“Daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity.” —Gaston Bachelard

We maneuver daily through vast spaces and past objects designed by human imagination and crafted by talented artisans. Some of these objects are as simple as a paperclip. There are crafted pieces of furniture, and towering glass-and-steel buildings lining city sidewalks. Textures and patterns surround us in fashion, appliances, and interior design among other numerous ways. In museums and art galleries, we discover paintings, exquisite glassware, pottery, and sculptures. In between and around these objects is the presence of space-time, and reflected and refracted light.

This morning, while waiting for the tea kettle to boil, the mug was the object of my attention. Its lines, circular form, the handles’ curve, and its nautical images of 18th-century ships. Faint light shone through the kitchen. The scene made me think of a still life painting. The mug was the positive space. Around the mug was negative space, being the empty space in which the mug rested on the counter. The mug’s design, its artwork, contained spaces that allowed my eye to wander the unified piece and the stories and the story it tells.

Then there was time for reading poetry. Two carefully crafted poems engaged me with the poets’ use of language and themes. The first poem was by Maureen Doallas titled “Remembering Martha.” The poem’s subject is the last known passenger pigeon named in honor of Martha Washington that lived at the Cincinnati Zoo. Dollas allows the reader to experience Martha’s life and death, and to gain insights into what inspired her to compose the poem, which can be found on her Substack page, “Writing Without Paper.”

The second poem, “From Tsukiko, While Watching the Moon,” by Michael L. Utley. This can be found in the online WordPress journal LatinoUSA. Utley’s poem is delicate, as if done in the ancient Japanese shodō (brush writing). He evokes the depths of emotion, solitude, loneliness, and spirituality blended with the natural world. The poet accomplishes this beginning with a word play in the poem’s title: Tsukiko— tsuki (moon) and ko (child).

After reading the poems, I found myself thinking about how we move “rhythmically between figurative and abstract shapes,” to borrow the words of the Canadian artist Terrill Welch. We make deliberate choices of what we observe. I have been struck by Terrill’s paintings of clam shells, pebbles, and rocks at the bottom of the coastal shoreline. There is a sense of childlike wonder, interpreted through the eyes of a skilled artist, in these paintings. When viewing these, I imagine myself barefoot, squatting down, gazing at the shells beneath the caressing sea.

What do the coffee mug, poems, and Terrill’s paintings have in common? Imagination.

The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard writes that imagination is “…the faculty of deforming images provided by perception; it is above all the faculty of liberating us from the first (here representations in perception), of changing images.”

Imagination enables us to create from the observable by adjusting reality. We find its influence in scientific theories, (e.g. Einstein’s photoelectric equation), sculpture (e.g., Michelangelo’s the Pieta, Camille Claudel’s The Waltz), painting (e.g., Pissarro, Kate Freeman Clark, Zinaida Serebriakova), poetry (e.g., Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon), dance (e.g. Martha Graham), music (e.g. Bach, Charles Ives, Dizzy Gillespie), glass works (e.g. Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka), and literature (e.g.,Arturo Pérez-Reverte , Isaac Bashevis Singer, Robertson Davies, Margaret Atwood), architecture (e.g. Frank Lloyd Wright. Gabriela Carillo). The list is endless, stretching from the earliest to the contemporary period of human history. Creativity begins with the imagination, and it is creativity that shapes our experience and knowledge of our environment.

In nature, when we pause to observe, we perceive insects in flight, or negotiating vast spaces, crawling up the stems of flowers, leaves, each slightly different than the other, dangling from branches, or delicate raindrops clinging to pine needles and cones, the diverse patterns of snowflakes, shafts of sunlight reflected and refracted off ocean waves breaking on rocks and sandy beaches, clouds, or dust particles in shafts of sunlight flowing through windows in our rooms. No two objects are alike, even when appearing similar. There are numerous patterns forming objects framed by time-space.

Within each observable object, there is an intimate space contained within an immense space. Our imagination, when we allow, invites us to daydream and experience “the space of intimacy and world-space blend….  When human solitude deepens, then the two immensities touch and become identical.”

This all seems rather academic until you think about the union of time and space in our daily lives, our ordinary experiences, which are shaped by the historical time period we live in.  Solitary moments are often difficult to come by in our contemporary life. But when we pause to reflect, we can see the interaction of space and time in nature, art, literature, architecture, and other forms of creative expression. How space-time speaks to us depends on our perspective, our willingness to observe with our senses— our commitment to understanding.

Bachelard warns us, however, that “Imagination does not seek a diagram for summarizing knowledge. Imagination searches for a pretext for multiplying images, and as it becomes interested in an image, it over rates its value.” Our imagination depends on emotional perception. Our creative interpretation and expression of the imagination depend on rational skills.

We live in a world of these two blending, a oneness and unity, that beckons us, not just as artists and writers, but as human beings, diverse as we are, to pause, to open our eyes to see— to allow ourselves child-like wonder. 

Image: The Daydreamer ©2014 Charles van Heck