the resonant soul

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THE SCHOOL OF SPIRITUAL PSYCHOLOGY PAGE 1

The Resonant Soul: Gaston Bachelard and the Magical Surface of AirRobert 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 myinterest is in the spiritual soul. In addition, as an individual having an astrological chartwith the Moon, the Sun, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus, all in air signs, my choice ofAir and Dreams as Bachelard's work most concerned with the spiritual dimension of the soulcomes as no surprise. Nonetheless there are five other major factors in my chart in earthsigns, so what I want to present, I assure you, will not be all up in the air. Rather, thedesire 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 thespiritualizing of matter and the materializing of spirit.

I ask you to enter with me into the tension of two opposing characteristics; aerial ascentand earthly engagement - simultaneously. Nature engages in this simultaneous oppositionof movement all the time. For example, the perfume of the flower in its aerial ascentcannot be separated from the earthly weight of the seed. This tension of forces isexpressed in the perfection of the flower, beings of the air and the earth all at once. Orthe tree as a giant being of air and earth. Bachelard quotes Paul Gadenne's meditation on agigantic 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 hadwoven 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 andaimed so high that it forced you to experience its rhythm and to follow it with your eyesto 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 intothe 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 aboutmotion in the soul but the soul itself as active movement, all movement, not somethingthat moves. Of the four elements, Bachelard says that elemental images of air are themost rare, but always exemplify the dynamic imagination that is by far more significantthan the formal imagination. More significant and more primordial because dynamic imagesare never about content but are the "how" of the content. If we do not have a deep senseof elemental air, the images produced all the time that are the mark of the psyche - thefantasies, the dreams, the memories and even our perceptions of the world, seem to us tobe 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 toovercome 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 motionperceived visually. Motion perceived visually is not dynamic imagination but cinematic.Elemental air images compel us to realize images as creators of their own motion. Thecinematic imagination, which views images as pictures, unwittingly reduces the motion ofimages as something caused by some invisible, outside force. The soul as motion is thebasis 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, forexample, on dreams of flying, quintessential images of the aerial soul, as the model of theair element.

We might think, for example, that a dream of flying in which one has wings and floatsthrough 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 aconcept of what we think concerning how humans might fly. Wings on the human are astatic form. They suggest the concept of flying rather than invoking the action. This truthis easily tested. All you have to do is imagine a human being with wings and try to set thatperson, in your imagination, into flight. You can perhaps do so, but the wings on thathuman 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 becausewe have wings; rather, we think we have wings because we have flown. Wings are aconsequence. The principle of oneiric flight goes deeper. Dynamic aerial imagination mustrediscover this principle. (Air and Dreams, pg. 27)

Soul is not some kind of unsubstantial thing that moves but rather qualities of motion. Theprimary 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 withoutwings 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 projectedgoal 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 ofresistance against anything heavy. In a dream of flight, the whole form is light and thereare subtle details, which if noticed, reveal this image as the soul's motion. In addition tothe 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 flyingform is not some kind of projectile in the air, but the form is the condensation of the airitself, a kind of consolidation of air currents. Such a dream form also moves in the air in away akin to a bird; the body form stretched out horizontally, rather than our usual verticalposture, now moving up and down. This resemblance to the bird also conveys that the formitself 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 essentiallyvertical motion. Soul seeks both the heights and the depths. I do not intend to suggest thatthe 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. ForBachelard, all depth psychology is spiritual psychology.

Rather than hand spirituality over to religion or to the spiritual initiates or to cults of spiritor to the New Age, depth psychologists perhaps needs to encourage its sister discipline ofspiritual psychology with its interests in elevation, and the resonant images touched off inall images of motion and elevation - gentleness, the embrace of light, the sky, infinitespace, 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 imaginalmatter 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 essentialnature. 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 windgently pulling on the soul. This attraction belongs inherently to soul, but can be attendedto only through practices focusing on the soul's motion.

Because our prevailing notion of images is that they are some sort of form, differentcertainly than the forms around us in the waking world of usual consciousness, butnonetheless 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 imaginationin 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 awall. It is a landscape painting. It pictures a strong, flowing stream, blue, stirred intowhiteness, moving from a higher region to the left, and down toward the right. On the farside 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 skyforms 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 aphotographic representation of a pretty mountain scene.

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


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The first image concentrates the formal imagination. The second image concentrates thedynamic imagination, of which the aerial imagination is the prime example. The animationof the image, we can see when we bring it out and let it speak loudly, comes from theaerial imagination. The formal imagination always risks missing the animation or makes

animation a matter of cinematic movement rather than subtle qualities interior to theimage.

Besides being present to the animation within images, there is yet a further reason forintense interest in the aerial imagination. It is the only passageway between images andimaginal thinking. The aerial imagination induces thought, to put it in Bachelard's terms. Inthe esoteric spiritual traditions, spirit first reveals itself as mind, and soul is always alesser level of the manifestation of mind, and more or less a hindrance to spiritualprogress. Thus, there is always a strong tendency in spiritual practices to neglect soul. Butin Bachelard, as in depth psychology, soul is first. And with Bachelard, because he is aphenomenologist who lets the world speak through him rather than concocting a theoryabout 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 ofarchetypal forces going as downwardly deep as the underworld.

Once we have released ourselves from the notion that images are forms, that is, releaseourselves from the tyranny of the formal imagination, images as formed content, and beginto be able to feel and experience images as motions of soul, images as activity rather thanas forms that do this and that, we are on the way to imaginal thinking. And just as imageschange from content to action with the aerial imagination, imaginal thinking ischaracterized by its constant and prevalent interiority of motion, action, movement. Whatwe usually call thinking is not thinking at all but rather the stringing together of alreadycompleted thoughts. We typically engage in "thoughting" not thinking. We use thinkedthoughts. 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 thethinking itself; the thinking activity goes unnoticed and thus we move further and furtheraway from the possibility of thinking being open to the worlds of the gods, from whichthinking originates. We do not think. Thinking occurs through us.

In aerial imagination, for example, we do not experience flowers, but rather the act of theflowering. By becoming more and more accustomed to imagination's mobility, we loosenthe 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 transitionalspace 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 ofnightingales, the flight of larks, the swooping of falcons, the beauty of swans, themovement of the wind than anything that trails along following thinking as its trail offrozen content. Ideas fly. The flight of ideas. Wandering thought. The sign of true thinkingis not in the content but in the vibrations, the resonances, the tones, the overtones andundertones 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 thattakes us into dynamic thinking. Something else is required. The aerial imagination takes usfirst 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 fourthdimension of silence. When we enter the realm of silence, not just being quiet, which isonly the necessary condition that opens the door to autonomous silence, we move from thesurface of the aerial imagination into its interior. The interior space of silence is the depthof this high region of the aerial imagination. If you pay attention to silence itself, not towhat might be in the silence, you find that silence is a subtle fluid medium that surroundsand interpenetrates everything. This medium, I propose, is the interior depth of the aerialimagination. And, just as silence exists on its own, penetrating and filling us, so also doesit fill and surround everything. And everything, absolutely everything of this world issuesforth 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 theiranimation, their soul, through very particular qualities, qualities that are missed inordinary perceptual consciousness --- the fluidity of wonder in which all things are forevernew; the subtlety of reverence in which all things are forever holy; the light of wisdom inwhich things find their place within the whole; the gesture of openness in which things bytheir very being surrender to the divine. These qualities are not in us, but are theanimating qualities within the world, primordial world ideas. The flight of ideas, flightyideas, are far from frivolous and far from abstract. Indeed, taking the flight path of theaerial 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 theautonomous life of fleet-footed ideas.

Thinking, experienced from within the fluid medium of the aerial imagination, isindistinguishable from contemplation. Bachelard verifies this assertion: In order to hearthings that belong to infinite(translate - deep) space, we must reduce to silence all thenoises on earth. .....Then we can understand that contemplation is essentially a creativepower. We feel within ourselves the birth of a will to contemplate which almostimmediately 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 thathymn is to go beyond reality and to project a world of sound beyond the silent world. (Airand 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 thetrajectory of the aerial imagination, which goes through these metamorphoses the deeperwe enter into this kind of imagination. We go from image activity to thought activity toworld 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 inRilke's Fragments and Prose. The example helps us to follow this eagle like rapidity ofmovement that I just outlined, showing that indeed this motional metamorphosis is indeedexactly 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 ofthe tree, sitting in the fork of the tree where he enters into silence. Then, this happens: Itwas as if almost imperceptible vibrations came from the inside of the tree and passed overinto 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 ordinaryclear-cut physical conditions, would not even have been perceptible at all. .....Endeavoring to become aware of the slightest of these impressions, he wondered over andover what had happened to him and, almost at once, found an explanation that satisfiedhim. 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? Asresonance, vibration, the interior currents of soundless sound, as the realm of immediatefeeling, the flowing forces of feeling itself. The aerial imagination gives us themethodology for directly experiencing the soul of the world, provided we follow theprescribed 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 Bachelarddevelops it with the aerial imagination of the sky. The blue sky is the aerial imagination ofreverence, 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 skycompletely pervade your being, when you let its resonate being pervade every part of yourbeing, what resonates within that reflects the soul nature of the sky is the feeling ofreverence. The sky does not make us feel reverent; it is the feeling activity of theoperation of reverence embracing the earth. And, in the depth of the blue feeling ofreverence, 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 whathas 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 untilform is completed. It is a real and active state. There we meet ourselves and we meet theworld, not as it is, but as it is intended. There are no formal images of this blue depth; ithas no content, but is the utterly real experience of the not-yet lucidly and purelyapproaching us. From within reverence of the sky, we have the sense of how the things ofthe world are the distillations of an infinite field of azure, and how the things of the worldare 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 andDreams, pg. 170)

We have here a picture of the alchemy of the soul of the world, the sublimatio of aircondensing at the top of the world flask into the infinite white/blue sky, the ether, soul ofthe world, sacred air, which then distills back into the ensouled world, in an unendingactive 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 alchemicalcirculation was taking place, images appeared. They saw the soul of particular things intheir 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'szoomorphism. 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-edgedconceptual perception of daily life are things fixed into a single form and meaning. Theaerial imagination releases in us matter that will dream. Clouds that are one momentmonsters, the next beautiful women, and the next a medieval castle, strengthen the aerialimagination, 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 wehave 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 dayexemplified with the air imagination of clouds, the night is a slow force, and the depth ofthe stars the teachers of slowness. Here we approach the first motion, the origin of themotion 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 deepinfinite space of the dark sky, the stars gaze. As Bachelard, says: In the realm of theimagination, 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 uponpassionately, 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 mantleof 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 wehave the creative force of anger. Wind is the elemental air image of anger that iseverywhere and nowhere. It has no shape, but creates the whirlwind, the vortex, and thevortex is the wind of creation. The soul of the world's anger creates. Bachelard puts thisbeautifully: As by a provocation, the world is created through anger. Anger lays thefoundation 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 smallthreshold 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 arecreated by the wind. Winged she-wolves, harpies. Even the Medusa is imaged as a flyinghead, a storm bird. Cries of anguish issue from the storm. The cosmology of the screambelongs to the imagination of air. There is always, with Bachelard, a tendency to getsentimental about the image. This is because he concentrates so much on beauty. With thewind, 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 ofinteraction between the world soul and the individual soul. The breath of the world, thewind, is the breath of human beings. In pure silence, in pure air, we lose the boundary andcannot 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 havesufficiently practiced our imaginal flying, we can become the sounding voice of thecosmos. This requires being stirred enough out of reveries by sometimes destructive forcesof angry winds to become creators of stirring words that give breath to the breath of thecosmos.

NOTES ABOUT THE TRANSLATION

For nearly twenty years, Dr. Joanne Stroud of the Dallas Institute has directed thetranslation from French of the works of Gaston Bachelard. Bachelard was a giftedphilosopoher of science who 'fell' into the imagination as he was trying to show that it hadno 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 becausehe does not write about the imagination, he writes from within imagination. You cannotread his work without undergoing a transformation of your very being. He makes oneimaginatively 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 DreamsAll of these books are available through the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. Thephone 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 wholeor in part requires the permission of the Author.]
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