The Spatial poetics of our soul

II was reading Kaya’s blog post about what ‘Home’ means to different people, and I remembered that I wrote this last year, which is the basic ‘theoretical tool’ I use to examine my own childhood, and of course it leads on from what I spoke about yesterday.
I love Gaston Bachelard’s book ‘The Poetics of Space’, I’ve read it at least 5 times over the last ten years.

Bachelard’s theory proposes that the first childhood home is the container and engine for the imagination for the rest of a person’s life.
Our first conceptions of space, movement, tactility, smell and taste are hardwired into our psyche's for evermore in our very first home.
Did we grow up in a flat? A bungalow (Like me)? A small terrace? An old Victorian shambles? A caravan? But more importantly for Bachelard, is how our pristine senses were first conditioned to all that material and spatial phenomena that constituted our initial conception of 'The world'.

The smell of a bookcase, the shape of the bathroom, did we share a bedroom? The sinister and intimidating parents wardrobe, the cubby-hole that we played hide and seek in, the rusty kitchen door, the texture, feel and smell of the sofa, the feel of the ripples in the glass in the front door panel.
Bachelard believed this original sensual and poetic home of our childhood is the substance and container of human personality for ever more..

When we were children, especially until the age of 5, all our daydream's and the possibilities of who we could be and of what we could imagine, occurred in the universe of our little shelter.

Roland Barthes used the same idea of this container of imagination by comparing our personalities to the fictional 'Nautilus': A fixed place of the imagination that travels through the larger world, surfacing and submerging, rejecting and encouraging - but essentially a container of the true self.

Bachelard theorized that our likes and dislikes, affirmations and rejections that we experience in adult life, are 'reverberations', musical notes that chime or jar with this poetic idea of home, that is in fact the deepest level of our personality.
The house is the soul.

Another fascinating thing Bachelard focused on was art and literature. He thought that our love of certain paintings and books for example, was not necessarily the pull of the narrative, or the aesthetic beauty of the scene, the girl at the window in Vermeer painting… but how this image resonates, reanimates and connects memory with imagination to our deepest sense of 'Home'

Bachelard exploration into the psychic home is comprehensive and vast, almost archaeological in its scope. He begins from the very primitive need for a shelter, the cave dwelling, the hut etc, to the sophisticated architectural spaces that we've all grown up in today.
Really worth a read by all the bohemian brothers and sisters.

Like Proust and his Madeleine, I sometimes find myself gripped by warm, comforting little epiphanies - a certain texture of stone, car wheels on gravel, a chance fold in the pattern of the curtains, the smell of an old rug, a painting of a chipped teapot, the precise tint of green on a tin of soup… like the green of my childhood kitchen.

And light itself, the eternal trickster is always tickling your soul .
The submerged child's memory of daydreaming in their bedroom on a Sunday afternoon, can suddenly be re-ignited by lying on a sofa in a different architectural space, and registering that same angle of light, that same spiralling dust mote in the warm sun.