Water and Dreams: An Essay On the Imagination of Matter (Bachelard Translation)

good

One of my favorite Bachelard books.

It's a pity Bachelard is not widely read, since his books are, to quote from the Preface written by Harvard professor John R. Stilgoe for The Poetics of Space (1958), "magical." They belong to the rare and precious group of books that invites the reader to the intimate conversation the author's soul has with itself. This in fact is to paraphrase a quote Bachelard himself made to his daughter. According to Suzanne Bachelard in Fragments of Poetics of Fire (1988), he one day spoke with admiration the first lines of Schleiermacher's Monologen, where he said: "No choicer gift may be offered another than one's spirit's intimate converse with itself."After molding our minds with conventional ways of thinking, which is unavoidable under the education system as it is in place almost anywhere in the world, reading Bachelard is like doing an archeology of soul. Discovery after discover is made on the wonders, joys, and terrors our childhood self once knew and experienced so intimately and spontaneously, and yet has long lost. Discovery of this sort can be disorienting at times, but it is usually exhilarating intellectually and redeeming spiritually. Writing these words, which make Bachelard sound like some sort of spiritual huckster, I bemoan my lack of words, words to express the many moments of deep gratitude I felt toward his books. But then, one would have to be Bachelard to talk about his books in a language that befits them. Each forming a class of its own, they all defy easy summary or reformulation.Following The Psychoanalysis of Fire (1938), Water and Dreams (1942) is Bachelard's second attempt at showing the so very intimate traffic between matter and psyche, the matter here being, of course, water. To Bachelard, we are all materialsts to the core, and our most idealized notions about, say, life, death, or re-birth (all very water-dominated themes) cannot escape the material ground/womb where they were conceived. In the manner first employed in The Psychoanalysis of Fire, which would continue into his later books, Bachelard here names those souls whose destiny is determined by matter by "--- complex." Hence, Ophelia complex is one suffered by those to whom water signifies feminine, masochistic, death. Charon complex is witnessed whenever water as a dissolving death also holds a promise for re-birth.Water is a deeply, very deeply, ambivalent matter. With water, we can experience the most profound joy and the most profound despair. These words simply bastardize Bachelard's poetic and hypnotic language. Still unable to translate him into a language that satisfies me, I'll just have to return to him again and again.

Bachelard's book, one of the best ever written about the nature of water, was an early inspiration for both my own research and writing. There is much in the pages of Water and Dreams to be of interest to any practitioner of water management and to any student conerned with how we regard life's very essence. I quoted Bachelard 6 times in own work Deep Immersion: The Experience of Water, nominated for top enviromental book of the year in 2003. Other works worth consulting include Schwenk's Water, the Element of LIfe, Illich's H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness, and Sprawson's Haunts of the Black Masseur.