The Poetic Imagination and the Brain

I want to return to an old subject, one that is a bit of a fixation for me.  It is the difficulty of reconciling a physicalist account of the mind with the power and the origin of metaphor, in poetry and in everyday life.

But we know now, you say, that computers can hold linguistic structures and connections within them that already rival our own and, it goes without saying, these are held in physical form, in complex binaries that, even if they are said to reside in the cloud, actually reside in a server somewhere.  So this physical "anchor" for such structures proves that our physical brains can do the same.

Yes, whatever resides in a computer resides there physically, but the "semantic component" of our language, as Chomsky described it, isn't really replicated in computers; rather, they use pattern recognition to mimic what the human mind has created through other means.  If, for example, you ask ChatGPT to explain the anatomical differences between a leopard and a jaguar, the program will search hundreds of millions of texts and spit back at you the consensus view that has been expressed by others, others with brains!

But, in humans, the semantic component must reside in the brain, you say.  Where else could it be?!

In examining our poetic capacities that militate against the physicalist paradigm (according to me at least), we can walk along a spectrum, from less impressive to more so.  Let's do it.

The Russian word for "work" is «работа» -- "rabota."  I would say that the two words occupy the same conceptual space; I can't think of any significant way in which the meaning of one departs from the meaning of the other.  And so, if you, an English speaker, decide to study Russian and encounter the Russian word, you can just map it onto something you already know -- "work," and the job is done.  This is easy to conceptualize in computer terms.  Whatever the meaning of "work" is, it is replicated, with a little superscript "r" attached to distinguish it as the Russian equivalent.  And so it is, you say, in our brains.

Now consider the word "license."  Its primary meaning is something like "permission."  You can't fish for small-mouthed bass in Maine without permission from the authorities, without a "license to fish."  But, once having secured permission, via the local tackle shop in Grand Lake Stream, how do you ensure that you can prove that you have such permission?  The store owner gives you a piece of paper which is headed, in bold letters, "Maine License to Fish."  The piece of paper is not the permission; it is the physical proof that you have secured permission.  The first person to call this piece of paper a "license" made a conceptual jump from the abstract to the tangible (usually it seems to operate in reverse!).  But this strikes us as a minor jump and one easy to imagine somehow replicated in the brain.

"Rank and file."  The original meaning of the expression comes from a military formation that looks like a box of men, ten across, say, and ten deep.  When we view the formation from slightly above and in front of it, each horizontal line of men is a "rank," and each vertical line is a "file."  (If the command drill sergeant gives the command "Right Face!," the rank will become the file and vice versa.)  But, through someone's poetic imagination, "rank and file" came to mean the common, lowest order of things as opposed to those in charge -- "The Republican leadership may not be able to establish order among the rank and file."  This is a bigger conceptual leap.  Who was the first to make it, and how is it that he was understood?  What does it look like in the mapping of the brain?

At a critical moment in the movie "A Complete Unknown," Johnny Cash leans in to his friend Bob Dylan and says "Track some mud on the carpet Big D!"  What was this carpet, and what was this mud?  What filaments within the brains of our heroes allowed one to invent it, and the other to "grok" it?

The writer and editor David Samuels, spurred on by the same film, said this week that Dylan's music revealed "a bullet-proof intelligence that twists and turns like a fish in order to avoid being caught."  How is a wriggling fish mapped onto the concept of "intelligence?"  And yet the metaphor is a very fine one.

You may call it magical thinking, but what I might propose is the possibility that our whole conceptual structure lies outside of ourselves, with the "tapping in" facilitated by our brains.  This model looks more like the visions of Carl Jung, and it may be more compatible with various "spooky" phenomena, including the fact, or theory, that, all things being equal, people doing the New York Times crossword puzzle at 3PM do better than people who do the puzzle at 5AM (coffee or no coffee), because the first cohort will benefit somehow from the learning of everyone else in the collective unconsciousness who has already done it that day.

So I don't think that our physicalist models have really come to terms with the elasticity, the fluidity, that is inherent in our thinking.  And, by the way, how did we come to stretch the very concrete and tangible concepts represented by an "elastic" band and a molten, "fluid" metal, so far into the realm of the abstract? 

The "roar" of the Napoleons at Waterloo.  The "bleating" of the trumpet of Miles Davis.  The "murmuring" pines and the hemlocks in the forest primeval!

Metaphors are everywhere.

 

"Megalophobia"

It's a new word to me as well, new in the last few weeks.  It means "fear of large things."  Instagram illustrates the concept beautifully with a short clip of an Airbus A380 -- the largest commercial airliner now in service -- emerging out of a dense fog for a near-zero-visibility landing directly over the videographer's head.  It does indeed inspire a frisson of fear.

What historical examples can we conjure up?

• JFK and his crewmates at the moment when they realized that a Japanese destroyer was about to cut Patrol Torpedo Boat No. 109 in half.
• The denizens of Fukushima, Japan and of Banda Aceh, Indonesia, when the entire sea rose to take their towns away.
• German soldiers manning a pillbox overlooking Omaha Beach at dawn on June 6, 1944, when they first looked, with disbelief, at the scale of the armada that had been organized for their destruction.

But a prospect of imminent death is not necessary to this our new equation; it is immensity per se that instills this instinctive fear.  Thus, if we could be transported via spaceship to a spot within, say, 1000 miles of the surface of the sun, with no danger whatsoever in our secure little capsule, we would nonetheless be overcome with megalophobia without doubt.

And sometimes megalophobia can bleed into something that we might call ... what?... "nanophobia"?  That is to say, "fear of very tiny things."  A global-scale attack on our bodies by little viral squiggles might be an example, leaving us in fear of both big and small, and forced to seek shelter in media res.

My current dread of Something Big bears closest resemblance, I think, to that of the pillbox Germans, except that for me it is not the morning of June 6, but the afternoon of June 5.  The killer armada is not in sight, but its immanence can be felt in the bones.

 

The Apocalypse Comes On Little Cat Feet

In Ukraine.  In Syria.  In the working-class towns of England.  In New Jersey.  And in the hills overlooking the Pacific Coast Highway.

Two women, one in Kursk Oblast, Russia, the other in Malibu, USA, weep as they abandon their homes and their personal effects, but for a few photographs stuffed into their respective back packs.  The rest is engulfed in flames.

 

The Collapse of Margaret McGillicuddy

I have been practicing law for almost 50 years now, or so I'm told by the little bar card I keep in my wallet.  For about 40 of those years I have known Margaret McGillicuddy, first as a colleague in the state service, and then as a friendly competitor in the world of state tax defense.  The niche is a narrow one and the community is small and tight knit.  Accordingly, I would see Margaret pretty often at conferences and in the courthouse.  We were friendly, as I say, but certainly not friends.  I have nothing at all bad to say about her, but the truth is that we never really clicked on a personal level.

In a dream that invaded my psyche 'round midnight last night, I had a meeting with Margaret in her office.  Her office was located in a stately old Boston building.  The decor was almost comically old-fashioned; it could have been the office of Perry Mason!  The other noteworthy environmental things about it were that she practiced alone, and that she did not maintain even a single administrative staffer.  So if you met with Margaret, you met with Margaret, alone.

When our meeting was done, I said so long to Margaret and left.  But as I was walking down the hall towards the elevator, I suddenly remembered that I had left my briefcase in her office, by the door.  It had many important papers in it, but more than that I had a sentimental attachment to it.  I certainly did not want to lose it!

When I came back to Margaret's office, her door was just ever slightly ajar.  I would not open it unannounced, of course; she might be indisposed.  I knocked twice, rather hard.  After a pause Margaret said "Just a moment!"  Her tone was very odd, odd enough to cause me some concern.  Clearly she was indisposed in some way.  My mind raced through a number of silly and highly "improbable causes."  Had she cut her leg on something, and was there blood running down her stocking?  Had she just washed off her make-up in the bathroom sink?  Was she, unbeknownst to me, wearing a wig, and had it fallen into the toilet?  Had she taken a couple of swigs from a whiskey bottle that she kept in a drawer?

Shaking off the nonsense scenarios, I said, through the door, "Sorry to disturb you, Margaret, it's just that I think I left my briefcase behind!"  There were a few footsteps.  "Just a second!" she replied again.  And then she opened her door about halfway with her left hand, and offered me my briefcase with her right.  But no sooner did we make sudden eye contact than she threw the door completely open, broke into heaving sobs, and collapsed into my chest.  (The briefcase had fallen to the floor.)  Instinctively I embraced her.

The situation on its face was awkward in the extreme.  But somehow I did not feel uncomfortable.  Rather, my higher moral instinct seemed to have risen to the occasion, and I did my best to comfort her, as a brother or a father might have, even though before this day I had never had any physical contact with her beyond a rather manly handshake.

After perhaps 90 seconds, her sobs began to subside.  I asked her what the matter was, "for goodness' sake!"  She answered me in short, staccato phrases, in many fewer words, in fact, than I need now to recount her tale to you.  It was as if she were speaking to me both in words and in a kind of stress-enabled telepathy!

"The matter" was that she was going blind, and going blind in the moment!  And she was losing her sight in a most peculiar way.  She said that if she concentrated intensely on her dilemma, her sight was fine, but as soon as she let her foot off the gas, as it were, she began to lose it.  So her sight was flickering on and off as she struggled to keep focus.  At the same time, she knew that this was a losing battle, because it was impossible to maintain the required level of concentration.  Like a drowning person who knows that she will soon have to concede defeat, open her mouth and swallow water, Margaret fought but without hope for a happy ending.

And it was worse even than that.  What she told me next was that she realized, for the first time, that her sensory input, taken in the aggregate, was her Self, her Being, her Everything.  Without them there simply was no Margaret.  And so, if her eyesight comprised, say, 30% of her sensory input, then when it flickered off she lost 30% of her Self; she quite literally died, in fact, precisely to that extent.

As I still held her in my embrace, her story told, I felt deep empathy for Margaret in her distress, but I also felt a terror I had never felt before for myself, for I knew that her awful struggle to stay in the light at all costs was a universal one.

 

A Skeletal Dream of No Lasting Import

It's a warm summer evening somewhere in the Midwest.  Bright lights illuminate the parking lot of a highway rest stop.  A white Ford pick-up, an F-150 of late 60's vintage, is squeezed into a spot close to the pumps.  It carries a pretty heavy patina of rust all around.

The truck's owner/driver is tall and lanky, a real Sam Shepard type.  He wears a cowboy hat.  He is ready to begin a journey back home to Nebraska, more than 1000 miles west more or less.  Although we have only just met, he invites me to take the jump seat.  He must be more than a little starved for company.

Nebraska has no purchase for me; in fact, I've never been there.  But while I am not exactly on the lam, there are things here that I would just as well escape.  I find myself thinking of Kinky Friedman's best tune, and of its refrain -- "I hope to God she finds the good-bye letter that I wrote her, 'cuz the mail don't move too fast in Rapid City, South Dakota."

I hop aboard.  After a few coughs and stumbles, the big V-8 roars to life, and it sounds strong as my cowboy benefactor slips the truck into first gear.

A new chapter begins, as it often does in these parts, on the open road.

 

Retreating Back Into Plato's Cave

Maybe my late best friend was right.  Whenever I would lay out for him my latest enthusiasm for a topic more dark than light, he would say (in loose paraphrase) "I won't go there with you.  My prosaic demons, the demons of my childhood, are sufficient unto the day thank you very much."

And I myself have said elsewhere that once one goes down such a path, it is hard if not impossible to abandon it if it has perceived credibility.  In particular, the "Woo-Woo Choo-Choo" of what we now call "non-human intelligence" rolls on and on towards lands of high strangeness and of deep strangeness, with no gentle exit possible it seems.  Lately, intimations of:

• Bioengineering of the human race.
• "Hyperobjects" that are not only unknown to us, but essentially unknowable, fundamentally beyond our ken for the same reason that a spider, upon inspection, can't make out the scope and the function of a tennis shoe.
• "Other forms of life" in the words of one prominent former master of the US national security apparatus, hinting, I take it, at the reality of that very unknowability.
• An invasion of "sentient plasmoids," plasmoids that bring old myths to life, calling to mind as they do Moses and the burning bush, the tongues of fire that touched the heads of the apostles, the spinning sun of Fatima, and even the monster of the id that terrorized Leslie Nielsen and Anne Francis in the classic 1956 film "Forbidden Planet."  In raw description, maybe Jerry Lee Lewis, of all people, came closest to the mark, with his "Great Balls of Fire!"

More broadly, there is an overhang, a premonition, if not of Apocalypse, at least of a time of Great Tribulation, perhaps to be followed by a genuinely new age, but one from which everyone born before, say, 1980, is excluded as collateral damage.  Tant pis.

 

Can You Picture It?

You are just finishing up the dinner dishes, this coming Wednesday evening.  You hear voices in the street, a little muffled laughter.  You turn on the porch light to spy ten of your neighbors, flimsy red books in hand.  When you open the door, they serenade you with songs of the season that everyone knows -- "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen," "Joy to the World," "O Holy Night," and "Silent Night," of course.  The voices congeal and rise in a single column of condensation.

You invite everyone in, briefly, for a cup of eggnog (a little heavy on the nutmeg) to brace them against the cold before they head further up the hill.

Can I picture it?  No, I can't.  I can sooner picture ten of my neighbors conspiring to throw toilet paper over the branches of my favorite front-yard tree, then scurrying like roaches when I turn on that porch light.

The Steve Jobs Cultural Revolution marches on.