Sudden Salience

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In the Poetics of Space Gaston Bachelard says the following:

“The poetic image is a sudden salience of the surface of the psyche”

This is an amazing phrase. When I first read it I think it produced in me the very effect that it describes, an effect produced, curiously, not by a conceptual understanding of what the phrase means but simply by an aural apprehension of it. The wonderfully sibilant alliteration evoked an image of something sizzling, like a brief flash of fire that singes (so many “s” words here!).

I read the phrase two or three more times, slowly. The author says that it is a salience of the surface of the psyche, not on it. The poetic image emerges from the surface of the psyche much like the ephemeral emanation of solar flares from the sun. In this metaphor the sun is, of course, the psyche. The latter has its etymological roots in the notion of breath but I much prefer the potency conjured in the image of a sphere of fire because poetic images are like sparks, as are ideas, when they are first thought of.

And then there is the word “salience”. Wonderful word! Although most would have to look it up in a dictionary to understand what it means, we seem, in this context, to intuitively grasp its meaning. Perhaps the more familiar adjective “salient” leads us to this apprehension. The very oddness and semantic vagueness of “salience” makes it jump out at us as we read, which of course is an enactment of the very thing that it describes. I love words like this.

If any one has a phrase they love for its poetic/linguistic/aural/semantic qualities, please let me know in the comments and I’ll post those and more in later entries.
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