The book I started work on in November has become two! The first, Horsetail Rhizome, starts in Sumer & ends with Gerard Manley Hopkins. The second, Occam’s Aftershave – for which I just drafted the text below – picks up where Horsetail leaves off & reaches into a future of quantum-genomic computing long after the Singularity.
I first met the polyvagal model of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) when looking for ways to tackle a chronic illness. It now strikes me that, whether or not it helped with my migraines, the model offers an approach to the relation of poetic rhythm – on the scale of phoneme, sentence, or canto – to our beings as innervated mammals.
As conceived by Dr. Stephen Porges, polyvagal theory says that a long branching parasympathetic cranial nerve, called vagus, “wanderer,” for its reach from earwhorl to bowel, gives us three frames (one more than we thought) for responding to stimuli.
Its ventral branch allows rest & digestion & opens us to affection & attunement. It goes quiet when a threat is perceived & the sympathetic nervous system readies heart lungs muscles sense organs &c. to fight or flee. The two we learned in school.
New to the picture is the nerve’s dorsal branch. It’s how a deer freezes in your headlights, or a bird your cat caught in your palm, or you or I raddled by rape or earthquake. Yeats’s rag & bone shop. Destination of every katabasis. The heavy hopelessness I feel a week into Trump’s second term. Freud’s death drive. But last resort of the life force. Can’t fight back? Run. Can’t run? Hide, go small, disappear, dissociate, die inside, for now. ¶ Notice how sentences & fragments, declaratives & imperatives – the ones you just read – affect you differently, bodily. That’s what I’m talking about.
Lot more to it, of course, as a physiological theory of mind. It has helped me some with mine & others I know with their troubles. I’m asking now though about its potential for literary theory. What might it disclose about the physiology of the poem – the poem as it addresses one’s imaginal body (mind’s eye, mind’s ear, mind’s limbs & organs) through kinetic & proprioceptive signals in its language?
Poem as embodied imaginal transcript of journeys up & down the vagal ladder.
I can say this much. I make a poem by enacting transits – lived the moment of making or recalled & relived – across realms of ease, activation, paralysis. I translate animal postures in the world into bodily aspects of human speech – stress pitch duration tempo as they register in mouth chest gut musculature – and image – direction of the gaze to curve line jag field & pattern. I do it, for instance, with the ampersand. I did it just now by omitting one. ¶ In “Weed Flower Mind” I used a fractured lyric form to chart the ups & downs, blisses crises & overwhelms, I met in zazen. ¶ My Dumuzi & Inanna poems make of their motions, from heaven to earth & underearth & back up, mythic correlates for states of attunement & danger & despair. ¶ My script for SCRO attempted the same in a sort-of confessional sort-of stream-of-consciousness.
Here’s the grandiose part. Maybe it’s not my method but the method.
Notes towards expansion of that idea – reductive as poetics in this form – hopelessly impressionistic about the science – maybe worth pursuing even so –
¶ Divine Comedy. A vagrant’s journey from arousal (dark wood) to dorsal (Hell) to arousal (Purgatory) to ventral (Paradise) with many loops & sub-loops. To be frozen helpless abandoned by God is Hell. To be wholly at rest in the wholeness of being is Heaven. Beatrice as an icon of the attunement – heart-connection self-connection mirror neurons blazing – ease in the ANS makes possible.
¶ The Tempest. Begins with a shipwreck (arousal) then assigns subplots to each nervous domain. Stephano & Trinculo are essentially predators (arousal). Alonso is immobilized by grief (dorsal) & pricked by Gonzalo (executive function) into movement. Miranda & Ferdinand savour intimacies (nexus of ventral & dorsal). Prospero engages in magical combat & is never ruffled (nexus of ventral & arousal). In the end everyone converges in a grand reconciliation (ventral ease). A comic or romantic schema.
¶ “Ode to a Nightingale.” One begins in a murky crossover of ease & numbness (nexus of ventral & dorsal), ventures toward the nightingale seeking attunement in its song (ventral), finds instead the sound of death (dorsal), returns to one’s body more alert (nexus of ventral & arousal).
¶ “To Autumn.” Intimacy with all life (ventral) in heightened alertness (arousal) conducted knowing it’s soon to end (dorsal). The poem stands at the intersection of all three modes. Where its wonderment comes from & how it makes peace with death.
¶ Mrs. Dalloway. Rapid irregular cascades among ventral arousal & dorsal. An interior realism – convincing, compelling, whatever the artifice – because its verbal activity enacts how these states actually play out in the nervous system.
¶ Tender Buttons. Every phrase a site of play & heightened vigilance & the insoluble.
It may be no more than warmed-over Structuralism. Or a poorly thought-out update of Aristotle’s catharsis. But I can’t shake my sense of the text as a verbal map of a nervous system – a map in periplum of one transit through a nervous system – a transit a reader can take as a sort of inner guided walking tour – because whatever the accidents shaping a life, we all as human animals have roughly the same nervous system. That system – it seems to me now – is the poet’s real instrument.
Maybe Jung was right about a collective unconscious. Not seated in the brain box – emergent in our nervous tissue, taken all together, as interface, as rhizome.
The Art of Compost 