Campbell Corner Language Exchange
Speech After
Long Silence : Of Poetry and Consciousness
by Noga
Arikha
- Delivered at the 2005
Campbell Corner Poetry Prize Reading
When Phillis Levin and Elfie Raymond asked me
to introduce this poetry reading, I hesitated:
what do I, a historian of ideas about mind and
body and consciousness, who deals with concepts
and their history, have to say about poetry? Why
in the world should I introduce the winner of
the Campbell Corner Poetry Contest, and the runners-up?
But then I accepted. After all, the necessity
of poetry was infused into my childhood, into
my consciousness - my mother is a poet. I wrote
poetry as a 20-year old, as most 20-year olds
do. Occasionally, in an intense moment, I will
still feel that the only thing left me to do is
to write poetically. The outcome is irrelevant;
the act is all, and it feels like a supreme act.
Supreme in that moment. Deep down I still believe
that if one is to have "Speech after long silence",
as Yeats has it in the incipit to one of his short
poems, then it better be poetic speech. Somehow
it is the most intelligent speech.
Those who live and think in prose as myself can
forget that language can perform miracles. Scholars
are often tin-eared. Students of the mind easily
forget their own minds; that is what is needed
for science to function. One has long classified
emotions and moods - the history of such efforts
fascinates me. Today one actually researches the
neurological and physiological correlates of emotions.
We now study emotions, even the response to music
and to painting. There is research into such phenomena
as the need for familiarity, for example, that
refers to evolved brain functions and genetically
determined habits; on the nature of disgust, or
of fear; on the origins of a sweet tooth. All
this is interesting, and important. We are physical,
evolved creatures; and to understand our own nature,
we must go to nature. We must analyse the stuff
that we are made of. But there is more stuff to
ourselves than the stuff we see and know, and
I have been struggling with this powerful awareness,
perhaps infused with the sense of art I grew up
with. I cannot help but focus on how scientific
curiosity can trump self-knowledge - by neglecting
the very stuff of which thoughts themselves are
made: language.
The point is this: poetry is where we come from
- verbally. It is the only form of linguistic
intimacy. It is the outcome of listening to what
lies within language, in spite of how we must
use language every day. The four-year old son
of a philosopher friend of mine declared to his
mother recently that there are two kinds of thought:
thoughts in the mouth and thoughts in the head.
Thoughts in the mouth are written, he said, and
thoughts in the head are dreams.
It might be that poems are the thoughts in the
head that are written - that would explain why
poets are commonly perceived as special knowers,
endowed with a special insight into consciousness
that others have lost, left behind in their childhood,
in their pre-linguistic life perhaps. Cognitive
psychologists, philosophers and scientists who
research the human mind do so by using language
descriptively - they write prose, thoughts
in the mouth to account for the origins of writing
and thinking, to depict the thoughts in the head.
Poets on the other hand use language performatively;
the poem is something like verbally embodied consciousness.
Poetic language at best is transparent; at the
place that Wittgenstein famously identified as
inaccessible to meaningful language, and that
seventeenth-century natural philosophers had believed
was the realm of post-lapsarian man. Pre-Adamic
language is in the head - or so it would seem,
if one is to believe the four-year old boy.
Certainly the poem follows the rhythms of the
mind; in that sense a cognitive psychologist could
very well analyse it in order to understand the
mind better. But that is precisely what cannot
be done. The poet is able to gather into one place
the intensity of insights; of course the technical
ability is needed to do so, just as technical
ability is empty without insight. But what sort
of insight is the poetic insight?
What is it about the elaborate transformation
of language into performance, the emphasis of
the musicality of linguistic sound, that so transcends
prosaic descriptive, language? Why is it that
the poetic experience matters? Is poetic insight
equivalent, or inferior, or superior to philosophical
insight? Is that even a valid question?
Not a few researchers of the human mind, myself
included, have referred to that extraordinary
poem by Emily Dickinson beginning The Brain
is Wider than the Sky (ca. 1862) for its insightfulness.
The neuroscientist Gerald Edelman recently entitled
his popular book on consciousness "Wider than
the sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness".
He writes there that the poem impressed him because,
"in extolling the width and depth of the mind,
Dickinson referred exclusively to the brain".
But there is more to it, surely. Indeed she referred
to the brain - and indeed in 1862 that might have
been a novelty, though actually not as much so
as Edelman supposes. I think what is impressive
here is the poem itself. The use of a poetic line
as epigraph confers on it authority - qua poem.
It acquires declarative value. Those who refer
to it implicitly treat it as an example of just
how insightful the poet can be about her very
mind, of just how transparent to ourselves we
can be, if only we let ourselves unmask language,
as Nietzsche would have put it - Nietzsche that
most poetic of thinkers, the philosopher (of sorts)
who most aspired to the condition of art. Many
of you probably know the poem in question - but
it doesn't hurt to tell it again:
The Brain - is wider than the Sky -
For - put them side by side -
The one the other will contain
With ease - and You - beside
The Brain is deeper than the sea -
For - hold them - Blue to Blue -
The one the other will absorb -
As Sponges - Buckets - do -
The Brain is just the weight of God -
For - Heft them - Pound for Pound -
And they will differ - if they do -
As Syllable from Sound -
Could this have been said in prose? No, of course
not. "Blue to blue" - that is not prose; it responds
here to the sea, that which is absorbed by the
brain, "as sponges - buckets - do" - and here
there is a description of a function, evocative
enough for the neuroscientist perhaps to be impressed
by the accuracy of this functional analogy. But
analyse enough and you will have concepts, the
sad remnants of what once was a poetic whole.
Separate form from content and all that is left
are the thoughts in the mouth, mournfully torn
away from the thoughts in the head.
We know this is true; yet, the philosopher -
the aesthetician in this case - might ask, how
is it so? Why do semantic, verbal echoes produce
emotion? A good poem is good because it suggests
more than it declares. Semantic echoes echoed
within rhymes somehow say more than straight lines
(rhyming here unintentional) - as they do in music.
In the Renaissance, principles of invention, judgement,
arrangement, order and decorum governed the composition
of poetry, and of prose. We have it from a not
very well known humanist poet called Raffaele
Brandolini, who wrote a treatise On music and
poetry for Pope Leo X in around 1513, that
"the poet's esteem proceeds first from the invention
of his poem, next from its composition, third
from its ornament, fourth from his fluency in
recitation, and finally from his delivery". All
this, a good student of rhetoric would have known,
guaranteed the efficacy of the written word, the
production of commensurate emotion.
This was the Renaissance - when rhetoric was
itself an art. We are removed from that period
now. Philosophers rarely pay attention to style.
Nietzsche fumed against "them" for that reason:
he knew that style is much more than dress. Language
can describe precisely; but philosophical, and
for that matter scientific language is quite different
from literary language. There is scientific work
today that might provide some rudimentary answers
to the question of why echoes produce emotion
- of why what we say in verse may in the end matter
more to our emotional selves than what we say
in prosaic prose, to our intellectual selves.
It is precisely for this reason that artistic
emotion is not graspable by any discourse other
than what produced it. Use prose to translate
Dickinson's poem and you will be as much as a
buffoon as when you use philosophical concepts
to understand a joke. There is something about
the poem that no account of its operations upon
our soul, so to speak - upon our minds, really
- can render.
Cognitive short-cuts are necessary for a sense
of value - and perhaps students of the mind can
make something of that. Description does not really
matter; evocation does, and evocation happens
performatively. Studies on the physiology of emotion
are important; but we must also remember that
the very language in which they are set ensures
the gap between description and evocation. There
is no such gap in a good poem (that is, arguably,
what makes it good in the first place).
And so there is a limit to the extent to which
disciplines - the arts and the sciences - can
meet because they are defined by their respective,
mutually exclusive rhetoric. The gap that remains
explicitly at the center of scientific or philosophical
investigations into the human mind guarantees
the place within which the science can be pursued
and can explain. It also guarantees that art,
always needed, remain the litmus test of consciousness.
We have been testing this tonight - and we'll
continue to do so, with this year's winner, Jennifer
Chang, who knows all about inner echoes, and how
to describe just what it is like to be in this
world, "two parts water, to one part salt", in
her words.
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