René Magritte - Personal Values (1952)
"If the dream is a translation of waking life, waking life is also a translation of the dream."
René Magritte
"The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth."
Joseph Campbell
"When this elsewhere is in natural surroundings, that is, when it is not lodged in the houses of the past, it is immense. And one might say that daydream is original contemplation.
If we could analyse impressions and images of immensity, or what immensity contributes to an image, we should soon enter into a region of the purest sort of phenomenology - a phenomenology without phenomena; or, stated less paradoxically, one that, in order to know the productive flow of images, need not wait for the phenomena of the imagination to take form and become stablised and completed images. In other words, since immense is not an object, a phenomonology of immense would refer us directly to our imagining consciousness. In analysing images of immensity, we should realise within ourselves the pure being of pure imagination. It then becomes clear that works of art are the by-products of this existentialism of the imagining being. In this direction of daydreams of immensity, the real product is consciousness of enlargement. We feel that we have been promoted to the dignity of the admiring being.
This being the case, in this meditation, we are not "cast into the world", since we open the world, as it were, by transcending the world seen as it is, or as it was, before we started dreaming. And even if we are aware of our own paltry selves - through the effects of harsh dialectics - we become aware of grandeur. We then return to the natural activity of our magnifying being."
If we could analyse impressions and images of immensity, or what immensity contributes to an image, we should soon enter into a region of the purest sort of phenomenology - a phenomenology without phenomena; or, stated less paradoxically, one that, in order to know the productive flow of images, need not wait for the phenomena of the imagination to take form and become stablised and completed images. In other words, since immense is not an object, a phenomonology of immense would refer us directly to our imagining consciousness. In analysing images of immensity, we should realise within ourselves the pure being of pure imagination. It then becomes clear that works of art are the by-products of this existentialism of the imagining being. In this direction of daydreams of immensity, the real product is consciousness of enlargement. We feel that we have been promoted to the dignity of the admiring being.
This being the case, in this meditation, we are not "cast into the world", since we open the world, as it were, by transcending the world seen as it is, or as it was, before we started dreaming. And even if we are aware of our own paltry selves - through the effects of harsh dialectics - we become aware of grandeur. We then return to the natural activity of our magnifying being."
From The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard
