"People need houses in order to dream, in order to imagine" (Stillgoe, cited in Bachelard, 1994, p. viii).
Time denotes impressions of past, present and future but coupled with the themes of memory and imagination, time becomes arbitrary and transcends its linear appearance. Origins become irretraceable. "We are not mechanical systems that are 'built'. Rather, we are living systems that are dynamic and growing. There is no single 'cause' of our behaviour " (Bachelard, 1994, p. 6). The past continually seeks to be re-invented . "All values must remain vulnerable, and those that do not are dead" (Bachelard, 1994, p. 59).
As I investigate a past site, riddled with fragmented moments of childhood intimacy, I am aware that those spaces now only exist within myself as a set of malleable values and tactile yet ever-changing impressions. Textural traces of sites and times past help me to re-imagine a space that was a physical site but bordered on the imaginary. The original/childhood home captured my imagination like no other site. It was my first playground, physically and imaginatively, which tended to blur into one another. Wistful times of boredom and unstructured lonely play strengthen the significance of isolation and so strengthen the importance of the daydreamer.
" Distant memory only recalls [facts] by giving them a value" (Bachelard, 1994, p. 59).
"The greatest honour you can give a house is to let it fall back down into the ground...."
I looked at him, surprised. "But then you've lost your house."
"Not if you know how to build another one...the important thing isn't the house. It's the ability to make it. You carry that in your brain and in your hands, wherever you go." (Peregrina in Animal Dreams written by Kingsolver 1992, cited in Rubenstein, 2001).
References:
Bachelard, G. (1994). The poetics of space: The classic look at how we experience intimate places (I. The Orion Press, Trans. 1994 ed.). Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press.
Rubenstein, R. (2001). Home Matters; Longing and belonging, nostalgia and mourning in women's fiction. New York: Palgrave.