Maintaining Balance— At West End Gallery
If our heart were large enough to love life in all its detail, we would see that every instant is at once a giver and a plunderer, and that a young or tragic novelty — always sudden — never ceases to illustrate the essential discontinuity of time.
—Gaston Bachelard, Intuition of the Instant (1932)
There was a phrase in the passage above from French philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962) that made me stop: every instant is at once a giver and a plunderer.
I don’t exactly know the context or Bachelard’s intended meaning. Don’t really know much about Bachelard or his work, to be honest. Some of it that I found online is way above the limits of my education, intellect, and understanding. But this line had an inkling of insight for me, even if it may not have been that which Bachelard intended.
As I see it, it says that every instant, however insignificant or momentous it might seem, is filled with both potentiality and inevitability. Each instant is a form of rebirth and death.
When one instant begins, another ends.
And in that instant there is both a gift and a price to be paid. A giving and taking. A beginning and an ending. A gain and a loss. Perhaps our gain, the new beginning, comes in the form of new insight, and our loss, the ending, comes in discarding ideas and beliefs that our newly gained insight disproves for us.
Perhaps it is as simple as finding new joy in one instant that replace sadness from another.
Of course, this happens instantaneously and continuously on a subconscious level so that unless we can somehow stop and examine an instant– if our heart were large enough to love life in all its detail as Bachelard put it– it takes place without our knowledge and recognition.
Does any of this have any practical application for our lives?
I don’t know. Like I said, this kind of thinking is way above my pay grade.
But maybe if we realize that each moment is both giving and taking from us, we can then live our lives more consciously, having a greater awareness of the potential significance hidden in every instant.
Maybe. Just spit-balling here before 6 in the morning.
There was another passage in this same book from Bachelard that also struck me deeply. It describes how an instant sometimes provides us with a gift that is true illumination, an instant that changes the arc of one’s life.
Whether it comes from suffering, or whether it comes from joy, we all experience as human beings this moment of illumination at some point in our lives: a moment when we suddenly understand our own message, a moment when knowledge, by shedding light on passion, detects at once the rules and relentlessness of destiny — a truly synthetic moment when decisive failure, by rendering us conscious of the irrational, becomes the success of thought. That is the locus of the differential of knowledge, the Newtonian burst that allows us to appreciate how insight springs forth from ignorance — the sudden inflection of human genius upon the curvature of life’s progress. Intellectual courage consists in actively and vitally preserving this instant of nascent knowledge, of making it the unceasing fountain of our intuition, and of designing, with the subjective history of our errors and faults, the model of a better, more illuminated life.
Part of me wants to believe I had such an instant many years ago. Can one ever be certain of such things?
I do know, however, that I have spent the past 30-some years trying to preserve whatever illumination, how little it may have been in the grand scheme of things, that was given in that instant. Though it may not be profound in its scale, it has certainly added meaning and purpose that was sadly lacking before that instant.
Got to wrap this up. Though this may be a bastardization of Bachelard’s concept, understand that today willed be filled with moments of giving and taking. Gain and loss. Be aware enough to accept both the gift and the loss for that may be the moment that offers some deeper illumination.
One that changes everything.
Here’s a song that I thought I had shared but found that I had not. Don’t know if it has any connection with this post but it sounded pretty good while I was writing so here it is. Comes from Python Lee Jackson which is probably not name that is familiar with most of you. I didn’t know who they were until I heard this song a few years ago. They were an Australian rock band active from 1965 to 1968, before heading to the UK for a few years, disbanding in 1972. The group’s most famous hit is this song, In a Broken Dream, which features Rod Stewart as guest vocalist.
Redtree Times 