I'm reading Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space for a long essay on Emily Dickinson. Bachelard is a self-described addict of what he calls 'felicitous reading', a term which I'll be using in the future.
Bachelard - a former philosopher of science now writing on poetics - writes, 'Sometimes, even when I touch things, I still dream of an element.' I think a whole shimmering tone poem a la John Adams could spring from this phrase.
We sadly miss the beauty and silliness of medieval cosmology: “The sun, moon, and stars go still round…for love of perfection. This love is manifest, I say, in inanimate creatures. How comes a loadstone to drawn iron to it? jet chaff? The ground to covet showers, but for love? No creature, St. Hierome concludes, is to be found…[that does not love something], no stock, no stone, that hath not some feeling of love. ‘Tis more eminent in plants, herbs, and is especially observed in vegetals…the olive and the myrtle embrace each other in roots and branches if they grow near…” Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy .
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