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Sunday in SF
My favorite kind of Sunday, I got something done (laundry) then went out for brunch at the Pork Store -- the Vegan Delight was even better than usual, more garlic. Then I strolled down Haight to Amoeba and actually found two of the things I was looking for (a DVD and a CD). Now I'm back downtown at my (most) usual Peet's.A fairly dressed-up man with a camera with a massive lens seems to be soliciting portraits on the sidewalk outside my window. You'd think that would be like carrying coals to Newcastle, but he seems to be doing some trade. It's a great business model, when you think about it. He takes a shot and then, I'm guessing, downloads the file to their phone. Your only cost is your capital investment in the equipment and the battery charge. You don't have to create prints, and the transaction is complete in a minute or two.
My Buffy online community is having a competition called Writing Idol, where people submit bits of competitive fiction. I've never played before, but the board has been too quiet lately so I thought I would participate in the interest of keeping the forum going.
The first theme is "telescoping;" which turns out to have many meanings to play with. I started out by reading what the OED had to say (smart move!) Thinking about what was in the OED I came up with a first paragraph that included a bunch of different meanings and that gave birth to the plot. Fine. But that was all I'd planned so I was delighted when the final paragraph wrote itself, as it were, without much thought and was itself a form of "telescoping" I hadn't anticipated.
Why are the "Mozart" moments so much more satisfying than the "Salieri" moments?
Walt Whitman - from Proust Was a Neuroscientist
p1 For Walt Whitman, the Civil War was about the body. The crime of the confederacy, Whitman believed, was treating blacks as nothing but flesh, selling them and buying them like pieces of meat. Whitman's revelation, which he had for the first time at a New Orleans slave auction, was that body and mind are inseparable. To whip a man's body was to whip a man's soul.
This is Whitman's central poetic idea. We do not have a body, we are a body. Although our feelings feel immaterial, they actually begin in the flesh...
Whitman's fusion of body and soul was a revolutionary idea, as radical in concept as his free-verse form. At the time, scientists believed that our feelings came from the brain and that the body was just a lump of inert matter. But Whitman believed that our mind depended upon the flesh. He was determined to write poems about our "form complete."
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p2 Neuroscience now knows that Whitman's poetry spoke the truth: emotions are generated by the body. Ephemeral as they seem, our feelings are actually rooted in the movements of our muscles and the palpitations of our insides. Furthermore, these material feelings are an essential element of our thinking process. As the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio notes, "The mind is embodied . . . not just embrained."
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p3 The story of the brain's separation from the body begins with Rene Descartes... [who] divided being into two distinct substances: a holy soul and a mortal carcass. The soul was the source of reason, science, and everything nice. Our flesh, on the other hand, was "clock-like," just a machine that bleeds. With this schism [mind-body dualism], Descartes condemned the body to a life of subservience, a power plant for the brain's light bulbs. [You could tie the Church's disapproval of pleasure in "this" life to this schism, except that the Church's attitude preceded Descartes.]
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p5 ...Whitman believed that his existence could be "comprehended at no time by its parts, at all times by its unity." This is the moral of Whitman's poetic sprawl: the human being is an irreducible whole. Body and soul are emulsified into each other...
Emerson
Whitman's faith in the transcendental body was strongly influenced by the transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson... A lapsed Unitarian preacher, Emerson was more interested in the mystery of his own mind than in the preachings of some aloof God. He disliked organized religion because it relegated the spiritual to a place in the sky instead of seeing the spirit among "the common, low and familiar."
Without Emerson's mysticism, it is hard to imagine Whitman's poetry. "I was simmering, simmering, simmering," Whitman once said, "and Emerson brought me to a boil."
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The Anatomy of Emotion
p15 Whitman's faith in the flesh... had a profound impact on the thought of his time. His free-verse odes, which so erotically fused the body and the soul, actually precipitated a parallel discovery within psychology. An avid Whitman enthusiast, William James was the first scientist to realize that Whitman's poetry was literally true: the body was the source of feelings. The flesh was not a part of what we felt, it was what we felt. As Whitman had prophetically chanted, "Behold, the body includes and is the meaning, the main concern, and includes and is the soul."
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p16 ...William James inherited the philosophical tradition of Emerson. Pragmatism, the uniquely American philosophy James invented, was in part a systematization of Emerson's skeptical mysticism. Like Emerson and Whitman, James always enjoyed puncturing the pretensions of nineteenth-century science. He thought that people should stop thinking of scientific theories as mirrors of nature, what he called "the copy version of truth." Instead, they should see its facts as tools, which "help us get into a satisfactory relation with experience." [?] The truth of an idea, James wrote, is the use of an idea, its "cash-value." [Now that does sound uniquely American.] Thus, according to pragmatists, a practical poet could be just as truthful as an accurate experiment. All that mattered was the "concrete difference" an idea produced in our actual lives. [Is it just me or is this language as puzzling as the German Idealism it was inspired by?]
p17 [About the physics-inspired psychology of the day] James also wasn't very good at this new type of psychology. "It is a sort of work which appeals to patient and exact mind," he wrote in his masterpiece, The Principles of Psychology, and James realized that his mind was neither patient nor particularly exact. He loved questions more than answers, the uncertainty of faith more than the conviction of reason... James was drawn to the phenomena that this mental reductionism ignored. What parts of the mind cannot be measured?
Searching for the immeasurable led James directly to the question of feeling. Our subjective emotions, he said, were the "unscientific half of existence." ...
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p18 ...When James introspected, he realized that Whitman's poetry revealed an essential truth: our feelings emerge from the interactions of the brain and the body, not from any single place in either one. This psychological theory, first described in the 1884 article "What Is an Emotion?" is Whitman, pure and simple. Like Whitman, James concluded that if consciousness was severed from the body, "there would be nothing left behind, no 'mind-stuff' out of which the emotion can be constituted." ...
...James believed that our emotions emerged from the constant interaction of the body and the brain. Just as fear cannot be abstracted from its carnal manifestation, it also cannot be separated from the mind, which endows the body'd flesh with meaning. [This would mean that animals that are so motivated by fear must also share in "mind," I would think] As a result, science cannot define feelings without also taking consciousness -- what the feeling is about -- into account. "Let not this view be called materialistic," James warns his reader. "Our emotions must always be inwardly what they are, whatever be the physiological ground of their apparition. If they are deep, pure, spiritual facts they remain no less deep, pure, spiritual, and worthy of regard on this present sensation theory, They carry their own inner measure of worth with them."
The Body Electric
p19 Modern neuroscience is now discovering the anatomy underlying Whitman's poetry...
p20 One of Damasio's most surprising discoveries is that the feelings generated by the body are an essential element of rational thought. [We've been over this before. He describes the gambling experiment.]
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p21 ...What Damasio found was that after drawing only ten cards, the hand of the experimental subject got "nervous" whenever it reached for one of the negative decks. While the brain had yet to completely understand the game (and wouldn't for another forty cards), the subject's hand "knew" what deck to draw from. Furthermore, as the hand grew increasingly electric, the subject started drawing more and more frequently from the advantageous decks. The unconscious feelings generated by the body preceded the conscious decision. The hand led the mind.
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p22 ... The moral of Whitman's verse was that the body wasn't merely a body. Just as leaves of grass grow out of dirt, feelings grow out of the flesh...
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Feelings from flesh? Soul from body? Body from soul? our existence makes no sense. We live inside a contradiction. Whitman exposes this truth, and then, in the very next sentence, accepts it. His only answer is that there is no answer. "I and this mystery, here we stand," Whitman once said, and that pretty much says it all.
..."Now I see it is true, what I guess'd at," Whitman wrote in "Song of Myself." What he guessed at, of course, is that the soul is made of flesh.
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p24 [After a bleak description of the decayed state of his body at the time of his death] What could Whitman have been thinking as he felt his flesh -- his trusted muse -- slowly abandon him? He began his last Leaves of Grass [the "Death-Bed" edition] with a new epigraph, written in death's shadow:
Come, said my soul,
Such verses for my Body let us write, (for we are one).
...We are the poem, his poem says, that emerges from the unity of the body and the mind. That fragile unity -- this brief parenthesis of being -- is all we have. Celebrate it.
And here I'm reminded of the mystical bliss that Dostoevsky writes about as his The Brothers Karamazov characters near death. (Though not the Karamazovs themselves.) If we grant that Dostoevsky wasn't just making this up -- and I think I've run into other instances of the same thing, but I can't recall where just now (Anne Lamott) -- is it so unlikely that a soul in conversation, as it were, with a diseased body would find a new song to sing?
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