"The flame is one of the biggest image makers. The flame forces us to imagine. From the moment we dream in the face of the flame, what we see is nothing compared to what we imagine," writes the philosopher Gaston Bachelard in one of the first sentences of "The Flame of a Candle." He sits in front of the candle and lets his imagination bloom, but does not go much away from the flame - he has no need to sail to made-up plots. His imagination revolves around the flame itself, the myriad ways in which it can be seen.
Bachelard looks at the flame and sees life in it. "Life is fire," he writes, and the flame, which is easily lit and exhaled lightly, consumes it, is "an easy birth and an easy death." He sees it as loneliness, like the loneliness of the thinker. "The flame is lonely, it's naturally alone, it wants to be left alone." He thinks about what might be the sound of the flame of the candle, and what word would be to reflect the sound of the flame. He listens to the crackling sound of a fly throwing itself at her, and tries to distinguish it from the sound of a moth falling into the candle.
The flame is charged through his gaze with aesthetic and moral values: he finds in it refinement, moral purity, powerful, massless beauty. He marvels at her vertical axis, her stubborn upward ambition. He sees it as a "vertical cascade" of light. In her erectness she reminds him of a stem. He writes: "The flame is a verticality in which life dwells... The stem of the flame is so erect, so brittle, that the flame is actually a flower." As his mind wanders to images of flames and flowers, he quotes beautifully from Balzac and Hugo that draw parallels between light and smell: "Every plant is a lamp. His scent is the light" (Hugo); "Every smell is a combination of air and light" (Balzac). The images of flame, Bachelard writes, bear the imprint of poetry, and it gives the dreamer "aerial food," turning the observer, who speaks to it, into a poet.
Menorah. The flame has a special meaning in culture, photo: Getty Images
Bachelard's poetic text is a treatise on dreaming and the embodiment of dreaming. Bachelard wanders between images and quotations, his mind leisurely sailing with no purpose other than itself, as Kant defines aesthetic experience. You can imagine him writing this book in the light of the flame, his gaze glazing over it, and he turns from it to his library, pulls out a book, and returns to his place to read and contemplate it in the meager light of the candle. The thought here is metaphorical, it does not strive for absolute clarity but remains in the twilight. For Bashlar, the dreamer is our dark double, "that shadow-light of the thinking man."
But the vague dreaming is not a negative of thinking. Bachelard's thinking appears as a kind of meditation, with its double meanings in English: both in the original sense of concentrated and attentive mental activity, and in the contemporary sense that also contains the potential for levitation and transcendence. Thinking does not appear here as an activity aimed at providing answers, organized knowledge and definitions, but as one that aims to open and awaken the poetic imagination.
The flame of a candle,
The Flame of a Candle is the last book Bachelard published in his lifetime: it was published in 1961, a year before his death. Born in 1884, Bachelard did not enter formal philosophy until the age of 36, but a decade after finishing his doctorate he was already awarded the Knight of the Legion of Honor in France and later elected to the French Academy of Sciences. Alongside his research work on cognitive barriers in scientific development, in a series of publications he investigated the poetic imagination through the four elements – water, earth, air and fire – with the view that poetic thought about these elements might teach us something about the collective human imagination. Of the four elements, fire is the only one that Bachar repeated and wrote about: before "The Flame of a Candle" came the "Psychoanalysis of Fire" (1938), which was not translated into Hebrew, and a few decades after his death his daughter published a collection of fragments on fire that he wrote in his last years.
Bachelard defines "The Flame of a Candle" as "a booklet that is all simple dreaming, without the weight of any body of knowledge." He sees the book as a continuation, and perhaps an image, of his previous book, The Poetics of Dreaming (1960), which has not been translated into Hebrew. But in fact this book was written from a vast body of philosophical and cultural knowledge.
Even if ostensibly Bachelard does not present here a systematic model for life or thinking, in practice such a proposal is implicit between the lines. He writes about the flame of the candle in the early 60s, knowing full well that the candle's time as a lighting device is long gone. He writes against the present of his time, holding against the wind an experience that cannot continue to exist in a world already dominated by bright electric light. He writes: "The flame of the candle is a model for a peaceful and gentle life. Without a doubt, the slightest exhalation will disturb her."
Tel Aviv at dusk. The constant light disrupts our lives, Photo: Getty Images
The flame is portrayed here not only as a powerful poetic image, and perhaps an image of poetry itself, but as a form of life - sensitive, fragile, struggling, glamorous. This is not a lamentation. The text is imbued with optimism, even if it is not the optimism of the man of action, who lays out a future outline of alternative psychology, but the optimism of the forces of the imagination of a man who, before his death, lays out in his mind, with his vast poetic knowledge, the expanses of the experience of staying in place, in the light of a candle whose usefulness has passed from the world but is still an endless anchor of living imagination.
In this sense, translator Mor Kadishson's afterword, which deals with light pollution, continues Bashalar's text beyond its horizon and "capitalizes" it, writing about the light that floods us and disrupts our lives and the lives of other animals (for example, the sea turtles that are attracted to the light of cars and their deaths, and the fireflies whose courtship rituals are disrupted by the headlights). This is a compelling and horizon-expanding critique, but it is not certain that its place in this book does well with both texts: Bachelard's essay is relevant even without the concrete contexts of the damage caused by light pollution. Her protest is first and foremost in the purposeless lounging, brimming with spectacular thoughts, in the twilight of a candle.
"The Flame of a Candle", Gaston Bachelard, translated from French and added notes followed by Mor Kadishson, Babylon Press, 141 pages
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