Transcending our memories of all the houses in which we have found shelter, above and beyond all the houses we have dreamed we lived in, can we isolate an intimate, concrete essence that would be a justification of the uncommon value of all of our images of protected intimacy?
Germ of the essential - Primary virtue: the humblest dwelling has beauty.
It (our house) is our first universe. But our adult life is so dispossessed of the essential benefits, that we don't feel their first attachment in the universe of the house.
They know the universe before they know the house, the far horizon beofre the resting-place; whereas the real begginnings of images will give concrete evidence of the values of inhabited space, of the non-I that protects the I.
We shall see the imagination build 'walls' of impalpable shadows, comfort itself with the illusion of protection-or, just contrary, tremble behind thick walls, mistrust the staunchest ramparts. The sheltered beings gives perceptible limits to his shelter. He experiences the house in its reality and in its virtuality, by means of thought and dreams.
Through dreams, the various dwelling-places in our lives co-penetrate and retain the treasures of former days.
We comfort ourselves by reliving memoriesof protections. Leaving their original value as images.
We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.
The house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace. Without it, man would be a dispersed being.
Being is being-well. These virtues of shelter are so simple, so deeply rooted in our unconscious that they may be recaptured through mere mention, rather than through minute description.
We think we know ourselves in time, when all we know is a sequence of fixations in the space of being's stability -a being who does not want to melt away, and who, even in the past, when he sets out in search of things past, wants time to 'suspend' its flight.
Because we must also give an exterior destiny to the interior being.
Each one of us, then, should speak up his roads, his crossroads, his roadside benches; each one of us should make a surveyor's map of his lost fields and meadows.
The first, the oneirically definitive house, must retain its shadows.
All we communicate to others is an orientation towards what the secret without ever being able to tell the secret objectively. What is secret never has total objectivity. In this respect, we orient oneirism but we do not accomplish it.
(It's not so much for you, my friend, who never saw this place, and had you visited it, could not now feel the impressions and colours I feel, that I have gone over it in such detail, for which I must excuse myself. Nor should you try to see it as a result of what Ihave said; let the image float inside you; pass lightly; the slightest idea of it will suffice for you. Sainte-Beuve)
For it is not until his eyes have left the page taht recollections of my room can becomea threshold of oneirism for him.
Reciprocal interpretations of dreams through thought and thought through dreams, keep turning.
How often have I wished for the attic of my boredom when the complications of life made me lose the very germ of all freedom!
A house constitutes a body of images that gives mankind proofs or illusions of stability.
Instead of facing the cellar (the unconscious), Jung's 'prudent man' seeks alibis for his courage in the attic. Inthe attic rats and mice can make considerable noise. But let the master of the house arrive unexpectedly and they return to the silence of their holes. The creatures moving about in the cellar are slower, less scampering, more mysterious. In the cellar, darkenss prevails both day and night, and even when we are carrying a lighted candle, we see shadows dancing on the dark walls. In our civilization, which has the same light everywhere, and puts electricity in its cellars, we no longer go to the cellar, carrying a candle. But the unconscious cannot be civilized.
Realities serve here to reveal dreams. We only find compensation for our perseverance if we participate by means of our own night dreams.
How can one help confer greater cosmicity upon the city space that is exterior to one's room?
So I make a sincere image out of these hackened ones, an image that is much my own as though I myself had invented it, in line with my gentle mania for always believing that I am the subject of what I am thinking.
However, any image is a good one, provided we know how to use it.
We must therefore experience the primitiveness of refuge and, beyond situations that have been experienced, discover situations that have been dreamed.
How many dwelling places there would be, fitted one into the other, if we were to realize in detail, and in their hierarchical order, all the images by means of which we live our daydreams of intimacy.
It's so simple taht it no longer belongs to our memories - which at times are too full of imagery - but to legend. Real images are engravings, for it is the imagination that engraves them on our memories. Its truth must derive from the intensity of its essence, which is the essence of the verb 'to inhabit'.
We never experience an image directly. Indeed, every great image has an unfathomable oneiric depth to which the personal past adds special colour...discover that its roots plunge beyond the history that is fixed in our memories...but we must lose our earthly Paradise in order actually to live in it, to experience it in the reality of its images, in the absolute sublimation that trascends all passion. 'Alas! We have to grow old to conquer youth, to free it from its fetters and live according to its original impulse'. They give us back areas of being, houses in which the human being's certainty of being is concentrated, and we have the impression that, by living in such images as these, in images that are as stabilizing as these are, we could start a new life, a life that would be our own, that would belong to us in our very depths.
Images are incapable of repose. Poetic revery, unlike somnolent revery, never falls asleep. The poet had certainly seen hundreds of time, is suddenly marked with the sign of 'the first time', and it transmits this sign to the familiar night. We are hypnotized by solitude, hypnotized by the gaze of the solitary house; and the tie that binds us to it is so strong that we begin to dream of nothing but a solitary house in the night.
The house's powers of protection against the forces that besiege it. The house is a world in itself.
A reminder of winter strengthens the happiness of inhabiting. In the reign of the imagination alone, a reminder of winter increases the house's value as a place to live in.
Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.
When the imge is new, the world is new.
Thus, an inmense cosmic house is a potential of every dream of haouses. Winds radiate from its center and gulls fly from its windows. A house is as dynamic as this allows the poet to inhabit the universe. Or, to put it differently, the universe comes to inhabit his house.
The images of these houses that integrate the wind, aspire to the lightness of air, and bear on the three of their impossible growth a nest all ready to fly away.
the most flagrant contradictions come to wake us from our doldrums of concepts, and free us from our utilitarian geometrical notions. Solidity is achieved by an imaginary dialectics.
The different characteristics of the house, it is inclined to be hospitable to fragmentary dialects, and if I were to pursue it, I should destroy the unity of the archetype. It is better to leave the ambivalence. It's precisely his right to be suggestive. The image is no longer descriptive, but resolutely inspirational.
For how forcefully they prove to us that the house tha were lost forever continue to live on in us; that they insist in us in order to live again, as though they expected us to give them a supplement of living. [58]
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