"the world is intense before it is complex"

a selection from Gaston Bachelard

I can’t hang around for very long today.

Elle

’s still in town and we’re getting brunch, walking the Logan Square farmer’s market, and then I’ll have to pick up my guitar from the shop (one of the pots was busted and some of the wiring inside was completely frayed — understandable for a thirty year old guitar) before another' friend’s pool party in Wicker Park and since I’ve been commanded to bring some Aperol there’s no getting out of it to write more. August, august, august. Smh. Maybe the second best month of the year though, after September’s fair-weather melancholy of course.

Anyways, since I’m a little short on time, I’ll let my good pal Gaston Bachelard fill in for me. I’ve recently taken up the habit of collecting quotes, paragraphs, and sometimes entire sections of books borrowed from the library, and here’s a wonderful passage from an essay titled Fragment of a Diary of Man, the final essay in Bachelard’s posthumous essay collection The Right to Dream (published by Orion Press, 1971) on the act of meditation as a return to beginnings (“Philosophy would then be restored—and very happily so—to first childish scribblings”):

“How one would welcome the right to an extended overture! One would use it to express quite simply the joy of meditating, and to make it quite clear that meditation is an act, the philosophic act. In it one would purely and simply meditate. One would represent that as the behavior of the philosophizing subject. One would juggle with lovely abstract words, believing in them. And then one would stop believing in them, happy to be living other abstractions. What mobility in living abstractions! All thoughts—the solemn and the shrewd, the passionate and the cold, the reasoned and the imagined—would play their part in this meditation match. One would doubt with mind and heart, knowingly and naïvely, methodically or hyperbolically, sincerely or in pretense. One would start to introduce those splendid scenes in which the universe and man alone swap light or defiance, and man is smashed or scorns. One would sing the philosopher in the fields, the philosopher in his cell, in festive mood, in tears. Time would be youth and death, fermata. It would be capable of suspending itself, It would be that through which everything recommences and everything is amazed. Suddenly one would ask, “I who am, where am I?” In what imaginary space have my lassos roped me? what is this curious characteristic of philosophic thought that makes the familiar astonish us? What is this strange road the philosopher travels with a crossroads at every point? Philosophic thought is one continuous, deeply muted hesitation, even when it is handing out pompous dogmatic assertions. Even while advancing, it doubles back on itself. Describe it as one and it shatters into pieces. Ought we perhaps to adopt Barrès’ definition of the poet and call the philosopher “a madman who propagates his alienation”? Indeed, when I look at myself, “I is someone else.” The doubling of thought automatically involves a division of the person into two. At the edge of the awareness of being alone is always nostalgia for being two.”

“So I am a substance of doubt and duality in ferment, heavy or light depending on whether the substance is increasing or evaporating, flowing or leaking away, In me as I meditate—bliss and bewilderment—the universe contradicts itself. It is solid and deceptive substance. In me the entire universe isolates itself and goes mad to the point of believing itself a single thought.”

“But the universe would barely be united before it began multiplying itself. The mind, dialectizing all unity, would on the threshold of its opera regulate its polymorphous meditation. It would give each of our senses—taste as much as sight—its proper meditation time. Each of our senses might have its character and each character its setting. In literature the descriptions of settings are always psychology. There would be at least five sensible universes, five sensible systems of solitude. All the potential universe factors in human life would be at liberty to conquer their world and to glorify the philosophic imperialism of the solitary subject. Ah, if only the philosopher had the right to meditate with his whole being, with his muscles and with his desire, he would soon shake off the sham meditations in which the meditative faculty is sterilized by logic! Or rather he would put them in their proper place, those sham meditations, those cunning, teasing mischievous meditations of the mind which is dead set on differentiating, and which at least possesses the fine property of taking the stiffness out of calcified convictions.”

“The universe is open to permeation by all types of meditation and apt to embrace the most solitary thought. We need only mediate a curious idea for long enough and we find the universe embodying it. The rough draft may of course be a fragile affair. Any interruption of our solitude may suffice to shatter it. But in more regular kinds of reverie, solitude is a whole world, the vast stage of our entire past. All our reveries—of forest and stream, of wine harvest and wheat harvest—gather immediately and settle on this tree and that sheaf. For the philosopher who dreams, the most insignificant object furnishes a perspective in which his whole personality arranges itself, with all his most secret and solitary thoughts. This glass of pale, cool, dry wine marshals my entire life in the Champagne. People think I am drinking: I am remembering…. The humblest object, truly contemplated, isolates and multiplies us. Before a multitude of objects, the dreamer becomes aware of his solitude. Before a single object, the dreamer becomes aware of his multiplicity.”

“Thus under their countless different aspects and through the countless exchanges between them, the universe and its dreamer express the action of realization effected by active meditation. Solitary meditation takes us back to the dawn of the world. To put it another way, solitude puts us into a state of primary meditation. To classify the vast pluralism of all sensible meditations, the philosopher would have to isolate himself in each of his images. He would quickly recognize that all sensible appearances are pretexts for separate cosmologies. But he proceeds too quickly to the great syntheses and, in his verbal belief in the unity of the world, believes he has only one world to project. The protean theatricality of cosmological reverie escapes the school-bound philosopher. Once a person is well wrapped up in his solitude, every impression becomes the occasion for a universe. Granted that subsequently, as they become mixed up, these multiple universes form a complex world. But the world is intense before it is complex. It is intense in us. And people would be more aware of this intensity, of this inner need to project a universe, if they obeyed the dynamic images that motivate our being. We believe, then, that the great synthetic, symphonic metaphysics should be prefaced by some elementary, études, little studies catching the marveling self and the marvelous world in their closest correlation. Philosophy would then be restored—and very happily so—to its first childhood scribblings.”

“It is through solitude that the philosopher is restored to the destiny of primary meditation. Through solitude, meditation has all the efficacy of amazement. Primary meditation is at the same time total receptivity and cosmologizing productivity. A morning meditation, for example, is straightaway a world to be woken up. A good illustration of the naïve dynamism of the morning reverie is this story that Oscar Wilde liked to tell: a certain saint used to get up long before dawn and pray to God that, today as on other days, He would make the sun rise. As soon as the sun had risen, he would get down on his knees again to thank God for granting his prayer. One night the saint slept so soundly he forgot his predawn prayer. By the time he awoke, the sun was already high in the sky. After a moment’s confusion, the saint got down on his knees to give God thanks that, notwithstanding His servant’s culpable negligence, He had made the sun rise all the same.” (Bachelard, The Right to Dream pp. 204-207)

What a passage! I’ve been thinking about it for the past week and half, thinking about returning to a proper meditation practice to start out my days while we’re still surrounded by summer mornings worthy of basking around inside of.

And of course I have to acknowledge, for a moment, the funny act of copying another writer verbatim like I just did. I wrote last week about plagiarism as it pertains to Substack, hoping to provide a more nuanced look at how we’re all inundated by outside thoughts almost constantly—so what could I possibly mean by copying over an entire passage like this? I mean to hint at the fact that the Substack “newsletter form” is not necessarily one for writing. I would say that Substack is more of a curatorial medium; this is why fashion writing, book recommendations, news roundups, fragrance roundups, and various other recommendation publications do so well on here. This isn’t a bad thing, necessarily, it’s simply how the medium works (i.e. a substack post inherently works differently than a book might), but also you can use the form in ways that are innovative, novel, and positive as long as you keep that in mind. For instance, you can dig through old books that are out of print and rewrite passages—for all intensive purposes passing notes around the classroom with a “hey this was interesting, you should read this”—as long as you cite the source and provide an air of respect to the author. Is it really any worse than taking an old painting as a post’s cover image?

Anyways, before I log off, some quick housekeeping on the How to get to new york series. The last five installments of season 2 are taking a good bit longer than previously expected. For instance, part twenty-two (the next one in the series) is as of now titled “The Lord of the Rings” and will likely be closer to the length of a novella than a short story so (um) heads up that regard. It’ll hopefully be well worth the wait. Until next time!

-gbe