A Victorian hallucinogen!

My current favorite quote, by Adam Gopnik in his book Angels and Ages, about Darwin’s On the Origin of Species:

 

“It’s a Victorian hallucinogen, where the whole world suddenly comes alive and begins moving, so that the likeness between seagulls and sandpipers on the beach where you are reading suddenly becomes spookily animated, part of a single restless whole, with the birds’ giant lizard ancestors looming like ghosts above them.  What looks like the fixed, unchanging solitude of the beach and ocean suddenly becomes alive to, vulnerable to, and endless chain of change and movement.  It’s a book that makes the whole world vibrate.”

Spaced Out

Now and then, someone or some circumstance will call my attention to some artist whose work had not been, prior to that moment, especially important to me.  But for some reason I happen to be newly receptive, and suddenly that artist's work seems really essential as a clue to my own doomed, quixotic project.  

So, currently I'm really interested in the Spanish/Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926).  

I remember seeing pictures of a couple of his buildings in an art history textbook I read many years ago, and I thought then that his work blew the doors off that of the other architects featured.  Unfortunately, that's as far as I got.  I've always tended to skip the architecture section of art history books, because I don't work in that medium; no medium save dance could be further from my two-dimensional writing and drawing activities.

My intention here is not to extol the virtues of Gaudi's work.  Obviously, his buildings are absolutely extraordinary, marvelously dreamlike, almost erotically organic.  And the man himself was also quite fascinating.  But when I get interested in an artist's work, my primary response is to want to steal from it in some way.  This has led me to the consideration of how exactly a poet might steal from an architect.

What would be the literary equivalent of one of Gaudi's buildings?  For that matter, what would be the literary equivalent of any building?  An architect controls the way a person experiences space; walking into a cathedral feels different than walking into a tiny residential space.  What is the literary equivalent of the way a cathedral's interior raises a person's consciousness into its lofty expanse?  What is the literary equivalent of the way a small room almost demands a sort of intimacy and humility?  Do poems contain and complicate psychic space as buildings do physical space?

I don't know the answer to these questions, but they seem very promising as ways to re-conceptualize the way a writer leads a reader through a psychic space.  Modeling poetry after painting is old hat by now, but I don't know of anyone who has tried to translate architectural ideas into poetry.  I think I would like to try to do this.

First, I have to learn some architectural ideas.   Another lacunae in my arts education that demands to be filled.

P.S.  Yes, it has occurred to me to reread Bachelard with these questions in mind, though I'm really more interested in the literary equivalent of space than in actual reference to spacial elements.