Prelude - A game of discovery and learning.

The Elements As Metaphor

March 7, 2010

The poet Octavio Paz described the world as “A conspiration of elements all moved by universal sympathy.” This also reflects the spirit of Prelude. a learning game that utilizes the four natural elements as metaphors. The game process helps players to see the holistic relation between themselves, each other, and the world around them.

The study of the four elements is ancient and yet remains an ever-present fascination. This has inspired some truly great creative minds of the 20th Century. 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].

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.

These two sets of books hold invaluable insights for adults and youth respectively. They are also  an excellent resource for use in Prelude discussions with both younger and older players as well. 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.” Simply put, this means that what we imagine we can make reality.  The ancient philosopher Pythagoras believed that when the four elements are in dynamic harmony, the fifth element appears called quintessence. A ‘conspiration of elements move to universal sympathy’ indeed. This is also akin to Appreciative Inquiry’s concept of the heliotropic effect generated by people imagining a positive future together.