The brain is wider than the sky [Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

How are you?  April is the cruelest month but I try not to pull too many lilacs from the dead.

A new interview just went up on Dr. Ginger Campbell’s Books and Ideas podcasts.  We spoke mostly about my books The Happiness Myth (2007) and Doubt: A History (2003).  The conversation was very rich I think, and addresses what I mean when I say that art is at least as good as science at helping us know the world and what we are.  I mention in the interview that Emily Dickinson conjured, in a few lines, a kind of perspective that shows us the world and what we are.  I didn’t cite particular poems, though I do paraphrase one of her insights, and the poem below is the poem from which it comes.  It is one of her most famous.

The Brain -- is wider than the Sky --

For -- put them side by side --

The one the other will contain

With ease -- and You -- beside --

 

The Brain is deeper than the sea --

For -- hold them -- Blue to Blue --

The one the other will absorb --

As Sponges -- Buckets -- do --

The Brain is just the weight of God --

For -- Heft them -- Pound for Pound --

And they will differ -- if they do --

As Syllable from Sound –

I wouldn’t claim any exclusive meaning for this poem.  Some might think that is a drawback in a truth-seeking method, but poetry readers know better.  Poetry strains our capacity to understand it on purpose.  Emily said, “tell all the truth but tell it slant”; Wallace said that “a poem should resist the intelligence almost successfully.”  Poetry is words set so carefully that they can be read in many different ways at once.  This allows a lot to be said in a tiny clump of words.  For my part, I read this poem as saying that the universe is immense and we are tiny, but our brains make us even more immense than the universe.  Conceptualizing our human place in the world is something scientists try to sort out, but have trouble.  If the universe is accidental and meaningless, does that mean we are meaningless?  Clearly it does not, the brain is wider than the sky.

The last stanza is the most enigmatic, but I read it as saying that the brain, not the mind, but the actual meat,  is the maker of the world we know.  The brain is what we thought was God, they weigh the same. “It will differ, if it does…” means often the idea of God is exactly the same as the brain.  When it does differ, it is semantics. Syllable and Sound are different but not much and not definitively – often we can swap them out in a sentence without loosing the sense.

It seems to me that there are tons of ways that poets express notions of the world that become a working part of how we describe the world and that in turn shapes science.

If you have a favorite one of these tell me in the comments or drop me a note:

hechtjm@aolcom

okay, bye for now.

Jennifer 

Comments

[DL]

It is. Wider than the sky, I mean. No "doubt" about it.

[Jamey Hecht]

Lovely.

[Kimoy Hodge]

This is the most on point analysis I've seen all day on this poem. It actually makes sense to.

[Ginger Campbell, MD]

Jennifer,

I was intrigued by your choice of this particular poem because it has inspired several books.

One is "Wider Than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness" by scientist Gerald M. Edelman.

I have just started reading is "Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind" by Daniel Tammet. Dickenson's poem is quoted in the Introduction. Tammet is an autistic savant (described in his best-selling memoir "Born on a Blue Day") and this new book looks at creativity from several different points of view, which is what you advocated during your interview on my podcast.