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The Elements As Metaphor

March 7, 2010

The poet Octavio Paz described the world as “A conspiration of elements all moved by universal sympathy.” Gaston Bachelard, the French philosopher, believed our archetypal affinity with the four elements is revealed as a form of poetic truth. T.S. Eliot’s classic the Four Quartets is one example. “This adoptation of the ‘elements’ is archetypal, a product of what Jung called ‘the natural mind’ that derives from natural sources and offers a natural wisdom” [Octavio Paz, a study of his poetics, by Jason Wilson]. The Pythagoreans believed that when the four elements are in dynamic harmony, the fifth element appears symbolized by a star.

Bachelard wrote a set of four books on imagination and the elements. - La Psychanalyse du feu, 1938, L’Eau et les rêves, 1942, L’Air et les songes, 1943, La Terre et les rêveries de la volonté, La Terre et les rêveries du repos, 1948. Dr. Joanne H. Stroud at The Dallas Institute oversaw the English translation of Bachelard’s series in the early 1980s. In turn, Dr. Stroud wrote a set of similarly themed books for youth. The set includes: Earth is Round, Air is Clear, Fire is Hot, and Water is Wet.

In The Imaginal Energy of Earth, Dr. Stroud suggests the environmental crisis is the result of a societal lack of deep self-awareness … In other words it is a crisis of unconsciousness.” Yet she also affirms “The idea of dreaming, or of reverie, as being linked to the will to action may be one of Bachelard’s most original premises.”