Alexander Lyusy. Heads and tails of the wind

Heads and tails of the wind
Alexander Lyusy

Publication date: February 21, 2000

Gaston Bachelard. Dreams of Air: An Experience on the Imagination of Movement. Per. from fr. B.M. Skuratova. - M.: Publishing House of Humanitarian Literature, 1999.

This book is the third volume of the most grandiose of the philosophical epics of the twentieth century. Gaston Bachelard's pentalogy is dedicated to the creation of new forms of working mythology based on the poetics of the four main natural elements. Previously, we have already published “Psychoanalysis of Fire” (M.: Progress Publishing Group, 1993) and “Water and Dreams” (M.: Publishing House of Humanitarian Literature, 1998), which explored the physics of imagination and developed the concept of the so-called material imagination, which should be injected into artistic creativity like hormones. In “Dreams of Air,” Bachelard turns to an element that is comparatively poor in substance, but at the same time the most dynamic and sudden - to the bearer of dynamic imagination as a special form of energetic information.

Air, unlike horizontal water, is a vertical element and therefore most permeated with human moral values. After all, a person cannot live horizontally. Imposing a special responsibility on a person, the vertical actually tears him apart into top and bottom. He who does not rise falls. Rest and sleep are most often perceived as a kind of immersion, but there are also people for whom sleep is an ascension or ascension. You just need to learn to sleep in your own element.

Bachelard writes about the drama and hygiene of straightening, growth, holding the head high, about the treatment of verticality and imaginary heights (as did the little-known psychiatrist Robert Desouilles, who knew how to transform the oneiric energy of sleep into moral energy in the same sense in which chaotic warmth is transformed into movement). Contrary to the well-known sentence “One born to crawl cannot fly,” according to Bachelard, the straightened one emerges from the writhing one; forms of straightening are forms of pain, the creation of hoarse inspiration, the bearer of which in Bachelard is the poet of painful breathing and thinking interjections Blake, and the Russian reader, of course, will immediately remember Vysotsky. In fact, we imagine a rush upward, but we know it as a fall down. Throwing oneself into the abyss in the hope of a decisive inversion of take-off - such is the dynamic scheme of radical heroism, discovered not only by the most airy, but by the most windy of poets (the poet not of matter, but of action) Nietzsche. Well, Bachelard’s tonic contemplation of the abyss from a height from which we will no longer fall should give additional power to the impulse to the heights. Those who are unfit to fly, Nietzsche, according to Bachelard, will teach to fall faster. Wind as an extremely dynamic image of violent air, an expression of lightning-fast formation and a symbol of unalloyed anger as pure action (as opposed to rancor as accumulating matter).

Bachelard is painfully worried about the lack in his native language of words necessary to convey the psychology of the moment, to break through viscous laziness, to merge with the matter of freedom: the culture of will requires monosyllabic words. At the same time, he calls for the therapeutic knowledge of the metaphorical life of language to accurately weigh the matter of adjectives. But the half-forgotten Russian poet of the turn of the 18th-19th centuries, Semyon Bobrov, also calling for “weighing the elements more accurately,” followed the path of inventing compound adjectives.

Counterpsychoanalysis - this is how, by the end of the book, the author formulated the essence of his method, which changed the vector to the opposite one compared to the first book of the epic. After all, psychoanalysis refuses the ontological study of the image, it unearths the history of a person, it demonstrates the secret suffering of the poet. He replaces the flower with manure. Bachelard bequeathed to the next century a project of organic poetry, telepoetry (by analogy with telepathy), more ordered than just verses accumulated together around a random image. Bachelard’s fireproof and fluid books, which have finally leaked to us, hang and sag in the surrounding air. The joint (with the support of the Russian-French airborne book publishing program Pushkin) project of Bachelarization clearly lacks attempts at a common reading, similar to the principle of publishing Corpus by J.-L. Nancy in the publishing house Ad Marginem. The short introductory notes do not introduce Bachelard into the Russian context. In one of them, however, there was a comparison of this author with Fedorov, Tsiolkovsky and Vernadsky. However, describing how a literary image explodes ready-made phrases, brings nouns to our ears after their explosion, when they left the Gehenna of their own roots, crossed the threshold of darkness, caused the transmutation of their own matter, Bachelard allegedly comments on Khlebnikov: “Cut the dirt with the order: Dream!” Its theme of falling upward is comparable to the image of an airy grave and the call to fight for the air of subsistence in Mandelstam’s “Poems about the Unknown Soldier” (like learning language from natural forms with learning from flowing water, and the dialectic of heaviness and lightness with sisters heaviness and tenderness). And the conclusion that a person who, with the help of psychoanalysis, has been freed from the burden of a difficult past should be offered some form of future as soon as possible, is perceived as an analogue of the current Russian “What to do?” Without this speedy or even instantaneous suggestion of future growth, the patient, who has long suffered from his mistakes and errors, may resume his suffering; his troubled life may not change. After all, posthumousization has a predominantly vertical structure.

The inexhaustible potential of Russian windiness (and the wind, among other things, is the most temporary of the elements) is evidenced by the fabulous victory at a representative international competition , akin to Luc Besson’s “The Fifth Element,” of twenty-year-old student Ivetta Gerasimchuk, whose essay has the symbolic title “Dictionary of the Winds.” It's a pity that Bachelard didn't live to see this.