The Resonant Soul: Gaston Bachelard and the Magical Surface of Air

Robert Sardello, Ph.D.

In November 2002, The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture sponsored a conference
titled "Matter, Dream, and Thought: A Symposium of the works of Gaston Bachelard."
What follows is Robert Sardello's contribution to that Symposium.

I approach the work of Gaston Bachelard as a depth psychologist who has for some twenty-
five years been interested in determining the practices needed to develop conscious,
embodied soul life that is open and receptive to the spiritual realms. I would say that my
interest is in the spiritual soul. In addition, as an individual having an astrological chart
with the Moon, the Sun, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus, all in air signs, my choice of
Air and Dreams as Bachelard's work most concerned with the spiritual dimension of the soul
comes as no surprise. Nonetheless there are five other major factors in my chart in earth
signs, so what I want to present, I assure you, will not be all up in the air. Rather, the
desire to know more what the soul's proclivity for ascension is all about belongs to the
alchemical imagination of the distillation process, the circulation concerned with the
spiritualizing of matter and the materializing of spirit.

I ask you to enter with me into the tension of two opposing characteristics; aerial ascent
and earthly engagement - simultaneously. Nature engages in this simultaneous opposition
of movement all the time. For example, the perfume of the flower in its aerial ascent
cannot be separated from the earthly weight of the seed. This tension of forces is
expressed in the perfection of the flower, beings of the air and the earth all at once. Or
the tree as a giant being of air and earth. Bachelard quotes Paul Gadenne's meditation on a
gigantic walnut tree:

"It was a huge and profound being which had worked the earth year after year with all its
roots, and which had likewise worked the sky, and which from this earth and this sky had
woven an unyielding substance and tied these knots against which no axe could have
prevailed. Its upward thrust was so great, the movement of its branches was so noble and
aimed so high that it forced you to experience its rhythm and to follow it with your eyes
to the very top." (Air and Dreams, pg. 222)

And he quotes La Fontaines' lines concerning the oak tree:

Whose head was neighbor to the heavens, And whose feet touched the realm of the dead.

Our imagination of depth, our depth psychology needs, I propose, to go not only deep into
the underworld, but also deep into the cosmos. Let us let Gaston Bachelard be our guide.

The elemental image of air concerns the soul's motion, soul as motion. It is not about
motion in the soul but the soul itself as active movement, all movement, not something
that moves. Of the four elements, Bachelard says that elemental images of air are the
most rare, but always exemplify the dynamic imagination that is by far more significant
than the formal imagination. More significant and more primordial because dynamic images
are never about content but are the "how" of the content. If we do not have a deep sense
of elemental air, the images produced all the time that are the mark of the psyche - the
fantasies, the dreams, the memories and even our perceptions of the world, seem to us to
be cinematic pictures, inner things to be looked at. Even the brilliant formulation of James

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 Hillman that images are not things seen but what we see through, is not strong enough to
overcome the tendency to confine the imagination to set forms.

To catch the air of the soul requires sensibility to the subtle, sensibility to the "how" of the
image. There is nothing visual about the aerial imagination. It does not concern motion
perceived visually. Motion perceived visually is not dynamic imagination but cinematic.
Elemental air images compel us to realize images as creators of their own motion. The
cinematic imagination, which views images as pictures, unwittingly reduces the motion of
images as something caused by some invisible, outside force. The soul as motion is the
basis of psychic images of every variety and element being activity and not static pictures.
But it is the element of air that is the source of image as activity. Bachelard focuses, for
example, on dreams of flying, quintessential images of the aerial soul, as the model of the
air element.

We might think, for example, that a dream of flying in which one has wings and floats
through the air would be a dream typifying the aerial imagination. We might think that
here is an instance of the soul revealing its dynamism, soul imagining itself as activity.
Such a dream more likely shows a memory of seeing pictures of angels, or it is dreaming a
concept of what we think concerning how humans might fly. Wings on the human are a
static form. They suggest the concept of flying rather than invoking the action. This truth
is easily tested. All you have to do is imagine a human being with wings and try to set that
person, in your imagination, into flight. You can perhaps do so, but the wings on that
human form will not be flapping nor even necessary to the flight. Bachelard says:

"I will therefore, postulate as a principle that in the dream world we do not fly because
we have wings; rather, we think we have wings because we have flown. Wings are a
consequence. The principle of oneiric flight goes deeper. Dynamic aerial imagination must
rediscover this principle.” (Air and Dreams, pg. 27)

Soul is not some kind of unsubstantial thing that moves but rather qualities of motion. The
primary qualities directly expressing soul's motion are buoyancy and lightness of being,
often showing, for example, in dreams of flight in which I may find myself flying without
wings but with the just right tilt of the feet that suggests motion. A buoyancy of the feet,
launching one into air with the pure delight of being an air being, not with any projected
goal toward which one seems to be headed.

The lightness of matter shows in all dreams of flight, for the soul's motion is not a work of
resistance against anything heavy. In a dream of flight, the whole form is light and there
are subtle details, which if noticed, reveal this image as the soul's motion. In addition to
the slight movement of the feet, the form itself is buoyant, and light, and movement
occurs freely and spontaneously, not mechanically. In such images it is clear that the flying
form is not some kind of projectile in the air, but the form is the condensation of the air
itself, a kind of consolidation of air currents. Such a dream form also moves in the air in a
way akin to a bird; the body form stretched out horizontally, rather than our usual vertical
posture, now moving up and down. This resemblance to the bird also conveys that the form
itself is airy. In a dream of flight, we are never our 170 pounds.

Dreams of flight are one of the archetypal images of the spiritual soul. Soul is essentially
vertical motion. Soul seeks both the heights and the depths. I do not intend to suggest that
the soul as motion only seeks the heights; only that this necessary upward aspect of soul

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 has been sorely neglected in depth psychology, showing up only as purer pathology.
Bachelard, however, has almost nothing to say of the downward flight of the soul because,
he says, the aerial imagination concerns the primordial desire of the soul to ascend. For
Bachelard, all depth psychology is spiritual psychology.

Rather than hand spirituality over to religion or to the spiritual initiates or to cults of spirit
or to the New Age, depth psychologists perhaps needs to encourage its sister discipline of
spiritual psychology with its interests in elevation, and the resonant images touched off in
all images of motion and elevation - gentleness, the embrace of light, the sky, infinite
space, silence, contemplation, the motion of the stars, nebulae, the milky way, freedom,
clarity, ideas. These qualities do not exist on their own but are the tropisms of imaginal
matter under the valorization of air. Bachelard quotes Gasquet:

"Could motion be matter's prayer, the only language that God really speaks? Motion!
Through it the love of creatures and the desire of things are expressed in their essential
nature. Its perfection unifies everything and makes it come alive. It binds the earth to the
clouds, and children to birds."
And
"In rarified air, at the summit of the soul, does God not float like the dawn on snow as it
grows whiter?" (Air and Dreams, pg. 57)

Spiritual psychology concerns the soul's aerial attraction to God, and God's breath as a wind
gently pulling on the soul. This attraction belongs inherently to soul, but can be attended
to only through practices focusing on the soul's motion.

Because our prevailing notion of images is that they are some sort of form, different
certainly than the forms around us in the waking world of usual consciousness, but
nonetheless forms, let me try to give an example of speaking an image as form and
speaking that same image as activity. Let us, for a moment, engage the aerial imagination
in a heightened way so our visual prejudice will not sneak in and infect the air.

First, an image spoken in terms of formal imagination. Suppose I look at a painting on a

wall. It is a landscape painting. It pictures a strong, flowing stream, blue, stirred into
whiteness, moving from a higher region to the left, and down toward the right. On the far
side of the swiftly flowing stream is a hill, a beautiful hill of dark green tall grasses,
sloping steeply down to the stream. And on this side of the stream, more dark green grass,
filled though with small blue flowers sitting atop long green stems. A hint of the blue sky
forms the background of this pleasant painting.

All images, like all matter, are composed of the subtle elements of earth, air, fire, and
water. This present image is of the preponderance of the water and the earth element,
but I am going to try to draw out and emphasize the air element, which is also present,
and, more than present, makes this painting tend toward a living image rather than just a
photographic representation of a pretty mountain scene.

The aerial imagination would have to be spoken something like this: downard flowing white
capping blue rushing, cutting through greening sloping hill ushering a welcoming field of
flowering blue reaching toward its sky blue likeness.

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 The first image concentrates the formal imagination. The second image concentrates the
dynamic imagination, of which the aerial imagination is the prime example. The animation
of the image, we can see when we bring it out and let it speak loudly, comes from the
aerial imagination. The formal imagination always risks missing the animation or makes
animation a matter of cinematic movement rather than subtle qualities interior to the
image.

Besides being present to the animation within images, there is yet a further reason for
intense interest in the aerial imagination. It is the only passageway between images and
imaginal thinking. The aerial imagination induces thought, to put it in Bachelard's terms. In
the esoteric spiritual traditions, spirit first reveals itself as mind, and soul is always a
lesser level of the manifestation of mind, and more or less a hindrance to spiritual
progress. Thus, there is always a strong tendency in spiritual practices to neglect soul. But
in Bachelard, as in depth psychology, soul is first. And with Bachelard, because he is a
phenomenologist who lets the world speak through him rather than concocting a theory
about the world, we are allowed to begin where we are, as ensouled beings, receptive to
the currents of upwardly deep spiritual forces and as well, receptive to the currents of
archetypal forces going as downwardly deep as the underworld.

Once we have released ourselves from the notion that images are forms, that is, release
ourselves from the tyranny of the formal imagination, images as formed content, and begin
to be able to feel and experience images as motions of soul, images as activity rather than
as forms that do this and that, we are on the way to imaginal thinking. And just as images
change from content to action with the aerial imagination, imaginal thinking is
characterized by its constant and prevalent interiority of motion, action, movement. What
we usually call thinking is not thinking at all but rather the stringing together of already
completed thoughts. We typically engage in "thoughting" not thinking. We use thinked
thoughts. Just as we neglect images as motion and focus only on the matter, the structure,
and the form of images, even more so do we confuse thinking with what is thought about.
That is, when we are thinking about something, we mistake what we think about with the
thinking itself; the thinking activity goes unnoticed and thus we move further and further
away from the possibility of thinking being open to the worlds of the gods, from which
thinking originates. We do not think. Thinking occurs through us.

In aerial imagination, for example, we do not experience flowers, but rather the act of the
flowering. By becoming more and more accustomed to imagination's mobility, we loosen
the hold fixed thoughts have on us and attune to the flowing activity of thinking itself.
Bachelard quotes, among others, the poet Shelley as a master of living in this transitional
space of image and thought:

Whence come ye, so wild and so fleet,

For sandals of lightning are on your feet,
And your wings are soft and swift as thought

True thinking is more like the motion of eagles, the tempests of storms, the sound of
nightingales, the flight of larks, the swooping of falcons, the beauty of swans, the
movement of the wind than anything that trails along following thinking as its trail of
frozen content. Ideas fly. The flight of ideas. Wandering thought. The sign of true thinking
is not in the content but in the vibrations, the resonances, the tones, the overtones and
undertones it sets off as it swoops swiftly by.

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 It is, however, not only a matter of becoming accustomed to the aerial imagination that
takes us into dynamic thinking. Something else is required. The aerial imagination takes us
first into silence and then, through silence, into the activity of imaginal thinking. Indeed,
you cannot experience the aerial imagination unless you quiet down and lets its presence
show forth in silence. The path from imagination to thought goes through the fourth
dimension of silence. When we enter the realm of silence, not just being quiet, which is
only the necessary condition that opens the door to autonomous silence, we move from the
surface of the aerial imagination into its interior. The interior space of silence is the depth
of this high region of the aerial imagination. If you pay attention to silence itself, not to
what might be in the silence, you find that silence is a subtle fluid medium that surrounds
and interpenetrates everything. This medium, I propose, is the interior depth of the aerial
imagination. And, just as silence exists on its own, penetrating and filling us, so also does
it fill and surround everything. And everything, absolutely everything of this world issues
forth from this medium as the things of the world.

To the extent that we can, through the aerial imagination, be present in this medium, then
the things of the world show in their animation, their aliveness. They show their
animation, their soul, through very particular qualities, qualities that are missed in
ordinary perceptual consciousness --- the fluidity of wonder in which all things are forever
new; the subtlety of reverence in which all things are forever holy; the light of wisdom in
which things find their place within the whole; the gesture of openness in which things by
their very being surrender to the divine. These qualities are not in us, but are the
animating qualities within the world, primordial world ideas. The flight of ideas, flighty
ideas, are far from frivolous and far from abstract. Indeed, taking the flight path of the
aerial imagination through silence shows us that we are all upside down in our usual,
sleepy ways of living. What we consider to be concrete - this chair, this room, this paper,
these people, are all abstract, for these 'concrete things' are but the smoky trails of the
autonomous life of fleet-footed ideas.

Thinking, experienced from within the fluid medium of the aerial imagination, is
indistinguishable from contemplation. Bachelard verifies this assertion: In order to hear
things that belong to infinite(translate - deep) space, we must reduce to silence all the
noises on earth. .....Then we can understand that contemplation is essentially a creative
power. We feel within ourselves the birth of a will to contemplate which almost
immediately becomes a will to take part in the motion of what we are contemplating.
....All profound contemplation is necessarily and naturally a hymn. The function of that
hymn is to go beyond reality and to project a world of sound beyond the silent world. (Air
and Dreams, pg. 49).

The aerial imagination opens into animated imaginal thinking, which opens the door to the
interior of the temple of the world through contemplation. I am simply following here the
trajectory of the aerial imagination, which goes through these metamorphoses the deeper
we enter into this kind of imagination. We go from image activity to thought activity to
world activity, sweepingly swooping its way through silence. On the other side of silence,
the activity of the aerial imagination turns into sound beyond sound.

Bachelard gives a beautiful example of this work of conscious contemplation as it occurs in

Rilke's Fragments and Prose. The example helps us to follow this eagle like rapidity of
movement that I just outlined, showing that indeed this motional metamorphosis is indeed
exactly what happens when the aerial imagination is religiously followed. In the passage,

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 Rilke is telling us about walking with a book and comes to a resting place, in the fork of
the tree, sitting in the fork of the tree where he enters into silence. Then, this happens: It
was as if almost imperceptible vibrations came from the inside of the tree and passed over
into his body....He felt as though he had never been moved so gently, as if his body had
been in treated like a soul and prepared to receive an influence whose degree, in ordinary
clear-cut physical conditions, would not even have been perceptible at all. .....
Endeavoring to become aware of the slightest of these impressions, he wondered over and
over what had happened to him and, almost at once, found an explanation that satisfied
him. He told himself that he had been carried to the other side of nature. (Air and Dreams,
pg. 208)

What is the other side of nature? It is the soul of the world. How is it experienced? As
resonance, vibration, the interior currents of soundless sound, as the realm of immediate
feeling, the flowing forces of feeling itself. The aerial imagination gives us the
methodology for directly experiencing the soul of the world, provided we follow the
prescribed flight plan.

There are four qualities of the soul of the world - wonder, reverence, world wisdom,
openness to the divine - let us follow through one of them - reverence as Bachelard
develops it with the aerial imagination of the sky. The blue sky is the aerial imagination of
reverence, but not the blue sky we look at above us, not that inverted goblet of sapphire,
as Coleridge called it, and in so doing hardened the indeterminate infinity of the blue,
which when entered is more of a feeling than a visual thing. When you let the sky
completely pervade your being, when you let its resonate being pervade every part of your
being, what resonates within that reflects the soul nature of the sky is the feeling of
reverence. The sky does not make us feel reverent; it is the feeling activity of the
operation of reverence embracing the earth. And, in the depth of the blue feeling of
reverence, the blue depth, we open to reveries with an entirely different direction ---
reveries of the future! In the blue depth, there is the reverent sense of being within what
has not yet come into form, the realm of what Aristotle called potentia.

Potentia is a permanent state of coming-into-form. It is not just provisional, there until

form is completed. It is a real and active state. There we meet ourselves and we meet the
world, not as it is, but as it is intended. There are no formal images of this blue depth; it
has no content, but is the utterly real experience of the not-yet lucidly and purely
approaching us. From within reverence of the sky, we have the sense of how the things of
the world are the distillations of an infinite field of azure, and how the things of the world
are potentia and actuality all at once. Bachelard quotes the author, D'Annunzio:

"On the tip of every needle, pines have a drop of blue." (Air and dreams, pg. 170)

Bachelard comments:

"Is there a better way to express the fact that rustling leaves distill blue sky?" (Air and
Dreams, pg. 170)

We have here a picture of the alchemy of the soul of the world, the sublimatio of air
condensing at the top of the world flask into the infinite white/blue sky, the ether, soul of
the world, sacred air, which then distills back into the ensouled world, in an unending
active circulatio. The world is the dream of the aerial imagination.

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 When the alchemists looked deeply and attentively into the flask in which the alchemical
circulation was taking place, images appeared. They saw the soul of particular things in
their nascence, in their coming into being. In the great alchemical circulation of the world,
we see this transformation from the depths of the universe into the things of the world as
the clouds in the blue sky. As Bachelard says,

"The clouds help us to dream of transformation."(Air and Dreams, pg. 185)

And he speaks of the clouds as the day's zoomorphism as the constellations are the night's
zoomorphism. The clouds are the aerial imagination of the soul of the things of the world.
Contemplating clouds can strengthen the sense that all things are constantly moving,
changing, transforming. Only for the formal imagination and only for the sharped-edged
conceptual perception of daily life are things fixed into a single form and meaning. The
aerial imagination releases in us matter that will dream. Clouds that are one moment
monsters, the next beautiful women, and the next a medieval castle, strengthen the aerial
imagination, releasing the illusion that the things of the world are lifeless. The things on
the table are, for the aerial imagination, no less mobile than the clouds in the sky, and we
have just a hint of the magical surface of elemental air, how the world itself is magical.

While the magic of the soul of the world operates with speedy mobility during the day
exemplified with the air imagination of clouds, the night is a slow force, and the depth of
the stars the teachers of slowness. Here we approach the first motion, the origin of the
motion of aerial imagination. We are still in the imagination of motion, but it is motion-as-
rest. And, in this motion-as-rest, we experience movement gazing at us. In the deep
infinite space of the dark sky, the stars gaze. As Bachelard, says: In the realm of the
imagination, everything that shines is a gaze. Our need to be on familiar terms is so great,
and contemplation is so naturally a confidence, that everything that we gaze upon
passionately, either because of our distress or our desire, looks back at us familiarly, with
either compassion or love. (Air and Dreams, pg. 183)

In the night, we are being looked at by the aerial imagination, which clothes us in a mantle
of comfort.

While the operation of the blue as reverence concerns mantling the world with comfort,
the true creative power of the aerial imagination is given in air stirred, the wind. Here we
have the creative force of anger. Wind is the elemental air image of anger that is
everywhere and nowhere. It has no shape, but creates the whirlwind, the vortex, and the
vortex is the wind of creation. The soul of the world's anger creates. Bachelard puts this
beautifully: As by a provocation, the world is created through anger. Anger lays the
foundation for dynamic being. Anger is the act by which being begins. However prudent an
action may be and however insidious it promises to be, it much first cross of a small
threshold of anger. Anger is the acid with which no impression will be etched on our being.
It creates and active impression. (Air and Dreams, pg. 227)

For the aerial imagination, the necessary shadow side of images and of the soul are
created by the wind. Winged she-wolves, harpies. Even the Medusa is imaged as a flying
head, a storm bird. Cries of anguish issue from the storm. The cosmology of the scream
belongs to the imagination of air. There is always, with Bachelard, a tendency to get
sentimental about the image. This is because he concentrates so much on beauty. With the
wind, however, we have images of the enraged universe. Tumult and tempest too belong

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 to the soul of the world. Wind inspires courage of soul, and is also the imaginal point of
interaction between the world soul and the individual soul. The breath of the world, the
wind, is the breath of human beings. In pure silence, in pure air, we lose the boundary and
cannot tell where we end and the cosmos begins. There is, of course, a deep reality to this
unity, but it is equally so that we are not the totality of the cosmos, but, if we have
sufficiently practiced our imaginal flying, we can become the sounding voice of the
cosmos. This requires being stirred enough out of reveries by sometimes destructive forces
of angry winds to become creators of stirring words that give breath to the breath of the
cosmos.

NOTES ABOUT THE TRANSLATION

For nearly twenty years, Dr. Joanne Stroud of the Dallas Institute has directed the
translation from French of the works of Gaston Bachelard. Bachelard was a gifted
philosopoher of science who 'fell' into the imagination as he was trying to show that it had
no place in science. He then spent the rest of his life developing an imagination of the
elements - Air, Fire, Water, and Earth. He is an extraordinary thinker and writer because
he does not write about the imagination, he writes from within imagination. You cannot
read his work without undergoing a transformation of your very being. He makes one
imaginatively capable.

The books that have been translated under the direction of Dr. Stroud are:

Earth and the Reveries of Will

Air and Dreams

The Right to Dream

The Flame of a Candle

Framents of a Poetics of Fire

Lautreamont

Water and Dreams
All of these books are available through the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. The
phone number is: 214-871-2440. The Institute's web site is: http://www.dallasinstitute.org

[Copyright © 2002, The School of Spiritual Psychology, All Rights Reserved. Reproduction in whole
or in part requires the permission of the Author.]

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