The importance of roots according to Gaston Bachelard

 

Roots along the Suncook River
CC Jean Stimmell

… A root is always a discovery. We dream it more than we see it. It surprises us when we discover it:..

The root is the mysterious tree, it is the subterranean, inverted tree. For the root, the darkest earth – like the pond, but without the pond – is also a mirror, a strange opaque mirror that doubles every aerial reality with a subterranean image. By this reverie, the philosopher writing these pages tells clearly in what a superabundance of dark metaphors he may be involved while dreaming of roots...

 For me, the tree is an integrating object. It is normally a work of art. Thus, when I managed to confer upon the tree’s aerial psychology the complementary concern with roots, a new life suffused the dreamer in me...

To live like a tree! What growth! What depth! What uprightness! What truth! Immediately, within us, we feel the roots working, we feel that the past is not dead, that we have something to do today in our dark, subterranean, solitary, aerial life. The tree is everywhere at once. The old root – in the imagination there are no young roots – will produce a new flower. 

The imagination is a tree. It has the integrative virtues of a tree. It is root and boughs. It lives between earth and sky. It lives in the earth and in the wind. The imagined tree becomes imperceptibly the cosmological tree, the tree that epitomizes a universe, that makes a universe … [14]

Bachelard, Gaston. On Poetic Imagination and Reverie . Spring Publications, Inc.. Kindle Edition. location 2572