What is an image?
On the necessity of revolution, Bachelard, engravings, the poetic image
I’ve been a little absent here lately. I’ve been trying to ramp up my income of late (why is everything so expensive?), so I’ve been adding new gigs, classes, and offerings. I haven’t had as much time as I’m used to to lavish on composing long messages and trawling for news to share. I guess what I’m saying is that I’m bumping up against a counter-productive myth of writing that I find myself cautioning people about: waiting for the perfect circumstances (a large uninterrupted chunk of time, the right space, etc.) to write.
I’m increasingly coming to feel like the working writer has to attack her situation from at least two sides: participating in the economies available to her to her advantage and doing what she can to fight capitalism (beginning with simply remembering and believing that it is neither good nor inevitable). Just a quick plug for revolution! And in the meantime, I’m going to try to see what I can do in an hour, and then share it with you.
Tomorrow will be the second session of my class on Gaston Bachelard’s classic book, The Poetics of Space, translated into English by Maria Jolas. As with most teachers who teach a text multiple times, I’m seeing more this time around. For instance, I noticed that in the first two chapters, Bachelard makes multiple references to engraving. He writes, “And what is underlining but engraving while we write?” And I think about the new annotations I am adding to old annotations. Carvings on a sidewalk / hearts on a tree [note: I do endorse writing on wet cement—I do not endorse carving on trees].
Doing research, I learn (from Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s The Hand of the Engraver) that Bachelard was influenced by the engraver Albert Flocon, a copperplate engraver, who collaborated with Paul Éluard and other writers, including Surrealists like André Breton for whom, “The seeing and thinking hand was nothing new...” And it’s true, the hand is one of the parts of the body that thinks. Familiarizing myself with Flocon’s engravings I see how he thematizes the hand.
Flocon created the album, À la gloire de la main, with sixteen prints and a number of texts, beginning with one by Bachelard. Rheinberger writes, “Two things about the task of engraving particularly fascinated Bachelard and prompted him to comment again and again during his engagement with Flocon’s oeuvre: the forms of resistance in the confrontation with matter; and the hand as the material and knowing agent of a becoming, of an emergence.”
Emergence into what? The work of the hand results in an image, which seems to me to include but transcend simple depiction or representation. What is an image? And what is a poetic image (for it is on poetic images that Bachelard builds his ontology)?
Some of my earliest poetic education involved learning about Imagism as a movement. “Petals on a wet black bough” from Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” or for that matter his branding of Hilda Doolittle as “HD, imagiste” but despite feeling like this is the most familiar ground, questioning that naturalized term, the image, renders it strange and I feel like I know nothing, so I ask again: what is an image? What is a poetic image? And I add some others: what are some poetic images that have moved you?