Yesterday I discussed how the poets Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Joe Weil enact what I am calling an affective poetics: a poetics that demonstrates the bedrock of our affective response outlined in the work of neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, whose empirical work in affective neuroscience has established the basis for emotional continuities across species. Panksepp’s seven affective systems, which he represents in all caps to indicate their primary process nature, include SEEKING, PANIC/GRIEF, PLAY, JOY, CARE, LUST, RAGE, AND FEAR. These systems are situated sub-cortically in the brain, inform and serve as the building blocks for cognition, and represent one of the first levels of response to stimuli. Today I will discuss how behavioral neuroscientist Stephen Porges’s Polyvagal Theory, which articulates a level of affective response to stimuli that is an elaboration on Pansepp’s seven primary process systems, and occurs at an even deeper level, itself contributes to an affective poetics as seen in the work of poets Kate Gale and Bruce Snider. While Panksepp’s work lets us understand neural circuits between higher brain structures and those in the brainstem; Porges’s work allows us to understand the neural circuits between the brainstem and visceral organs: “neural circuits mediating the reciprocal communication between body states and brainstem structures, which impact on the availability of these affective circuits” (The Polyvagal Theory, 258).
The main postulates of the Polyvagal Theory are the following:
• Emotional regulation and social behavior are psychological processes that respond to events, environment, and people. They shape our sense of self, help form relationships, and determine whether we feel safe in various contexts. Neural circuits are bidirectional, biobehavioral processes that mediate reciprocal communication between body states and brainstem structures: psychological processes influence body states, and body states influence psychological processes like perception (Polyvagal Theory, 257, 259, emphasis mine).
• Polyvagal Theory provides the context for cognition—the bodily states it describes make cognition possible or impossible.
• Neuroception—the unconscious perception of safety—triggers a response according to these systems, starting with the social engagement system (SES) and ending with the “freeze” behaviors as a last resort. It precedes perception.
- “The evolution of the
mammalian autonomic nervous system provides the neurophysiological substrates
for affective processes and stress responses”
- We react to real-world,
environmental challenges with three neural circuits, in this order:
- 1) We react with our
evolutionarily newest system, the Social Engagement System, a parasympathetic
neural circuit that is expressed in the newer myelinated vagus nerve
that “functions to facilitate pro-social behavior and to maintain calm
behavioral states” (265-66).
- 2) If this doesn’t satisfy
our quest for safety, we react spontaneously with the older, sympathetic
nervous system that supports fight/flight behaviors. This system mediates between the two vagal
circuits.
- If fight/flight fails, we
resort to the oldest vagal circuit, a parasympathetic circuit expressed
in the older, unmyelinated vagus nerve that inhibits motion and is linked to
disassociation in response to trauma (playing dead, and having the sensation of
floating out of your body).
- Pathways regulating the
striated muscles of the face and head and the myelinated vagal fibers
regulating the heart and lungs” (270).
- The SES calms the viscera
and regulates facial muscles, “enabling and promoting positive social
interactions in safe contexts” (270).
- Porges calls this the
“brain-face-heart circuit,” and is both a stress reliever and responsible for
the pro-sociality often exhibited by our species.
- “Specific bodily states
foster different domains of behavior”
(Porges, 278).
The phylogenetic stage of the autonomic nervous
system determines the behavioral, physiological, and affective features of
reactivity to things in the environment.
Physiological state limits the range of adaptive behaviors and psychological
experiences (265). Trauma can limit an
individual’s ability to engage the vagal brake associated with the SES because
trauma victims often have faulty
neuroception and become hypervigilant, always reacting to the
environment/people as though they are a threat.
The SES helps detect and express signals of
safety in the environment—it “distinguish[es] and emit[s] facial expressions
and intonation of vocalizations . . . By calming the viscera and regulating
facial muscles, this system enables and promotes positive social interactions
in safe contexts” (270). In other words,
it helps us read body language, which is what dogs do as their primary modality
of communication, and which is what we do when we are using our pre-conscious neuroception.
Implications of the Polyvagal Theory for poetics
include the following:
- Affect is primary process
and occurs before and informs cognition
- Polyvagal response in the
CNS & ANS inform affect
- Both are evolutionarily
earlier processes linked to survival value.
One of
the main implications for poetics is that if we understand the affective basis
of memory and cognition, our poetics will proceed from and value the “bottoms
up” approach to information processing as do all our affective and cognitive
processes. Again, these processing
levels are bi-directionally linked and indissociable, so even if affect
triggers other processes, it is still informed and shaped by secondary and
tertiary process memory and cultural learning.
Language and its effects are not primary, or secondary, but rather part
of an integrated circuit in this approach.
We can see these patterns of bidirectionality as
they are informed by Polyvagal Theory
and its systems of response in the poem “Hotel Room, Patterns of Light” by the
poet Kate Gale, from her aptly named book Mating
Season (Tupelo Press):
HOTEL ROOM, PATTERNS OF LIGHT
And now you whose face I have nearly forgotten
Remember how you said you would change the world?
Remember how you smoked weed and drank tea and told me
in one hotel room after another how glad you were
you knew your purpose?
Remember how you painted me a picture on birch bark,
a canoe paddling upstream carrying light in the stern?
As if one canoe could make a difference.
Remember how you went to Flagstaff to visit your mother?
When you came back you said, I slept with this hooker
over the holiday, Sweetness, had to see what it was like
to order a woman around.
I remember the pattern of light on the hallway floor
shadowed with these little slivers of darkness
that kept disappearing. I opened and closed my mouth
several times without speaking. Like a fish I was.
Before I left, I dropped the birch bark on the floor.
You left it there, sat rocking back and forth.
Don't go, you said. But you looked all hollow to me.
I could see the door right through you.
Your voice sounded faraway, like a radio station
you can never tune in. I walked out into the cold air,
open sunlight. Last I heard you were in furniture sales.
Measuring success one couch at a time.
