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The "Poetic" and the Multimodal Brain by Maryke Cramerus
The Brain is Multimodal, not Lexical
A previous essay, Language Dethroned, challenged the notion that contemporary poetry is obliged to foreground language and its problems. Postmodernism's assumption that cognition is completely dominated and organized by language has been decisively disconfirmed by decades of modern research. In fact, thinking and awareness are deeply intertwined with wordless and largely unconscious sensory and motor processing.
The brain contains a vast array of very divergent specialized processors, such as the five traditional senses, spatial orientation, emotional responses, awareness of social signals, musical recognition, abstract reasoning, etc. This poses the problem of integrating massive amounts of varying types of information, ranging from concrete sensory impressions to hazy memories to highly abstract forms of reasoning.
For our present purposes the crucial means of integration is consciousness. Conscious awareness provides a point of common access for all these different kinds of input— a "common workspace" function where information from the senses, memory, belief systems, reasoning and other forms of cognitive processing can be "published" and combined with one another despite their different formats. The brain is analogous to "a massive parallel distributed system of highly specialized processors," (Baars, 2003) with consciousness serving to distribute information to the system as a whole. .
T. S. Eliot and the Dissociation of Experience
The modern view of the brain and of awareness fits very well with T. S. Eliot's important idea that the task of poetry is to transcend the dissociation of human experience.
Eliot believed that humans are plagued by experiencing life in a disconnected and chaotic way. For him, it was the task of poetry to heal this breach by integrating and "unifying" experience. He believed that a successful poem presents the disparate aspects of our experience in a profoundly interconnected or "unified" way:
"Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think: but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modifed his sensibility. When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love or reads Spinoza, and these experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes."
-- "The Metaphysical Poets," (Eliot, 1921)
T. S. Eliot blamed the emphasis on rational thought in the later part of the seventeenth century for this "dissociation of sensibility." He believed that Descartes and the great scientific thinkers of that era gave rise to a split between thought and feeling that most subsequent poets were unable to bridge. (He felt that Keats and Shelley were at times able to achieve the desired "unification of sensibility" but that the Victorian poets such as Tennyson and Browning failed.)
I place the blame for the dissociation of our experience elsewhere. I believe that it is the highly disparate nature of the brain's myriad different types of input and its radically different modes of processing that bear the blame for the disconnectedness and fragmentation of our experience. How could the compartmentalized and heterogeneous nature of our brain's capacities and of its multiple and disparate modes of awareness not give rise to a dissociated, divided, and fragmented experience? Odor is encoded so differently from sounds and both these senses are processed by the brain in modes even more divergent from those of vision. (Vision has the task of tracking motion and position in space—smell and taste do not.) Our longings and emotions are registered in modes quite unlike those of sensory impressions. The brain encodes mathematical reasoning in a very different way than it does hopes, ethical ideals, and future plans, and it processes all of these in ways utterly unlike its handling of concrete perceptions of colors and odors.
Biology designed our experience and awareness to be "dissociated" and fragmented because the relative autonomy and disparate formats of all of these information processors provide much greater flexibility, survival value, breadth and range than would a "unified" processor which had only a few types of similar modes of input processed in lock step with one another.
However valuable our dissociated consciousness is in all of its flexibility and richness, we do at times experience moments of synthesis between thought, feeling, sensory awareness, and movement patterns such as speed and tempo. When such moments occur, we find them intensely satisfying and pleasurable. These experiences are at once enlivening, even exhilarating, and yet calming and restful. The mind is given the pleasure of moving in harmony, with each faculty in tune with the others, each one strengthening and deepening what the others convey. Such sensory-emotional-motor-enacted-thoughts etch themselves deeply into the mind and leave powerful and lasting impressions: the "dent in the mind" that G. M. Hopkins sought in his poetry.
If we ask ourselves what literary genre lends itself most to this kind of integration of our experience, poetry has the enormous advantage provided by its traditional emphasis on sound and also motoric patterns such as cadence and meter. Until quite recently, poetry elevated the use of sound (sibilance, clusters of harsh consonants, assonance, rhyme, etc.) to a position of importance almost rivaling that of the choice and arrangement of words. The use of sonic and motoric elements (such as rhythm, staccato, crescendo and diminuendo, acceleration and deceleration, force, brusqueness, etc.) extends the reach of poetry deep into nonlexically encoded areas of awareness in more primordial strata of the brain, areas profoundly linked with emotion, mood, arousal, and motivation. When poetry encodes experience in multiple ways that involve parts of the brain beyond the cortex, including the limbic system, the effect is far more powerful than what can be achieved by words alone.
A line or group of lines in a poem can convey elements of experience beyond the reach of all three--language, sound, and movement patterns--if it also appeals to the additional layer of meanings encoded in narrative. The brain uses narrative as a powerful way to interpret experience, arouse emotion, fire up motivation, and relate to others (Steen, 2005). We will look at the use of narrative elements in a poem in the next section.
Analysis of a Multimodal Poem
Here it may be useful to look at a few lines of poetry which combine sonic, motoric, and narrative elements--and a bit of lexical wordplay of a type the Postmodernists favor thrown in.
my mirror is hissing lies
the sibilance soothes me into
dreams where love is a contagion
all the pleading sappy songs are about me
-- Hologram Hell, Misti Rainwater-Lites
The sound effects employed here are long-established,, well-known to most poets, and highly expressive. There is prominent use of sibilance in the seven "s" sounds in the words is, hissing, lies, sibilance, soothes within the first two lines above. In addition, there is the assonance of the two short "i"s of the first line and three more in the second, which contrast nicely with the elongated "oo" sound of soothes. The hissing sounds are rather alarming, perhaps even menacing, but they are played off against the slower and soothing sounds of the elongated vowels in soothes, dreams, love. Thus the portrayal of the mirror as alluring, fascinating, and hypnotic, but at the same time dangerous and inimical, is enacted by the sounds as well as suggested by the words.
As for the lexical, there is a nice Postmodern-style three-way pun in the word "sibilance" which contains within it the word "sibil" or sibyl--a prophetess whose predictions are mysterious and unclear. In addition, sibilance is derived from the Latin sibilare, to hiss, so the word has three meanings in the poem: the hissing named in the previous line of the poem, the confusing prophetess which the mirror represents, and the group of sounds identified in the dictionary definition of sibilance, represented by the seven sibilants in this and the previous line. All very self-referential, but not arbitrarily so, as all three of these meanings are important to the narratives and meanings of these lines. The sonic, motoric, and narrative elements are not the enemy of the lexical, but its partners and helpmates.
The poem uses motoric patterns as well. The first line and the first half of the second line move rapidly due to the short vowels and the repetition of identical sounds in the five short "i"s, until the movement is suddenly slowed by the extended vowels of "soothes," "me," "dreams" and "love" to create a languorous and hypnotic effect. The fourth "sappy songs" line has a jaunty exageratedly sing-song rhythm reminiscent of sentimental pop tunes, and approaches trochaic, a meter which generates energy and forward impulsion. Pace, shifts in pace, and rhythm join with sound and words to strengthen the portrayal of excitement, menace, hypnotic seduction, and intense longing.
The narrative element of the mirror hissing lies evokes the backstory of Snow White--the murderous Queen's mirror and its lethal messages. But Rainwater has made an important change in the traditional narratives of coldly critical and truthful mirrors that pitilessly reflect harsh realities (as in Sylvia Plath's poem, Mirror): her mirror is not prophetic. The mirror lies--its sibilance casts a hypnotic spell in order to implant delusional and dangerous dreams.
This is potent use of traditional narrative, exploiting the many layers of resonance of the magical mirror, but twisting the fairy tale in a productive new direction. The mirror appears magical and powerful, but it is actually the reflection of the speaker's psyche at its most vulnerable. It is the voice of excited longings, loneliness, childlike sentimentality, and delusional wishes.
The line with "love as a contagion" introduces a new narrative element: love as a source of danger. Love as a "contagion" evokes the long poetic tradition of love as a sickness and a potentially fatal one. The next line, "All the pleading sappy songs are about me" highlights the renewed perception of the self as deluded and incapable of looking past the hissed lies and the songs' unrealistic promises about love and about the self's centrality and attraction for others.
Hopefully, these brief comments are sufficient to demonstrate the value and importance of nonlexical elements to this poem. (Additional comments could be made about its use--and evasions--of syntax.) It is not possible to do this kind of analysis with poems which restrict themselves to the lexical. In these, sonic and rhythmic patterning are fastidiously avoided or used exceedingly sparingly, and narrative elements are rigorously excluded--restrictions based on very problematic assumptions about the centrality of language to cognition, assumptions which fly in the face of recent research. Close readings of such poems must rely on nuances and complexities of the meanings of words and word fragments, the effects of their juxtapositions, and the echoes and contrasts of lexical meanings and spellings/misspellings patterned throughout the poem.
Hologram Hell achieves powerful and persuasive effects by means of deeply rooted sonic, motoric, and narrative, as well as lexical elements used in adventurous and skillful ways. I would argue that this short poem (90 words) knits together rhythm, pace, a wide variety of sound effects, visual images, kinetic enactments, evocation of longings and fears, storyline and suspense, psychological portraiture, resemblances and echoes, contrasts and reversals, magical and religious ideation from widely diverging historic traditions (talking mirror, cherubim, Goddess, Eden), and literary resonances including Perrault, Plath, and Baudelaire--in 22 short lines.
It is my hope that poets will not narrow their attention to the thoughts and emotions they wish to convey and the words they choose to express them. I believe that limiting oneself to words, their shifting meanings and their artful juxtaposition creates the poems of "dissociated sensibility" and "failure of conjunction" that Eliot lamented, poems in which "the ideas are yoked but not united" (Eliot, 1921).
For me, it is not enough for the poem to posit a talking mirror, to explain its actions, or to describe it visually. The poem will be weak and ineffective if it simply presents its elements side by side or informs the reader that they are related. The experiences of the poet should be made part of a new whole which interweaves the disparate elements of that experience (sensory, ideational, historic, narrative, psychological, literary) until these can be felt "as immediately as the odour of a rose."
There are those who believe that reviving the traditional rhymes and meters and stanzaic forms will provide the crucial means for bringing order, integration, and interconnectedness to a poetic realm currently awash in dissociation and fragmentation. I do not deny the potential value of these as powerful agents of synthesis in the right hands, but I think that the problem is much broader, as Eliot suggested.
I believe that a revival of interest in incorporating sound, movement patterns (including but not limited to cadence and meter), and narrative elements would make for stronger poems capable of presenting multifaceted and deeply felt themes with vividness and power.
The following list of devices, taken from the previous essay, Language Dethroned, is meant to be illustrative, not exclusive and certainly not mandatory:
-- sonic effects (such as sibilance, assonance, rhyme, the clustering of harsh-sounding consonants, the "colors" of vowels, alliteration, onomatopoeia)
-- poem elements that echo motoric organization (rhythm, staccato, crescendo and diminuendo, acceleration and deceleration, force, brusqueness, languor, exaggerated prolongation or clipping short of sounds)
-- narrative elements such as contrasts, reversals, repetition, parallels, foreshadowing, suspense, and various devices used to provide the "sense of an ending," including but not limited to elements used for "resolution" and "closure."
Such poems could engage our multimodal human brain across a wide range of its capacities in an "unified" way, including
"the direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling" (Eliot, 1921)
thereby granting us a profoundly enlivening and pleasurable experience of meaning, purpose, and engagement that we can call "poetic" in the fullest sense.
References
Bernard J. Baars, "The global brainweb: An update on global workspace theory." Guest editorial, Science and Consciousness Review, October 2003
http://cogweb.ucla.edu/CogSci/Baars-update_03.html
Eliot, T. S. "The Metaphysical Poets" (1921) in Selected Essays, Faber and Faber, London
Steen, Francis F. "The paradox of narrative thinking"
Draft of an article to appear in the February 2005 issue of Journal of Cultural and Evolutionary Psychology.
http://cogweb.ucla.edu/crp/Papers/Steen_Paradox.html
http://cogweb.ucla.edu/crp/Papers/Steen_Paradox.html
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