‘Poetry is a metaphysics of the moment’, Vertical time
‘He defines the poetic moment as the “principle of an essential simultaneity in which the most scattered and disunited being achieves unity’ / discontinuous and disruptive
‘”Real” poem signals a stopping of ordinary clock time, introducing instead a dimension of “verticality,” in depth and in height’
“Reverberation” from Poetics of Space (1957)
‘Sensible simultaneities invoking deeper metaphysical correlations that cannot be experienced in chronological time’
‘Vertical temporality- examples in Joyce’s Ulysses or Proust’s Remembrance of Times Past
‘past and future are rein scribed in a timeless moment’ —> evokes imagination*
Buddhist idea of the empty moment as a free detachment from the horizontal cycles of samsara, as in the famous Heart Sutra—“form is emptiness, emptiness if form”
Emptiness is not empty but fuller than the greatest fullness itself : another deep ambivalence conjured in the eternal instant.
Poetic instant- ‘imagination is the well-spring of ethical as well as poetic values’
Poetry has ‘no interest in time as duration that dissipates echoes. It seeks the moment. ‘
‘He defines the instant as a sudden burst of consciousness calling for an acute act of attention.’
‘One experiences the instant, he claims, as an act of concentrated will; and will is to be understood as a radical moment of decision that is simultaneously a deep moment of listening’
‘The instantaneous time is far removed from the clock time of everyday life. It is the moment of the transformation of forms’
‘Bachelard’s phenomenology of the instant involves a radical ethics of empathy’
‘The self for Bachelard, as for Buber, is less a substance or cogito than a dynamic relation to the endlessly surprising other. Bachelard’s philosophy of the instant takes the form of a phenomenology of relations understood as sympathy, reciprocity, and surprise’
‘In the poetic instant, in short, the temporalizing horizons of “before” and “after” dissolve to reveal a bare inaugural moment. This is the moment when a lighting bolt of cosmic time traverses personal time in a fire of intimate intensity’
‘Death of linear time is reborn as vertical time’
‘Mode of reverie, that attitude of attention which combines will and decision with a deep receptivity toward an incoming gift’
“Time can be reborn but it must first die” -L’Intuition de l’instant