Bachelard Response

For years, I understood that the day my grandfather died was only a memory of moments forged from shattered ideas in my head. Scenes ticked by in my head as frames depicting his last days and hours came together, which I believed only came from verbal stories my family had recited to me. When reading Bachelard’s text, I couldn’t help but fall into daydreams compiled of the time I found out I was wrong, and the visuals that engulfed me when I found myself missing Charlie were really mine. I realized I had never asked my parents what the hospital he was in looked like, or how things were situated, and what the last thing I fed him bedside was. When I described the brick walls and us standing in the parking lot as Charlie passed, everything lined up. What it means to have a true visual memory of and not a compiled one of a perhaps a morose, yet important day in my life, was important to me. Memories are futile, and they can be shifted so easily by whatever level of consciousness your inner workings choose. They can shift to make things seem better when you want them to, and they somehow can become fantasy. They are spawned by images of childhood and concealed. I am reminded of how important memories and daydreams are, and how blurry the line between them can be sometimes.

I would also like to bring up the notion of the attic versus the cellar. I find the dialectic between the two both metaphoric and symbolic of the nature of so many states of being. The general notion that is applied is one of conquering and the feeling of conquering. In the attic we conquer. It is only our presence that is needed, the faintest bit of identity to secure a place and feeling of authority and of being heard as well as being the commander. There is shelter from the birds’ eye view, a literal place of being on top of every other [floor] and physical and emotional state. The cellar represents the state of feeling conquered. We aren’t the ruler, and it isn’t even really a place that is comfortable for it is seemingly an unnaturally and weary place to be in. We are underneath everything, with the possibility that everything above us can cave in and we are crushed. I wonder what stands in the middle. The feeling of being on ground is one that leads to an emotional state of feeling grounded. I can see the verticality of the house representing a range of states and reactions, the psychology of our being, while the horizontality is the ending-axis on which the journey takes place.