of conceptualization which is on the other plane of our being than poetry. First we walk on one plane, then on another. The danger lies not in using one or the other as a place to walk, a space to inhabit, but in confusing one plane for the other, in believing that by interpreting a poem we have read it, understood it, we have allowed it to reverberate within us. If a battle rages in the process of reading, as in the process of living, it is not a battle between ourselves and the text, the poem, for predominance. It is a battle within ourselves to remain open to the reverberation of the poem. This is life as text.

In The Poetics of Reverie, Bachelard says that “the true poet, at least, is bilingual: he does not confuse the language of meaning with poetic language” (186).

By reverie Bachelard sees the possibility of the constant revitalization of the “objective” world, the birth and rebirth constantly of meaning: “‘Inexhaustible object’ is truly the sign of the object that the poet's reverie makes emerge from the objective inertia” (Reverie 156).

Merwin's shadow, his people, the ax with which they cut, the stones they throw, their own shadows, all become “inexhaustible objects” as Merwin writes about them, as we read about them, as we reflect on them and carry them with us. Merwin leaves his poem with these last lines:

The ones that were left went away to live
if it would let them.
They went as far as they could.
The lucky ones with their shadows.

Let the images that are left, inexhaustible, go away and live, the lucky ones.s

Notes

1. Eugene Minkowski, Vers une Cosmologie ch. 9, as quoted by Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969) n. 1, xii.

2. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (New York: Avon, 1965) 312.

3. Jeffrey Mehlman, “Trimethylamin: Notes on Freud's Dreams,” Untying the Text, ed. Robert Young (Boston: Rutledge and Kegan Paul, 1981) 184.

4. Martin Heidegger, “Holderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” European Literary Theory and Practice: Existential Phenomenology to Structuralism, ed. Vernon W. Gras (New York: Dell, 1971) 151.

5. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness (London: Rutledge and Kegan Paul, 1961) 151.

6. Longinus, “On the Sublime,” Critical Theory Since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1971) 89.

7. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie, trans. Daniel Russell (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971) 7.

8. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet,” Essays (New York: Crowell, 1951) 213.

9. Giambattista Vico, The New Science (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1970) 127.