The Stale, Continued

This cell phone photo series, which takes from eight months of cell phone pictures wasn’t really inspired by anything in particular; it was more of the lack of any good ideas surrounding the great Bachelard quotes that I had sitting around, cited in my notebook, in my post-Poetics of Space reading. With all these random cultural snaps taken around Philadelphia, I had to put them to use. There will be a bigger slideshow project produced for the Fringe Festival in September, and a larger poetry project created with the significantly longer Bachelard quotes.

“If we cannot imagine, we cannot foresee.” – XXXIV

“All aggression, whether it comes from man or from the world, is of animal origin.” – 44

“Life begins less by reaching upward, than by turning upon itself.” – 106

“Well-being takes us back to the primitiveness of the refuge.” – 91

“In order to surpass, one must first enlarge.” – 112

“Beauty of substance is added to beauty of geometrical form.” – 127

“If need be, mere absurdity can be a source of freedom.” – 150

“We seek to determine being and, in so doing, transcend all situations, to give a situation of all situations.” – 212

“If there exists a border-line surface between such an inside and an outside, this surface is painful on both sides.” – 218

“But is he who opens a door and he who closes it the same being?” – 224

“And then, onto what, toward what, do doors open? Do they open for the world of men, or for the world of solitude?” – 224

“We have to designate the space of our immobility by making it the space of our being.” – 137

“The two kinds of space, intimate space and exterior space, keep encouraging each other, as it were, in their growth.” – 201

“There is consolation in knowing that one is in an atmosphere of calm, in a narrow space.” – 229

“Through its light alone, the house becomes human. It sees like a man. It is an eye open to night.” – 35

“The house helps us to say: I will be an inhabitant of the world, in spite of the world.” – 46-47

“In the realm of absolute imagination, we remain young late in life.” – 33

“Images are more demanding than ideas.” – 79

“Exaggeration is always at the summit of any living image.” – 80

“A wardrobe’s inner space is also intimate space, space that is not open to just anybody.” – 78

“The lock doesn’t exist that could resist absolute violence, and all locks are an invitation to thieves.” – 81

“Here the past, the present and a future are condensed. Thus the casket is memory of what is immemorial.” – 84

“Mankind’s nest, like his world, is never finished. And imagination helps us to continue it.” – 104

“For one “living” shell, how many dead ones there are! For one inhabited shell, how many empty!” – 107

“Words are clamor-filled shells.” – 179

Created by Gregory Bem in June 2009.