When a dreamer of reveries has swept aside all the ‘preoccupations’ that were encumbering his everyday life, when he has detached himself from the worry of others, when he is thus truly the author of his solitude, when he can finally contemplate a beautiful aspect of the universe without counting the minutes, that dreamer feels a being opening within him. Suddenly such a dreamer is a world dreamer. He opens himself to the world, and the world opens itself to him. One has never seen the world well if he has not dreamed what he was seeing.
[Poetics of Reverie: Reverie & Cosmos, Gaston Bachelard]
Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake. Henry David Thoreau
There is a definite sense of the contemplative within Bachelard’s ‘Reverie’, a sense of the 'defragmentive' (what dreaming effectively is), and of putting things back together again (unfragmenting them) whilst ejecting that which is extraneous and segregative. This contemplative aspect, like dreaming, reduces 'access latency', helping to render hitherto separated parts whole again. Dualism, as a mode of thinking, is gradually destroyed. The self then, naturally, through the process of reverie, emerges into health, 'opens himself to the world', and expansion (as a sort of 'auxesis' and an increase of life) occurs. Bereft, however, of this capacity for 'waking-dreaming', the self is compelled to stagnate.
In her thesis on the virtues of slowness Christine McEwan in World Enough and Time writes, 'The Buddha predicted that a Dark Age would arise when people's thoughts would move so tremulously fast there'd be almost no room left for inner stillness.' The French philosopher Paul Virilio writes of the 'picnoleptic society' and the epileptic state of consciousness that has been produced by speed. 'Tele-presence technologies' usurping our very being. Usurping the capacity for dreaming. Raimon Pannikar, the philosopher and theologian, in Invisible Harmony, talks of the 'anti-contemplative society' that has sprung up in unison with the global exigencies of business. That is, business as essentially busyness. David Orr writes in Verbicide of our language being whittled down to conform to the limited objectives of a capitalist society. The limits of our language, need we be reminded, are the limits of our world.
All this speed and busyness can surely bode no good, trapped as we are within the machinery of power. A power that is wholly artificial and hollow, and corrupting. More pathology than actual power.
'The active life, what a pity!' writes Thomas Merton in a poem somewhere -
In her thesis on the virtues of slowness Christine McEwan in World Enough and Time writes, 'The Buddha predicted that a Dark Age would arise when people's thoughts would move so tremulously fast there'd be almost no room left for inner stillness.' The French philosopher Paul Virilio writes of the 'picnoleptic society' and the epileptic state of consciousness that has been produced by speed. 'Tele-presence technologies' usurping our very being. Usurping the capacity for dreaming. Raimon Pannikar, the philosopher and theologian, in Invisible Harmony, talks of the 'anti-contemplative society' that has sprung up in unison with the global exigencies of business. That is, business as essentially busyness. David Orr writes in Verbicide of our language being whittled down to conform to the limited objectives of a capitalist society. The limits of our language, need we be reminded, are the limits of our world.
All this speed and busyness can surely bode no good, trapped as we are within the machinery of power. A power that is wholly artificial and hollow, and corrupting. More pathology than actual power.
'The active life, what a pity!' writes Thomas Merton in a poem somewhere -
Our loss of world (which is also a loss of self) is firstly a loss of slowness, leading to the loss of the capacity for reverie.
'The Man with a Cloud for a Head' The Lighthouse, Mitchell Lane.
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