I have been reading an odd but fascinating and delightful book, The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos by Gaston Bachelard, a name that readers may note has been popping up in these newsletters lately. After all, how can you not want to read a book called The Poetics of Reverie? The very title is enough to enchant one into a reverie.
But that raises the question, what is a reverie? And that in turn raises the issue of various modes of subjectivity, internal states of consciousness that are not often precisely distinguished from one another. The question seems to be mostly ignored by academic psychology, which is still wrestling with the materialist contention that consciousness doesn’t even exist: it is merely an “epiphenomenon,” which is basically a euphemism for “illusion.” All that exist are various states of matter and energy, some of which give off the false impression that we call consciousness. Not all psychology is so reductionist. However, modern studies of consciousness often seem unaware of theories that long precede scientific psychology, all of which ultimately go back to the literary tradition of the 17th through the early 19th centuries. That era did not of course invent consciousness, but it did mark the rise of a tendency to self-conscious observation of internal states, that tendency being one of the chief characteristics of the “modern.”
The first modern theory of consciousness is summed up by Descartes’ famous phrase, “I think, therefore I am.” The kind of consciousness doing the thinking in Descartes’ perspective is what came to be called the ego, Latin for “I.” The ego is a detached awareness, distinguishing itself by contrast with what is not-I. The ego is a subject that is withdrawn from all that is outside of and objective to it. Descartes clearly thinks of it as the seat of a rational clarity, of neutral observation. Its thinking can easily be contaminated, though, by emotion and bodily sensation, and scientific method is a discipline designed to keep the ego detached from and unbiased by such irrational influences. Bachelard’s early works on the philosophy of science, as far back as the 1930’s, make a sharp distinction between the early mechanistic and materialistic science of someone like Newton and modern theories: Einstein’s theory of relativity is for him something of a paradigmatic case. “Relativity” means that reality is relative to an observer. The “real” is not some substance underlying—the very meaning of the word “sub-stance”—our subjective impressions of it. It exists only insofar as we measure it. Increasingly, modern science contradicts the commonsense view that reality is a bunch of “things” that exist “out there” somewhere and are observed by the senses. The things are made of atoms, which are in turn made of subatomic particles, and all of these things are perhaps better described as energy states, none of them observable by the senses. And the describing is almost entirely mathematical. Insofar as science approaches “reality,” reality turns out to be a set of interlocking equations. Science begins with concrete observations about the world of nature, but it heads in the direction of mathematical abstraction. Bachelard was not alone in saying this: his theories resemble those of theorists such as James Jeans and Arthur Eddinger.
Eventually, the social sciences and humanities began to adopt an analogous perspective, often called “structuralism.” Whether analyzing a social organization or a poem, what was taken to be real and essential was not the observable surface details but a “structure”—a set of patterns and relations that underlies the surface variety. The structuralist enthusiasm did not last long in the humanities, where various “post-structuralist” theories such as “deconstruction” pointed to what is missing in structuralist theories—proof. Structures in literary analysis, for example, are just-so stories. There are no equations that prove them, no experiments that demonstrate the proof. However, there is another place in our society where the tendency towards abstract, detached consciousness is still going strong, and that is information theory and cybernetics, which have given rise to the idea that all reality is really just patterns of information. Consciousness itself is just patterns of information, so that the patterns could conceivably by uploaded into a computer, and humanity would become “transhuman,” escaping the prison of the organic world, where consciousness is “fastened to a dying animal,” in the words of Yeats. Some of the AI theorists seem to regard the body and the senses with all the horror of medieval Christian ascetics. They are attempting to realize a possibility portrayed decades ago in science fiction, of a pure, detached Cartesian-style consciousness. They are clearly thinking types and give the impression that they would not miss bodily sensations and emotions. Presumably they could argue that sensations and emotions are themselves just patterns of information, and therefore could be replicated in a virtual reality. But there is little exploration of the implications of such a possibility. I think they prefer the word “transhuman” because “inhuman” suggests a possible coldness that is not flattering.
What is interesting and original about Bachelard, however, is that he is two-sided, not just a philosopher of science but a theorist of the imagination who has authored a whole second set of books that were what interested me in him in the first place. In his works on the imagination, Bachelard calls himself a phenomenologist, meaning that he is interested in “not ideas about the things, but the things themselves,” in a famous phrase from Wallace Stevens. And that means that he is interested in a very different mode of consciousness than the Cartesian Cogito, which is the name used as shorthand for the “I think, therefore I am” mode of ego-consciousness. In the Cogito, the subject is detached from the object, from its whole objective environment: Blake called this mode the “cloven fiction.” This is the default mode of ordinary consciousness. In the first chapter of his book The Educated Imagination, Northrop Frye uses the metaphor of someone shipwrecked on a desert island, faced with a world that is “set over against” the observer. But, he also says,
you may have moods of complete peacefulness and joy, moods when you accept your island and everything around you. You wouldn’t have such moods often, and when you had them, they’d be moods of identification, when you felt that the island was a part of you and you a part of it. (439)
This is still a Cogito, an “I am,” a conscious subject—yet it is a very different mode of consciousness. Bachelard calls it “reverie.” Reverie has what we could call inherent phases. The first is a kind of here-and-now immediacy. We have to be careful about Frye’s description, because a mood of identification, of “I am one with the universe” may sound like some kind of New Age vagueness, whereas precisely the opposite is true. The humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow did not speak of reverie, but he spoke constantly of “the creative attitude,” the title of one of his essays, one of whose characteristics is being in the present moment, giving up concern with the past and future. It also entails giving up “rubricizing,” the reduction of experience to preconceived stereotypes and categories. He spoke of “love knowledge,” the kind of knowledge that comes not from detachment but from more intense attachment, as in love, where we know the beloved, physically and emotionally, better than anyone else in the world, because love pays attention with the greatest possible intensity. Such knowledge is a knowledge of particulars—“To generalize is to be an idiot,” Blake said. In another work, The Modern Century, Frye spends much time detailing the ways in which modern art attempts to break down formulas and preconceptions, even to the point of a deréglement de tous les sens as advocated by Rimbaud.
At the end of the autobiographical Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus, Joyce’s fictional alter ego, lectures a friend on his theory of artistic perception, using a common basket as his example. Perception moves through three phases. The first is wholeness, or integritas: the basket is singled out—bracketed, as the phenomenologists would say—from the blooming, buzzing confusion (in William James’s phrase) of the flux of perception. The second is harmony, or consonantia: the basket’s parts are discerned, but discerned to be part of a whole or gestalt. The third is claritas, or the “whatness” of a thing, that which makes it uniquely itself. To adapt the terms from German Romantic philosophy that I used in The Productions of Time, these are phases of identity, difference, and identity-in-difference. Elsewhere, Joyce speaks of the final phase as an “epiphany,” and Stephen likens the moment of epiphany to Shelley’s description in “The Defense of Poetry” of the mind as a fading coal. Because he grew up being trained by Jesuits, Stephen has constructed his theory out of Latin terminology derived from Thomas Aquinas, ironically combined with the Romantic theory of Shelley, who wrote “The Necessity of Atheism.” But that is no doubt quite deliberate on Joyce’s part, an attempt to show that the mental state here bursts through the normal distinction between sacred and secular. Mircea Eliade would call such a revelation a hierophany, an epiphany of the sacred; the humanistic Abraham Maslow would call it a peak experience. But the epiphany is a transformative mental state. In it, the doors of perception are cleansed—to quote Blake yet again—and we see everything as it is, infinite. Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception records his attempts to cleanse his vision with hallucinogenic drugs, not what Blake had in mind but a practice with a long history in various religions, including Greek and Native American. Some painters are painters of epiphanies, van Gogh, for instance, with his sunflowers and his starry night. We note that epiphanies are a dialectic between two poles that Wallace Stevens called reality and the imagination. Sometimes reality prevails, sometimes imagination (as in the poems of Stevens himself). That is true of a great but neglected watercolorist, Charles Burchfield, whose work ranges from street scenes reminiscent of Edward Hopper to visionary landscapes influenced by Blake.
If such epiphanies seem too energetic and dramatic to be reveries, that is because they are breakthrough moments, as if the reverie were the still surface of waters from which suddenly leaps a dolphin or a whale. But the breakthrough does not always happen. We live our lives according to habit, too preoccupied to pay attention to what is before us. Even when confronted with the richness of the natural world, we are too numb to respond. As Wordsworth said,
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not.
Yet it still may be worth trying. According to an interesting article called “The Science behind Creativity” from the website of the American Psychological Association
Some research suggests spending time in nature can enhance creativity. That may be because of the natural world’s ability to restore attention, or perhaps it’s due to the tendency to let your mind wander when you’re in the great outdoors (Williams, K. J. H., et al., Journal of Environmental Psychology, Vol. 59, 2018). “A lot of creative figures go on walks in big, expansive environments. In a large space, your perceptual attention expands and your scope of thought also expands,” Kounios said. “That’s why working in a cubicle is bad for creativity. But working near a window can help.”
A thoughtful passage, and one with a historical background. It was the Romantics who established the theme of the power of a natural setting to nurture and recreate consciousness, starting with Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker (1776-1778), a set of short essays consisting of Rousseau’s musings and observations on a series of walks. It is said to have rehabilitated the word “reverie,” giving it a positive connotation, and may well be Bachelard’s source for the term. Wordsworth said that he composed a good part of his poetry in his head while taking enormously long walks through the Lake Country. Wordsworth’s epic is The Prelude, an autobiographical account of the growth of the author’s imagination from childhood until the recognition of his vocation as a poet, contains many vivid passages dramatizing nature’s nurturing influence on the mind. Wordsworth’s friend Coleridge was an orphan who was raised in the city, and who envied upbringing in nature. But his great poem “Frost at Midnight” still speaks of the transforming power of the imagination operating through the mystery of memory.
“Frost at Midnight” is one of the “conversation poems,” a type of meditative poem invented by Coleridge that expanded through the work of other poets into what the Romantic critic M.H.Abrams called “the greater Romantic lyric.” Such a poem begins with the description of a landscape or external scene. But the scene evokes a series of memories and associations, circling around some preoccupation, often one having to do with time and the power of imagination working through time. In other words, the movement of such a lyric is a dialectic between outward and inward, objective and subjective, often at a moment of emotional crisis. Some of the greatest Romantic short poems fit this description, including Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” and Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.” Later examples include Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” Wallace Stevens’ “Sunday Morning” and “The Auroras of Autumn,” Dylan Thomas’s “Poem on His Birthday,” and A.R. Ammons’ “Corson’s Inlet.” Such poems are miniature dramas, mental dramas in which the action is all internal, really a kind of dramatic monologue.
What Bachelard means by reverie is a state of mind different from ordinary ego consciousness, with its subject-object detachment, yet also distinct from mere daydreaming, which is a rather Freudian combination of wish-fulfilment fantasies and anxieties. Sometimes he will call it dreaming, but it is a dreaming while awake, and at other times he sharply distinguishes reverie from the actual dream, which is a mental state without a subject. In one way there is a dreamer, yet in another way the dream is a mental process that replaces the dreamer. The dream really is dreamed by the unconscious, which is Other. Bachelard is interested in reverie because it is the locus of the imagination. His phenomenology of the imagination is a really a study of the creative process. It is curious that he seems so unaware of the historical background of his inquiry: the great Romantics explored the nature of the creative process with great subtlety, using themselves as their own laboratory subjects, so to speak.
Bachelard is a bridge between the Romantic tradition and a burgeoning field of “creativity studies” whose burgeoning began as far back as the 60’s. There are any number of journals with the word “creativity” in their title, but I suspect that creativity studies is something of a side gig so far as academic psychology is concerned, less a pure than an applied science. And what it is applied to is often if not usually capitalism on the one hand and technophilia on the other. How do we make individuals creative? How do we make organizations creative? But what does “creative” mean when we ask these questions? Often it merely means the ability to come up with new products, new markets, and new gadgets. In other words, it means what Coleridge meant in his Biographia Literaria by “fancy” rather than imagination. Fancy is a mere “playing with fixities and definites”—in other words, it simply comes up with slightly new variations on an existing formula. About 90% of popular culture in all genres, including literature and music, is fancy rather than imagination. Real creativity is in fact not likely to sell, because what mass audiences want is a familiar formula slightly varied.
The greatest contemporary theorist of creativity was Abraham Maslow, and I am not sure that creativity studies has advanced much since his remarkable essays in the 60’s, collected in Towards a Psychology of Being and The Farther Reaches of Human Nature. Maslow’s insights about the creative process were truly, well, creative, and in fact venture into depth psychology by adapting the Freudian paradigm of a “secondary process” of conscious control and a “primary process” that exists on a deeper level. Creativity takes the risk of temporarily giving up conscious control and allowing primary process to take over. And there are times when Maslow is as aware as Jung of what a dare that is:
Aristotle doesn’t exist for the primary processes. It is independent of control, taboos, discipline, inhibitions, delays, planning, calculations of possibility or impossibility. It has nothing to do with time and space or with sequence, causality, order, or with the laws of the physical world….it can condense several objects into one as in a dream. It can displace emotions from their true objects to other harmless ones. It can obscure by symbolizing….It has nothing to do with action for it can make things come to pass without doing or without acting, simply by fantasy. For most people it is preverbal, very concrete, closer to raw experiencing, and usually visual. It is prior to good and evil. (Farther Reaches, 85)
Primary process, which is the unconscious itself, is not a separate place. It is, rather, a way of seeing, a vision of reality as a continual process of metamorphosis.
In the essay called “The Creative Attitude,” Maslow says, “I feel I must take far more seriously today than I did twenty years ago the Heraclitus, the Whitehead, the Bergson kind of emphasis on the world as a flux, a movement, a process, not a static thing” (56). Why? Because “It seems to me that we are at a point in history unlike anything that has ever been seen before. Think, for instance, of the huge acceleration in the rate of growth of facts, of knowledge, of techniques, of inventions, of advances in technology” (56). A bit later on the same page he says, “everything seems to be changing.” Heraclitus, who said that no one stepped twice into the same river; Alfred North Whitehead, whose philosophy of process denied “simple location” in space and time, who was the first to say that everything is truly everywhere all at once; Henri Bergson, who said that life is durée, the energy of creative time: these are the oracles of our age. Primary process is not some weird psychological hinterland deep in the psyche. Or rather, it is that too—but, as within, so without: primary process is what the world is. From this insight, Maslow draws a social conclusion that is more timely today than it was 50 years ago, for it explains what we are living through now, namely, the attempt of people terrified by change and difference to put authoritarian rulers in power who will make it all stop:
To come back to my title, what I’m talking about is the job of trying to make ourselves over into people who don’t need to staticize the world, who don’t need to freeze it and to make it stable, who don’t need to do what their daddies did, who are able confidently to face tomorrow not knowing what’s going to come, not knowing what will happen, with confidence enough in ourselves that we will be able to improvise in that situation which has never existed before. This means a new type of human being. Heraclitian you might call him. The society which can turn out such people will survive; the societies that cannot turn out such people will die. (Farther Reaches, 57)
We are speaking of a lot more than capitalist or technogeek types of creativity here. In “Emotional Blocks to Creativity,” Maslow says that the opposite of the Heraclitean type of personality is the obsessive-compulsive type, who sounds exactly like the type of people who look to Trump or Ron DeSantis as their saviors from a world that is changing in terrifying and unpredictable ways:
The “new” is threatening for such a person, but nothing new can happen to him if he can order it to his past experience, if he can freeze the world of flux, that is, if he can make believe nothing is changing. If he can proceed into the future on the basis of “well-tried” laws and rules, habits, modes of adjustment which have worked in the past, and which he will insist on using in the future, then he feels safe and doesn’t have to feel anxious. (81)
With such a leap, “creativity studies” changes from looking like a kind of New Age self-indulgence to something prophetic, something that provides a reason for the fascist insurrections that have erupted all around the world, which are really a recurrence of the same hysteria that we saw in the 60’s, that decade of change, of primary process played out in the streets.
But one serious challenge remains. Sudden epiphanies and revelations, a vision of reality as an ever-changing process rather than a stable foundation: all this metamorphosis seems directly contradictory to the meaning of “reverie,” whose connotations are surely of stillness and repose. In the end, the contradiction has to be simply accepted: the imagination has two modes, active and receptive, in a yin-yang relation to each other, and I suspect Bachelard wrote his book as a counterbalance. Reverie has its place in Romantic theories of imagination: Wordsworth’s famous definition of poetry is of “emotion recollected in tranquility.” As such, reverie instinctively reaches for the conventions of the pastoral, which idealizes a simple life in nature, a life that is often projected into the past as a lost golden age. Individually, the lost golden age is childhood, when we lived in paradise without knowing it: one of the five chapters of The Poetics of Reverie is called “Reveries toward Childhood.” Nostalgia for the lost state of what Blake called Innocence runs from Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode” to Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill.” Both those poems speak with anguish about the inevitable falling out of childhood paradise into destructive time, but that is not the whole story. We are, as the title of Proust’s great novel says, in search of lost time, and sometimes we can find it. May Sarton has an eloquent poem called “On Being Given Time” which begins with the timeless time of childhood: “Sometimes it seems to be the inmost land / All children still inhabit when alone.” This is a different kind of time: “Not the clock’s tick and its relentless bind / but the long ripple that opens out beyond / The duck as he swims down the tranquil pond.” But the poem culminates in a vision of time possibly regained:
It is, perhaps, our most complex creation, A lovely skill we spend a lifetime learning, Something between the world of pure sensation And the world of pure thought, a new relation, As if we held in balance the globe turning.
Blake recognized the two modes of the imagination, which he named Eden and Beulah, but he regarded Beulah as a lower and somewhat inferior paradise. In Fearful Symmetry, Frye says,
The writings of many visionaries are full of a childlike delight in a paradisal world which is the same world that other people see, but seen differently….Love and wonder, then, are stages in an imaginative expansion: they establish a permanent unity of subject and object, and they lift us from a world of subject and object to a world of lover and beloved. Yet they afford us only a lower Paradise after all. Wonder would doubtless have been defined by Blake differently from Johnson’s “effect of novelty upon ignorance,” but perhaps he would only have substituted “innocence” for the last word. Ultimately, our attitude to what we see is one of mental conquest springing from active energy. (55)
I was always a little put off by this description. There is a limit to thinking of the creative process as an aggressive conquest. The other Romantics insist that creation cannot be an act of will—indeed, it necessitates a renunciation of the will. In “Defense of Poetry,” Shelley maintains that no one can say, “I will compose poetry,” and in one of his letters Keats says that if poetry does not come as easily as leaves on a tree it had better not come at all. Beulah is the Sabbath vision of the imagination after six days of striving, and we do not work on the Sabbath because it is the sacred day after six profane days of struggle.
In his “Ode on Indolence,” Keats, rather mischievously, opts for reverie instead of the active striving symbolized by three figures who appear to him in a “drowsy hour” when “The blissful cloud of summer-indolence / Benumb’d my eyes.” They are Love, Ambition, and “my demon Poesy. Keats dismisses all three: “Ye cannot raise / My head cool-bedded in the flower grass.” Keats knows full well that this is not what one is supposed to say. That is exactly the point: he is rejecting the work ethic’s conquest of our lives. Folk singer-songwriter Richard Shindell has a delightful song, “Lazy,” that updates the “Ode on Indolence” for our time:
Lazy, I get so lazy When I'm with you I just want to stay there Doing something Approaching nothing…Monday - I should be working I call in lazy I can't make excuses No one believes me
But of course they have not actually been lazy, have not actually refused the call: both of them have created a work of art whose theme is the refusal to work. And yet, creating the poem and the song took work. Nevertheless, someone should make the case for relaxation and leisure for their own sake, not simply as a recharging of batteries so that we can return to our daily lives and be more productive than ever. Various comic characters, from Falstaff to Beetle Bailey, win our hearts by their affable, unapologetically parasitical indolence. Work is Adam’s curse: in the Golden Age, no one had to work. In the most perfect age of the world, everyone was lazy. Some visual artists, Matisse for example, seem to me painters of reverie, presenting us with a world we would love to be lazy in, full of color and sunlight. Others, like Klee and Miró, capture the childlike wonder and unself-conscious inventiveness of reverie.
So do some graphic novelists, such as Lynda Barry, in her book What It Is (2014), where “it” is the creative process itself, of which the book is an examination. But it is also an examination of the failure of that process, of the death of reverie. For children, she says, this means times when the child is not able to play: “there were times when nothing played back. Writers call it ‘writer’s block’” (52). Then she goes on to explain—I translate it into Bachelard’s terms—that the poetics of reverie includes more than an evocation of the golden hour. The genre par excellence of reverie is the romance, the tale of wonder, of which the fairy tale is a type aimed at children. Fairy tales, she says, are about the end of wonder and the waning of magic. They are death-and-rebirth narratives in which what dies and is reborn is the imagination itself:
Fairy tales and myths are often about this very thing. They begin sometimes with this very situation: a dead kingdom. Its residents all turned to stone. It’s a good way to say it, that something alive is gone….In a myth or a fairy tale, one doesn’t restore the kingdom by passivity, nor can it be done by force. It can’t be done by logic or thought. So how can it be done? Monsters and dangerous tasks seem to be part of it. Courage and terror and failure or what seems like failure, and then hopelessness and the approach of death convincingly. The happy ending is hardly important, though we may be glad it’s there. The real joy is knowing that if you felt the trouble in the story, your kingdom isn’t dead. (53-54)
The happy ending at the end returns to reverie’s paradisal state, but with a difference. Blake has a poem called “Auguries of Innocence,” and an augury foretells the future. In his work, Innocence dies into the world of Experience, but through the work of the imagination it is born again in a new form that Blake called “Organized Innocence.” The child within us dies, turns to stone like the kingdom. Yet in romance statues may come alive. We were children once, and, as Jesus told us, we must become children once again. That is the use of reverie, despite what all the skeptics say.
References
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos. Beacon Press, 1969. Originally published 1960.
Barry, Lynda. What It Is. Drawn & Quarterly, 2008.
Frye, Northrop. The Educated Imagination. In ‘The Educated Imagination’ and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933-1963. Edited by Germaine Warkentin. Volume 21 in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye, 2006.
Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Edited by Nicholas Halmi. Volume 14 in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye, 2004.
Maslow, Abraham. The Farther Reaches of Human Nature. Penguin, 1976. Originally published 1972.
I think that Frye is right when he characterizes the arts as engaged in a mental conquest. Later in the same book on page 251 in my copy he calls it all out war. Sinister laws— like the Espionage Act— and nauseating laws— like Affirmative Action— should be set ablaze in the town square by works of satire. Similarly science is a war to hunt down error—like the lie still widely held and promoted that the Covid vaccines prevented transmission of the virus—and free knowledge from obfuscation and shallow contempt and material gain.