"Now my aim is clear: I must show that the house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind. The binding principle in this integration is the daydream. Past, present and future give the house different dynamisms, which often interfere, at times opposing, at others, stimulating one another. In the life of a man, the house thrusts aside contingencies, its councils of continuity are unceasing. Without it, man would be a dispersed being. It maintains him through the storms of the heavens and through those of life. It is body and soul. It is the human being's first world. Before he is "cast into the world," as claimed by certain hasty meta-physics, man is laid in the cradle of the house. And always, in our daydreams, the house is a large cradle. A concrete metaphysics cannot neglect this fact, this simple fact, all the more, since this fact is a value, an important value, to which we return in our daydreaming. Being is already a value. Life begins well, it begins enclosed, protected, all warm in the bosom of the house."
French writer and philosopher (1884-1962)
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When a cultured and sensitive soul retraces its efforts to lay down the great lineaments of reason according to its own intellectual destiny,
when it retraces the history of its own culture through memory, it becomes aware that the vestige of an essential ignorance lies forever at the core of its intimate certainties. Within the realm of knowledge itself, there is indeed an original fault-that of having an origin; that of falling short of the glory of atemporal being; that of not awakening oneself to remain oneself, but of awaiting the lesson of light from the dark world.
En efecto, soy un soñador de palabras, un soñador de palabras escritas. Creo leer. Una palabra me detiene. Dejo la página. Las sílabas de la palabra empiezan a agitarse. Los acentos tónicos se invierten. La palabra abandona su sentido como una sobrecarga demasiado pesada que impide soñar. Las palabras toman entonces otros significados como si tuviesen el derecho de ser jóvenes. Y las palabras van, entre las espesuras del vocabulario, buscando nuevas, malas compañías. Muchos conflictos menores hay que resolver cuando, de la ensoñación vagabunda, se vuelve al vocabulario razonable.
Y es peor cuando en vez de leer me pongo a escribir. Bajo la pluma, la anatomía de las sílabas se despliega lentamente. La palabra vive sílaba por sílaba, en peligro de ensoñaciones internas. ¿Cómo mantenerla unida obligándola a sus habituales servidumbres dentro de la frase esbozada, frase que quizás vamos a tachar del manuscrito? ¿No ramifica la ensoñación la frase comenzada? La palabra es un brote que pretende dar una ramita. Cómo no soñar mientras se escribe. La pluma sueña. La página blanca da el derecho a soñar. Si tan sólo se pudiera escribir para uno mismo. ¡Qué duro es el destino del hacedor de libros! Hay que cortar y volver a coser para tener continuidad en las ideas. Pero, cuando se está escribiendo un libro sobre la ensoñación, ¿no habrá llegado el momento de dejar correr la pluma, de dejar hablar a la ensoñación y mejor aún, de soñar la ensoñación en el mismo momento que uno cree estarla transcribiendo?
"All great, simple images reveal a psychic state. The house, even more than the landscape, is a "psychic state," and even when reproduced as it appears from the outside, it bespeaks intimacy. Psychologists generally, and Francoise Minkowska in particular, together with those whom she has succeeded interesting in the subject, have studied the drawing of houses made by children, and even used them for testing. Indeed, the house-test has the advantage of welcoming spontaneity, for many children draw a house spontaneously while dreaming over their paper and pencil. To quote Anne Balif: "Asking a child to draw his house is asking him to reveal the deepest dream shelter he has found for his happiness. If he is happy, he will succeed in drawing a snug, protected house which is well built on deeply-rooted foundations." It will have the right shape, and nearly always there will be some indication of its inner strength. In certain drawings, quite obviously, to quote Mme. Balif, "it is warm indoors, and there is a fire burning, such a big fire, in fact, that it can be seen coming out of the chimney." When the house is happy, soft smoke rises in gay rings above the roof.
If the child is unhappy, however, the house bears traces of his distress. In this connection, I recall that Francoise Minkowska organized an unusually moving exhibition of drawings by Polish and Jewish children who had suffered the cruelties of the German occupation during the last war. One child, who had been hidden in a closet every time there was an alert, continued to draw narrow, cold, closed houses long after those evil times were over. These are what Mme. Minkowska calls "motionless" houses, houses that have become motionless in their rigidity. "This rigidity and motionlessness are present in the smoke as well as in the window curtains. The surrounding trees are quite straight and give the impression of standing guard over the house". Mme. Minkowska knows that a live house is not really "motionless," th
Childhood is a human water, a water which comes out of the shadows. This childhood in the mists and glimmers, this life in the slowness of limbo gives us a certain layer of births. What a lot of beings we have begun! What a lot of lost springs which have nevertheless, flowed! Reverie toward our past then, reverie looking for childhood seems to bring back lives which which have never taken place, lives which have been imagined. Reverie is a mnemonics of the imagination. In reverie we re-enter into contact with possibilities which destitute has not been able to make use of.