He is characteristically concerned with the schemas we have constructed to map
our mental activities -geometry, complex grammatical constructions,
physiology, definitions. He is thinking about thinking. (And about smelling
roses, but he is not immediately inducing us to smell any in our
imaginations.) Reading Jean Pierre Dupuy's extraordinary account of the
1950s meetings of the cybernetics group, which discussed minds and machines
and what it was to be human, I came across a remark by a neural network
designer about puns. Perhaps, this scientist said, we delight in puns
because the neurone connections become very excited by the double input
associated with all the stored information for two arbitrarily connected
things or ideas. Perhaps we enjoy this excitement. It occurred to me,
reading this, that complex metaphors produce infinitely more subtle versions
of this excitement and pleasure. I started to think -to use a double
entendre that is very pertinent -about the play on words, the play of light
on a landscape, the mind at play. I know that this excitement is the
primitive thing at the source of why I want to spend my life writing and
thinking. I do not have a message to give to the world, I do not wish to
seduce or persuade, I want to think as fast as possible, in as complex a way
as possible, and put the thinking into verbal forms.
I think I knew even as a schoolgirl that Donne excited me because he was a
pattern-maker -with language. The other poet who has the same qualities of
excitement is Wallace Stevens. The geometry of the lights that portion out
and give form to the meaningless dark water in "The Idea of Order at
Key West", the sections of "Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction" -"It
Must Be Abstract", "It Must Change", "It Must Give
Pleasure" -are part of the mental mapping I am reaching for. I think
both Donne and Stevens describe not images, but image-making, not sensations
but the process of sensing, not concepts but the idea of the relations of
concepts. I like glass because, as Herbert said, you can look at it and
through it simultaneously.
I think of both Donne and Stevens as "glassy" poets, as Herbert
himself is not, because he is too much of a perfectionist, his poems are
made objects, their form is what they are and contains them. Donne and
Stevens make skeletons of poems.
It has been much easier to think about this aspect of poetry since there have
been increasing quantities of information available about the myriads of
neurones in different areas which fire when things are perceived, are
reinforced by connections with previous perceptions and previous
connections, and make up the constantly changing matter of mind which
Jean-Pierre Changeux calls "'L'Espace de travail' neuronal".
Changeux's neural work space is itself part schema, part description of what
goes on in our brains when our minds are at work. In it there are millions
of cells with connecting dendrites and long questing axons, some of which
can cross into the opposite hemisphere of the brain. In L'Homme neuronal
Changeux describes the construction of a mental object, which is a physical
state created by the activation (correlated and transitory) of a large
number of neurones from different layers and areas of the brain. This mental
object can be represented by a graph. He then describes an increasingly
complex sequence of mental objects.
a) The primary percept is a mental object whose graph and activity are
constructed by direct contact with the external world.
b) The image is an object of the memory, "autonome et fugace", whose
evocation requires no contact with the environment. It can only exist
autonomously if there exists a "couplage" (coupling or linkage) of
neurones in the graph which is stable in time and already exists before it
is called up.
c) The concept, like the image, is a memory object, but has only a weak or
even no sensory content. It is the result of the recruitment of neurones
present in areas of association with multiple sensory or motor "specificites".
The passage from image to concept follows two distinct and complementary
paths -the "elagage" (pruning) of the sensory component, and the
enrichment due to the combinations resulting from the way the mental objects
are linked.
d) The "proprietes associatives" of mental objects allow them to
link themselves spontaneously and autonomously. They are constrained by the "mode
de cablage de la machine cerebrale" which in fact imposes its own "grammar"
on the linking of mental objects.
Elsewhere Changeux refers to the combination of neurones in concepts as an "algebra",
derived from the isomorphs of perceptive acts. He describes language itself
as a system of arbitrary signs, constructed as a vehicle for the
communication of concepts in a society. Language has to be learned (laid
down as stable neural linkages) in a "long apprenticeship".
Changeux distinguishes this social language from the "langage de la
pensee" -concepts derived from images derived from percepts - which is "permanently
connected to the real" ("branchee sur le reel").
Changeux sees mental activity as a kind of musical rhythm of firing cells, and
has a very specific and beautiful image -both a description and a metaphor
-which Donne would have loved for its combination of the precise and the
random. The cerebral cortex is organized in cellular crystals which
establish local connections over millimetres, which are superposed on
contacts at distances of centimetres or decimetres. The long axons reach out
as far as the opposite hemisphere. This organization is at the same time
precisely localized and delocalized. The mental object is, he says, "entre
le crystal et la fumee" -between crystal and smoke. Quite different
parts of the system fire when the thinking subject is simply perceiving, and
when he or she is struggling with understanding or forming concepts.
I do not imagine that we are yet within reach of a neuroscientific approach to
poetic intricacy, although Semir Zeki has made interesting observations on
the relations between certain abstract works of visual art and neurones in
the brain that detect movement, direction and colour. But I was convinced on
reading Changeux that the neurones Donne excites are largely those of the
reinforced linkages of memory, concepts, and learned formal structures like
geometry, algebra and language. There is a kind of poetry that is mimetic of
primary perception, and that is not -except in very special senses -what
Donne is doing. I thought I might get help from cognitive psychologists
about why we take such pleasure in complex metaphors. But the work they do
on metaphor appears to be largely directed to understanding how metaphor
fits into "normal" cognition and social construction of
communication. They like to work on hidden dead metaphors, and construe from
these metaphors rules about why we like to link things. In terms of Donne's
fantastic webs of language it is not helpful to have it made clear how
automatically we use military imagery for normal argument. The fact that the
direction "up" in language describing human emotions represents a
positive, while "down" is usually bad, is of great interest in
terms of the human body firing perceptual neurones and making language from
images and concepts. But the psycholinguists are not much interested in the
complex play of words.
On the other hand, I was very excited by Elaine Scarry's dizzily ambitious
Dreaming by the Book. Scarry's brilliantly original project is to describe a
kind of grammar or algebra of the instructions by which a writer causes a
mental image to be constructed in the mind of a reader. She is mostly
interested in novelists and epic poets setting scenes -from Homer to Tolstoy
to Hardy. She analyses phenomena like mental solidity or mental spaces, the
description and evocation in the mind of movement and colour and flesh. She
has various names for the constructive instructions -"Radiant Ignition",
"Rarity", "Addition and Subtraction", "Stretching,
Folding and Tilting", and "Floral Supposition" (she offers
complex explanations for our human preference for describing flowers in
detail). Her chapter on "Radiant Ignition" immediately made me
think of Donne and Stevens. Radiant Ignition for Scarry is the verbal
calling up of sharp bright lights in the mind -which she says is a way of
focusing the imagination which will then see a scene. The interesting thing
about brilliant lights in both Stevens and Donne is that mostly the
excitement is simply in the brief radiant ignition. There is no following
expansive imagined scene. The poetry is perhaps about this mental tool and
its excitement, not about particular lit faces or fields.
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