The Poetic Image

When I tell someone I am trying to write about my grandmother’s childhood home, they ask what my relationship to it is. Aloud I say, “It’s complicated,” but to myself I say, “Imaginary.” To be frank, I’ve only physically been inside the house a few times. But in my thoughts, I visit it almost daily.

On my first visit almost a decade ago, I was accompanied by my mother and second cousin. We drove the county roads together to eastern Wisconsin, just south of Lake Winnebago. One of my primary memories is the wallpaper in the two-story staircase that was about to be painted. The only pictures I took that day were of this wallpaper. There were three different floral patterns visible: cream on tan, bright yellow, and white on pale pink. The first two had worn away in places like a topographical map in which the bottom layer was the oldest. It was like looking at the rings in side of a tree trunk, I thought later – as if multiple generations’ versions of the house were present at once.

The house is octagon-shaped. I have held this fact close like an heirloom seed in my pocket. I have held it like a talisman, not knowing why, but not being able to put it aside either. It is like a burnished stone in the centre of my mind.

A seed, a talisman…this is not quite right. To be precise, I feel like I have inherited a poetic image. I will attempt to explain this.

~

I use the term “poetic image” specifically in reference to the philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s book The Poetics of Space. I was initially drawn to his book because of its title. I have often felt that there is a spatial element to poetry. It seems we do not just read a poem – we as readers enter a poem. Stanza, from the Italian, means “room.”1 I enter a poem, I exit a poem – and somehow I am not the same. I, the reader, have been psychically rearranged, as if I entered a new space.

Bachelard explains his poetics as follows: “If there is a philosophy of poetry, it must appear and re-appear through a significant verse, in total adherence to the isolated image; to be exact, in the very ecstasy of the newness of the image.”2 He then focuses on several poetic images that have a spatial or architectural element – the first being one’s childhood home, which he calls “the human being’s first world.”3

Ultimately he explores what it means to inhabit spaces physically and psychically via the imagination. The childhood house, for example, is both the site of much daydreaming and the object of daydreaming. He emphasises that “The house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer.”4

Bachelard emphasises that along with imagining, reading too can be an active process: “Poetics comes from poiesis, meaning ‘to make,’ and for Bachelard this is a two-way process; we are made by material images that we remake in our turn.”5 Daydreaming here goes further than memory. We reinhabit the spaces of memory by revisiting them and adding onto them through active imagination.

~

I have an inner image of the outside of the house. Is it from looking at a photograph? Or from standing in front of the house myself? Facing the front door, the house looms above. The front wall confronts the viewer head on, and two walls on either side taper off at an angle receding to the right and left. On the right side, a rectangular addition creates a visual contrast. It is painted a stark white and the tin roof glints brightly overhead. A single step leads up to the elevated porch leading to the front door. The front porch is supported by two thin columns of wood and the top is edged in a moulding of curves and cut-out diamonds painted a royal blue.

In the distance, behind the house to the left, a barn stands tall. To the right, obscured partly by the house, is a shed painted the same red. Beyond these are hilly fields that once grew crops but are now overgrown. Along the horizon to the left is a thin glimmer of blue, the Fox River, and to the right a smudge of green woods.

In my active imagining, the house is a castle tower anchored firmly in the earth, as if it has been here since time began. It is a lighthouse in its near-cylindrical shape, a structure that resists strong winds and tumultuous waves. It is a white gull perched solidly on seaside cliffs, watching closely for any hint of movement, a sign of fish. It is as if the house watches me intently.

Brauch in American Architecture

My fascination with the house is largely due to its shape. An octagon seems like an unlikely shape for any house, let alone a farmhouse. There is an element of the extraordinary tied up in the ordinary. Why, I wondered, an octagon house?

The octagon design was created by nineteenth-century phrenologist and amateur architect Orson Fowler. That century marked a time of reform and inventiveness, and phrenology was thought at the time to be another sound application of the modern scientific method. While it mistakenly correlated the shape of the skull with mental traits, Fowler’s profession gives insight into his interest in the relationship between the outer and the inner nature of things. He applied this thinking to the octagon house, which he designed based on the premise that a house’s design affects its inhabitants’ quality of life and state of mind: “Especially will the quantity and quality of man’s intellect evince themselves in the houses they build […] and rooms should be conveniently located, as regards each other, especially adapted to facilitate family ends.”6

In her book Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy wrote a comprehensive ode to American architecture, specifically pre-industrial anonymous architecture whose buildings “tell not the official but the private history of a culture” and whose designs are “serviceable and timelessly beautiful.”7 In other words, they fulfil both of the key elements of architecture – form and function.

Fowler’s interest in efficiency can be seen as an interest in the function of the house. He chose the octagon shape because it is second only to the circle in its ratio of perimeter to volume. As Fowler says, it “incloses the most space”8 and uses less material to build than a rectangular or square building. He was also interested in the function of space as being conducive to the lives being lived inside. He designed a symmetrical floor plan that devotes equal space to each room, and each is devoted to its own activity – the kitchen, the dining room, the sewing room, the bedrooms. This makes the house’s inhabitants feel comfort and the “perfect satisfaction of the home element,” and it provides every family member with an “‘own room’ feeling.”9 He exhibited a kind of egalitarianism (the subtitle of the book is A Home for All) and showed how the house could lead to harmony of thought and of labour. He did not seem to focus much on the formal aspects of the house, except in the possible ornamentation he suggested – cupolas, wraparound porches.

Moholy-Nagy also speaks of a particular concept in American architecture called brauch. She describes it as how individual architects or builders “respond to the challenges of a new environment with […] tradition and intuitive talent,” a kind of intentional melding of the new and the old, “modifying that which is inherited and transforming that which is given.”10 There is a kind of echo here of Bachelard’s poetic images which we “remake in our own turn.” Surely Fowler, though by no means anonymous in his promotion of the design, could be said to have created the octagonal design in this spirit: “Why continue to build in the same square form of all past ages? Is no radical improvement of both the external form and internal arrangement…possible?”11 This uniquely American style of architecture has multiple influences as well as a new aspect. In Europe there were existing precedents of using the octagon shape for fortresses and watchtowers.12 Fowler’s creative act was in applying the octagonal design to a house.

~

Was Fowler a functionalist with no real regard for form? Even his work as a phrenologist seems to imply a belief that form is only in service of function. And yet, as I study the octagon form, as I revisit the image, I begin to wonder. Moholy-Nagy calls architects “the artificers of forms” – akin to the poet. Fowler wrote an entire book on the octagon design, mostly made up of practical building instructions. As Bachelard explains, there is “an essential difference between an absolute image that is self-accomplishing, and a post-ideated image that is content to summarize existing thoughts.”13 And yet there are moments in the book when Fowler’s sudden philosophical musings seem to reach beyond the values of progress towards beauty. He asks, for instance, “Nature’s forms are mostly spherical […] why not apply her forms to houses?”14 Was there some initial moment of his being struck by an image of the octagon itself? Perhaps in tracing the literal origins of the octagon design, I risk letting the “being of the image lose its original light.”15 Perhaps I must approach the octagon house not only as architect or historian, but as poet.

The octagon house on the inside: I am in the living room with the open floor plan and the walls each have a window. The walls are as much window as solid wall, as much a view of the exterior as the interior of the house. The space is infused with light and a feeling of spaciousness pervades. My body feels as wide as the walls or the walls are the width of my body. My gaze extends to the expanse of fields to horizon’s edge and I am there somehow as well as here, breathing in the cool shadows of the wood.16 This is surely the vastness – which “opens up unlimited space” – that Bachelard spoke of in his discussion of the qualities of space, his “intimate immensity.”17

My experience of being inside the octagon house makes me wonder if Fowler ever imagined being inside before he designed and built it. Did he in a daydream conjure an image of an ancient tower of stone, protected solidly from the outside world (as in the outside of the octagon house)? Or did he imagine himself inside a bird’s nest, a round and enveloping shape that was spacious and airy (the octagon house inside)?

It is as if he began with the reverie of a bird’s nest and rationalised this reverie in retrospect. What evokes the shelter of a round structure (as Bachelard characterises in his final chapter, the “image of being”) but can be practically built (using two-by-fours, accommodating traditional furniture) with the addition of corners?18 An octagon.

The Dream House

Fowler created a new design, and yet sought to have it replicated as a prototype. The first octagon houses were built in New York, and there are few octagon houses west of the Mississippi. My Challoner ancestors who came from Yorkshire, England may have seen one of these octagon houses when they arrived in New York, where they stayed for several years. What qualities of the octagon might have been transferred when they replicated the form?

The fact that they chose the octagon design, with its unique foundation and unlikely shape, makes me think that my relatives were both skilled and inventive carpenters. They most likely chose the design because of its efficiency.

Many octagon houses that were built were elaborate, three stories or more, with wraparound verandas, buttresses, even in one case a domed roof. They belonged to middle- or upper-class families eager to follow the latest modern trends. And yet the octagon makes for a good farmhouse. Its many windows allow whoever is inside continuous observation of the fields, workers, children, and animals outside. Its fieldstone foundation makes for a practical solution to the fact that farmers must remove stones from their fields before they can plough them. My grandmother’s octagon house, two-stories high without a wraparound porch, in contrast to most of the others, evokes simplicity.

~

When one lives in a house, one cannot long for it. When one is inside of the poem, one cannot long for it. As Bachelard highlights, the newness of the image of the childhood house is in part created by the yearning for it: “It is not until late in life that we really revere an image, when we discover that its roots plunge well beyond the history that is fixed in our memories.”19 Bachelard gives the example of a man who lived in a cottage and longed to build a manor. Once he had built the manor, however, he longed again for the cottage.20 In this example and in his discussion of the difference between the image of the childhood house and the house our adult self dreams of building, Bachelard helps me accept that my grandmother can only psychically inhabit the octagon house now: “Maybe it is a good thing for us to keep a few dreams of a house that we shall live in later, always later, so much later, in fact that we shall not have time to achieve it […] It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.”21

As she approaches ninety, it makes sense that my grandmother’s yearning for her childhood home has increased over time. Perhaps she thought of it more when she retired from being a cook and had more time to daydream. Or perhaps when my grandfather passed away and she moved to an assisted living place, and her ties to familiar spaces were cut. And certainly her current dementia has sharpened the image of the octagon house in her mind. It seems as if the details of the present and near past are often lost in an undifferentiated mass of ocean in her mind, and her childhood memories are an island in the centre where she can sometimes rest.

It seems that her years inhabiting the house (with the boundless tenor particular to the dreams of children), combined with the intensity of her yearning, make the poetic image particularly vivid for her. Each time I talk to her, she communicates a different shade or fragment of the image to me and reads another line of the poem. Sometimes I fill out the image a bit more by asking her a question or by remembering her words later and conjuring my own images – in these moments we co-create the image.

But there is one day in particular I remember when it was as if she read to me whole stanzas at once. I am living in Colorado and I am snowed in. The juniper bush out my window is covered in large drifts of snow and the snow on the pine tree branches bends them down low to the ground. The weather keeps me inside, and I decide to call my grandmother as I curl up under several blankets on my bed. She answers. I ask how she is, and she responds that she has been thinking about her father.

This is unusual – we usually begin by talking about how she slept and what she had for lunch and eventually begin discussing the past. She has delved right in. I ask her what he was like. She answers that he had a strong booming voice when he called the cows in, and she continues talking, unlike our usual pattern of me asking questions and her giving short, reluctant answers. Now her words follow in a continuous thread of thought. She seems determined – she has something she needs to say. I hold my breath, suspended in the moment with my unasked questions caught in my throat. I am listening with my whole body and we are reinhabiting the octagon house together in real time. She tells me memories of her mother and father, of her childhood living in the octagon house. She gives me a view of the image from the inside – what it felt like to dream in and inhabit the space.

I became convinced after this that for me it is not Fowler or my Challoner ancestors that are the origins of the image of the octagon house. Instead my grandmother is the poet.

Interior Thinking

For my grandma to convey how it felt to live in the octagon house – memories that convey a certain feeling or quality – is to get closer to the reality of an internal landscape. How a space felt from the inside moves towards what Bachelard implies is interior rather than exterior thinking.22

My grandmother tells me that the far bedroom upstairs was hers and her sister Elaine’s. Elaine was one year younger and, being the youngest children of four, the two were like twins. The room’s window faced south, with a view of the road and a neighbouring farm. In a photograph, they stand next to each other; both wear overalls and each holds a rope tethering a Guernsey calf no taller than they. Though Elaine smirks and Mary glares at the camera, they lean towards each other slightly as if in confidence.

Their room was oddly shaped, with five walls. Their sister Ruth described it as “a room with the corner cut off.” The short wall, the cut off part, pressed inward with the quality of a hermit crab withdrawing into its shell. For them it was a space of intimacy and secrets. It was the two of them behind a closed door, each always leaning towards the other to whisper in her ear.

It was here that one day they had a shared dream: an image of a coffee table in a refined parlor with lace curtains, a full silver tea set, an elegant woman who sat and provided tea to her guests. Inspired by the fullness of the image, taken hold of immediately, they rush to the barn, grab their father’s hand saw from its high hook, and together chop the legs of the kitchen table in half – to create the coffee table.

Sometimes when the family (Father, Mother, Ruth, Robert, Elaine, and Mary, my grandmother) sits around the table to eat a meal, her father recites a poem instead of saying grace. They sit in the dining room on the eastern side; the window looks out on the fields and the woods beyond. It is sunny and open, next to the entryway and living room with its many windows. Today in his strong tenor he recites William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis,” and perhaps they all are dreaming variations on the same dream for several minutes. The way the bright sunlight strikes the table just so, illuminating hundreds of pieces of dust, conjures both “the wings of morning” and the decay of the dust. As the wind blows against the window, death becomes a force out there mixed with the wind and the animals that are buried under the shade of the trees. And yet they are inside – together. A feeling of shelter.

The barn is warm and quiet. With its small windows it becomes a blanket pulled overhead with a loose weave – dark with pinpricks of light. It is like a hut, and the cows’ warmth is the fire that warms it. Her father hand-milks and my grandma runs the milk machines. He cleans the cows’ udders with a warm cloth, and she brushes their sides, cooing at them. Then she attaches the machine which adheres to the cow’s udder through light suction. As she monitors its pumping for several minutes, she can become idle and snatch a few moments of daydreaming. It begins with what she can see – the biggest calf in the pen near the door, a Guernsey. She imagines that in full daylight its brown coat is sleek and unblemished by mud or insects. She leads it into a full arena, wearing a yellow pinafore dress and buttoned shoes. All the judges see the calf just as she does – its shiny coat, the clean line of its shoulders extending into its backbone, its neat brushed-out tail – and she is presented with a blue ribbon tied around the winning calf’s neck. The click of the milking machine brings her back to the barn. Feelings of grandeur, pride, intimate immensity.

It is hard to say exactly how, but space confers certain qualities on experience.

The Dialectics of Inside and Outside

Outside, the octagon house evokes protection, solidness, watchfulness. Inside, it evokes openness, spaciousness, extension. How can it be all of these at once? How can these seeming contradictions be overcome?

Bachelard devotes a whole chapter to the dialectics of inside and outside. He implies that these opposites can at times both be present, can form a kind of unity: “Inside and outside are not abandoned to their geometrical opposition. From what overflow of a ramified interior does the substance of being run, does the outside call?”23

It is a house that evokes the outside inside. The delineation Bachelard says the house makes between “the I” and “the non-I” is softened here. Bachelard’s other terms for “outside” and “inside” are more accurate here – “here” and “there” or even “this side” and “beyond.”24 The octagon house creates this effect in part by the many windows and multiple views they allow in one glance:

Barn looming

silent as a shadow

Gravel road

tapers out of sight

wistfully

Sapphire thread of river

fluid edge

of the known world

The multiplicity of views, like the refraction of a gem when the light hits it just so, a crystal’s infinite cleaving. The many views make the world feel larger than it is.

In this way the octagon house is a house that evokes a field. The field is an entity of openness. Even when it is fenced in, its commitment to growing overtakes the fence and goes beyond this attempt at limit and boundary. A field also evokes the farm that is a key part of the octagon house in its full form.

A house that evokes a field steps closer to the world. Rather than totally protecting the dreamer from the outside world, the house that evokes a field forms a tether with the world, so that one “lives a daydream that is awake, but above all [the] daydream remains in the world, facing worldly things.”25 It allows the “I” to remain connected to the “non-I” and thus more closely state its kinship with it.

~

For all its airy spaciousness, my grandmother’s octagon house with its open floor plan is rare. There is, however, in designs with a closed floor plan still a distinct sense of centrality, as in the structure of the nest. The centre of the house may have a staircase or rooms on the perimeter that open into the same central space. Unlike a rectangular house, there is a gathering together of rooms at the centre, or a raying out of rooms from the centre. There is an axis here, a centredness and rootedness, an invisible pole: “Tree always in the center […] feasting upon/Heaven’s great dome.”26

I sit in the corner of a rectangular room as I write this now. As a child, one of my favourite places in my own childhood home was perched on the counter in the corner of the kitchen. Here I could feel connected to the centre of the house and all its activities, but still separated from them and free to observe and daydream. I felt myself become a part of the cabinets. The corners of the octagon house, however, are of a wider angle. They do not evoke the same feeling of protection Bachelard speaks of: “An imaginary room rises up around our bodies, which think that they are well-hidden.”27 Instead it is as though the door to this room is ajar.

Perhaps, because of its lack of traditional corners, the octagon house is less conducive to dreaming and more conducive to observation and physical labour. Though daydreaming begins with observation, and labour can be conducive to daydreaming. I experienced this when I lived on a farm for several years, picking the beans or milking the cows. The repetition of a movement can tether a person to their body and also give the mind space to dream. Varied observations and freedom of movement would seem to be necessary conditions for daydreaming.

Since I have established that the views from an octagon house are varied (especially with an open floor plan), perhaps I can now ask, What movements would the octagon house allow for and nurture? Given that in the nineteenth century the house was primarily the domain of women, the octagon would need to accommodate all the varied movements of women. Cooking food, tending to children, mending clothes.

In the closed floor plan, a woman might move from room to room, from task to task, in a kind of looping motion, always returning to the centre room. Fowler mentions women specifically several times in his book: “To large houses women object that it takes such a world of toil to keep well […] [Yet] compactness of rooms […] facilitates the grouping of rooms around or contiguous to one another, thereby rendering the passage from room to room both short and easy.”28

Bachelard mentions women as well: “The minute we apply a glimmer of consciousness to a mechanical gesture…when a poet rubs a piece of furniture […] he increases the object’s human dignity […] From one object in a room to another, housewifely care weaves the ties that unite […] awakens furniture that was asleep.”29 Bachelard even implies that the interior thinking he values is associated with women and that their imaginings have uniquely creative potential: “In the intimate harmony of walls and furniture, it may be said that we become conscious of a house that is built by women, since men only know how to build a house from the outside.”30

In this regard, there is one aspect of the design of my grandmother’s octagon house that seems to fail to reach its ideal. Fowler’s design is egalitarian in its symmetrical floor plan. But my grandmother’s house is asymmetrical–a large rectangular addition extends from the eastern side. It contains the kitchen–arguably the most important room for woman’s labour in this domestic space. The room where my great grandmother, the farm wife, spent a majority of her days.

The kitchen has only two windows on the south side and on the northern side is a screened in porch where the roof hangs low. I remember a cabinet structure that before renovation supported the stove and the kitchen sink was at a diagonal, making the dimly lit space seem even smaller. Like a hallway, I think. Not like a room at all. With its lack of light, it evokes a cellar. It does not have, however, the warm, sheltered feeling of the barn, with its living inhabitants and the movement of milk. Bachelard, inspired by Jung, speaks of the cellar as an encounter with the unconscious, and of shadow.31 It seems that not all of a woman’s labour is given equal consideration in this design.

Even in spite of its failures, its contradictions, the octagon house is an image and a space full of possibility. It is a multiplicity of forms, hard to pin down exactly. I begin to ask myself: what kind of house would a farm wife have designed for herself?

Women and the Labour of Mind and Body

My grandmother has deeply inhabited the octagon because she has dreamt here and laboured here. The repetition of her movements form a continuum. “Life originates forms,” as labour and movement originate life.32 Perhaps to dream in a space is to inhabit the space, but to dwell in the space is to also fill it with care, attention, and physical movement. “Dwell” is a word that itself extended its stay and evolved in meaning from “to delay” to “to linger” and finally “to make a home.”33

In one of his chapters, Bachelard writes of shells as one of his examples of a primitive image of inhabiting: “the mystery of form-giving life, the mystery of slow, continuous formation.”34

Rachel Cusk, in writing about artist Louise Bourgeois’ fibre self-portraits, reflects on the relationship between women, specifically mothers, and cloth: “Cloth expresses a new legitimacy, soft and unprestigious, meditating between body and world, a record of female process.”35

I learn from my second cousin that at one time the stairway was a tight spiral. An image emerges in my mind of a woman knitting cloth in the centre of the living room. As stitches accrue, the cloth spirals out and around her, becoming indistinguishable from her body, like the shell before it solidifies.

“In the organic, the evolutionary, lies the source of woman’s authority. Woman has special knowledge of process as the unifying characteristic of that which can be made,” Cusk writes.36 The body here holds knowledge. Just as the bird does in making its nest. Bachelard quotes Michelet in his description: “The instrument that prescribes a circular form for the nest is nothing else but the body of the bird […] by constantly turning round and round and pressing back the walls.”37

As the moon moves water away and towards, as spirals unwind, as horizontal lines embrace the ground, as women press back the walls of the house with the quality of their attention, the octagon evokes an organic, earthly movement.

Bachelard’s original image of the house emphasises verticality with its numerous nooks and corners: “A house is imagined as a vertical being. It rises upward” and “illustrates the verticality of the human being.”38 Here a masculine space is evoked. The octagon house with its horizontal orientation, its proximity to the circle, and its openness evokes a more feminine space. Perhaps the octagon house requires its own phenomenology.

~

The poetic image is forged from dwelling. The reader meets the poet in the doorway and is at once inside and outside, overcoming for the moment the separation caused by yearning. The tower, the nest, the barn, the octagon, the field. This multiplicity of poetic images form a unity, a long-form poem.

Each time she remembers or speaks to me about the house, my grandmother reinhabits and thus re-creates the house. She goes beyond remembering. By transmitting this image to me, she has projected into the future – the eternal image – and teaches me both how to inherit and how to create. How to dwell and how to dream.

1 Merriam-Webster Dictionary, accessed August 30, 2023, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stanza

2 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (New York: Penguin Press, 2014), 1.

3 Bachelard, 29.

4 Bachelard, 28.

5 Richard Kearney, introduction to Bachelard, xix.

6 Orson Fowler, The Octagon House: A Home for All (New York: A.R. Shephard & Co., 2015), 11–14.

7 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture in North America (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 11–12.

8 Fowler, 56.

9 Fowler, 63.

10 Moholy-Nagy, 21–23.

11 Fowler, 4.

12 Moholy-Nagy, 130–132.

13 Bachelard, 172.

14 Fowler, 82.

15 Bachelard, 248.

16 Bachelard, 214.

17 Bachelard, 214.

18 Bachelard, 252.

19 Bachelard, 53.

20 Bachelard, 84.

21 Bachelard, 81–82.

22 Bachelard, 248.

23 Bachelard, 245.

24 Bachelard, 228.

25 Bachelard, 105.

26 Rilke, Ranier Marie, in Bachelard, 254.

27 Bachelard, 156.

28 Fowler, 65–67.

29 Bachelard, 88.

30 Bachelard, 88.

31 Bachelard, 40.

32 Bachelard, 133.

33 Etmyonline, accessed March 22, 2023, https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=dwell&utm_campaign=sd&utm_medium=serp&utm_source=ds_search

34 Bachelard, 126.

35 Rachel Cusk, Coventry (New York: Picador, 2019), 141.

36 Cusk, 142.

37 Jules Michelet, L’oiseau, in Bachelard, 121.

38 Bachelard, 39.