A week or two ago, I stumbled upon a book called The Poetics of Space, by Gaston Bachelard.
It was a dense, philosophical text. I couldn’t get through a single page. But I think the gist of it is that spaces have personalities.
What does this mean, exactly?
Well, I’m not sure. It’s the kind of thing that, when reading it, means nothing, really. It’s one of those dense abstract statements that, when reading, just translates to empty noise in your head.
Compare these two statements:
“We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.”
Compare this with a sentence like this:
”Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”
The first is a line from The Poetics of Space that is famous enough to be quoted on Goodreads, and the second is a famous ‘nonsense sentence’ with no meaning at all.
I know I’m being a little bit of a dick. If you sit down for long enough, the former sentence means something. But the language is so hard to parse that the little wisps of meaning available at the end of it just don’t seem worth the effort.
Anyway, I didn’t write this just so I could trash The Poetics of Space (even though for some reason I can’t help it, perhaps because I’m not intelligent or patient enough to read it).
I actually sat down today intending to praise the main idea of it.
When something happens, it leaves its mark on the place where it happened. It could be good. A home that’s been in a family for years might feel ‘warmer’ to a member of its kin, not only because it looks familiar to them but because it actually oozes familiarity.
Maybe this is why it’s easier to get work done at a library than at home. The place takes on a character of focus.
If this is true, then that means that it really is possible for a space to be ‘haunted.’ Maybe, if a lot of terrible things happened somewhere, a space really does start to feel creepy.
I live in the apartment where my uncle died. It’s not something I think about often, but I thought about it this morning.
The house has been in my family for generations. My mom lived here. My uncle. My other uncle. My grandfather was born here. If there were any space in which I belonged, this seems like it would be one of them.
It doesn’t seem as ‘homey’ as the house where I grew up (I have a lot less memories here), but it’s definitely more inviting than a house that was always inhabited by strangers.
It’s strange to think that this space carries all these memories. You can actually see it when you start digging around the place. When we tore up the kitchen to redo the cabinets, we found wallpaper from at least 100 years ago. It’s still back there, even though we can’t see it.
There but unseen, just like everything that happened here.
I wonder if anyone else died in my apartment. I guess someone died everywhere, when you think about it. The world has been around for a long time. It’s just not always someone you know, and you don’t always know that it happened. Does knowing about it influence the ‘character’ that a space takes on? In your head, of course. But what about in reality?
I don’t know. I don’t really know how much I buy into the whole concept in general. It seems like something that I should believe. After all, the opposite—that an empty space is just a void until something living occupies it—seems unfathomable.
Still, there’s a part of me that just can’t get behind it.
Hell, I don’t even know if it’s what Gaston Bachelard was trying to say.