The recent “neuro-revolution” in poetics has tended to
replicate the privilege granted to cognition over affect in other areas of
neuroscience. What is most
important, from this perspective, is the prefrontal cortex and its attendant
brain systems: those most linked
to tertiary processes, the “higher” forms of reasoning that are unique to the
human brain, the kind of meta-critical capacity that distinguishes us from our
dogs and dolphins, elephants and apes.
Research in neuroscience has been guilty of the same biases
until recently. The term
cognitive neuroscience was often taken
to describe
all brain processes, as
if all brain processes were cognitive, primarily because of the assumption that
emotion is regulated by cognition and that cognitive processes occur first,
structuring the emotion in fundamental ways. “Cognitive gating mechanisms” were seen to inhibit emotion
and determine its expression, thus representing emotion as raw material that is
only given its form through cognitive processing—emotions are viewed in
cognitive terms.
This is called a “top down” model of information processing. However, the most recent advances in
neuroscience tell a different story, one that makes a convincing argument for a
“bottoms up” model, and one that has wide implications for poetics and the
value we have granted to the cognitive over the affective. Any such attempt to purge affect and
narrative is doomed to failure, since it ignores the indissociable relation
between affect and cognition, emotion and reason, biology and culture, the
brain and the mind. As current
neuroscience has spelled out in some detail in its theories of “functional
connectivity,” the one is not possible without the other.[i]
Instead, “brain-behavior processes” are the products of
interaction effects between each, neural circuits that include the control
functions of the primary process emotional states themselves. In fact, recent advances in affective
neuroscience argue for “more realistic models that incorporate dynamic
properties and bidirectional interactive multi-way communications.”[ii]
Instead of occurring through a top-down hierarchy in which cognition occurs
first and is the controlling mechanism, neural activity has recently been shown
to occur bidirectionally in multiple regions. Furthermore, as the
phylogentically oldest part of our brains, the affective systems are most
linked to fundamental survival mechanisms that “provide a necessary foundation
for higher functions to operate” (Cromwell and Panksepp 2032).
Crucially, these are the systems shared across all mammalian
brains, and point to an affective experiential universality across all
mammalian species, including humans.
From a neuroevolutionary perspective, the affective remains
fundamental. It is not a matter of
cognition always generating a behavioral response, for instance, such as reader
response. In fact, quite often, it
is the more fundamental processes that inform behavior, those “from the gut”
responses linked to the embodied, “so powerful it gives me the chills” effect
in aesthetic response—a response in the autonomic nervous system triggered by
adrenaline.
With this new information, it’s time to examine the
interaction effects, the feedback loops between affect and cognition in
poetics. An affective neuropoetics
would, like Jaak Panksepp’s affective neuroscience, proceed from the bottom up,
locating the roots of our motivations and aesthetic response in the primary
affective processes.
A wonderful example of what I am talking about is Maria
Mazziotti Gillan’s poem “Watching the Pelican Die,” first published in Prairie Schooner and forthcoming in The Silence in the Empty House (NYQ
Books. 2013). The
embodiment of what I have posited here as a site of the interactions between
the affective and the cognitive, the poem enacts what, in her own aesthetic
theory, Gillan has termed the dialogue between “the cave” and “the crow,” which
are the metaphorical representations of affect and cognition.[iii] For Gillan, the privilege historically
granted “the crow”—the social discourses and systems of valuation associated
with scientific rationalism, tertiary process cognition, and the masculine—has
served to devalue the embodied, the feminine, and the emotional that represents
“the cave”—precisely those primary process affects that Panksepp has
empirically situated as the very basis of and possibility for the
cognitive. The “cave” in Gillan is
the equivalent to affective brain processes in Panksepp, and is similarly fundamental:
Watching the Pelican
Die
On TV, I watch the pelican with its mouth wide open,
its wings and body coated with oil. Is it screaming? I do not hear
the sound and since this is a photograph, I don’t know if it
was caught
in that mouth-stretched howl when it died or if it’s howling
in recognition that it cannot survive the thick coat
of oil that bears it down.
The ladies who take care of you when I’m gone tell me you
are having trouble.
“His hands,” they say, “his hands.” When I
come home, I see that your hands have turned black
at the tips and I see that the ends of your fingers
have been eaten away.
I watch the dead bird in the Gulf
floating on top of the water, its legs stiff and straight in
the air,
its body drained of all motion, all light.
The next day I take you to the doctor; he tells us he will
have
to operate to remove the gangrenous flesh.
The announcer on CNN says BP didn’t want the photographer
to take pictures of the dying birds covered as they are
with the black slick of oil. “They were hoping,” he says,
“that the birds would sink and the evidence
would be swallowed by the ocean.”
In the late afternoon, I hear my daughter cry out. I rush to
see
what has happened, and you are stretched out on the bed,
your body so thin you look like a boy. You do not move.
I call 911 and the ambulance takes you to the hospital.
BP is trying to put a cap on the spewing oil rig; the CEO
keeps saying, it’s no problem. Clumps of oil wash ashore
and float on the surface of the water. The beach is littered
with dead fish and birds.
At the hospital, they want to know whether we want
extraordinary measures. “No,” I say. “He
has a living will.”
We hover around while they admit you. You have forgotten
how to speak.
Mostly you lie in bed, staring into a space
above our heads.
In my mind I see that screaming bird, its mouth wide open,
a picture of torment and despair.
I reach out to hold your hand, stroke your forehead. “Dennis,”
I call out, “Dennis.”
You do not hear me. The
doctor comes in
to see you. “Well,”
he says, “he should have been dead five years
ago. What did
you expect? You shouldn’t have
taken such
good care of him.”
“We did everything we could,” the BP president says, looking
directly at the camera. “It’s not such a calamity,” says
the governor of Louisiana. “We don’t need to stop
deep water drilling.
Our economy will collapse if we do.”
We stand around your hospital bed. My brother comes in
and says he’ll try a stronger antibiotic. “It’s bad,” he says,
but he waits until we are in the hall to tell me.
The social worker says, “You should put him in a nursing
home.” My
brother says, “You kept him home all this time.
If he gets a little stronger, I’ll let him go home and he’ll
be
around the things he knows.”
The doctor comes in and says, “He’s not going to make it.”
The social worker admonishes us with her bag
of common sense.
She does not love you. We
take you home.
I sit next to you and hold your hand.
The MSNBC reporter stands on the beach in a hurricane
and picks up a huge glob of oil with a stick.
“Look,” she says,
“look,” and drips the oil on the white sand. She is shaking
with fury at such destruction. Dead birds float behind
her.
“I’m in so much pain,” you say, though you have not
complained
before. Althea
feeds you a jar of baby applesauce.
You open
your mouth and accept the food. When I see the pelican
on TV with its mouth wide open in horror, I remember you
as you lay dying.
On the Gulf, the earth and the sea
are being destroyed, just as you were by the disease that
finally
defeated you after you struggled against it for all those
years.
Some things are bigger than all of us. We cannot defeat
them. If there
is enough carelessness and greed in the world
even the ocean can be destroyed, and you, who fought
against this illness with such courage, even you
cannot survive, the blackened tips of your fingers, the oil
heavy on the birds feathers, the birds dead and floating on
the surface that gradually sink and disappear.
Astonishing in the depth of its representation of the levels
of brain processing, “Watching the Pelican Die” moves from affect to emotion to
memory to cognition and back down the chain, establishing the affective basis
for human behavior and relations and showing how cognition, when detached from
the other levels of processing, can be responsible for destroying the very
things it relies upon most—the basic attachment mechanisms of relationships
(Panksepp’s “CARE” system), on the one hand, and the biology of ecology, and
the relationship between the basic levels of the ecosystem, on the other. The movement in the poem between the
grief the narrator experiences (the basic affective system that Panksepp terms
Panic/Grief) and the ways that grief resonates throughout the larger cultural
landscape of destruction and loss is a quintessential example of a narrative
poetics that embodies and demonstrates the principles of affective
neuroscience. In Gillan’s poem we have one of the most bidirectional
representations of the relationship between affect and cognition, the cave and
the crow, that I’ve seen in contemporary poetry. As Gillan puts it, “poems hide in a place deep inside you
that I call the cave . . . In the
cave are all your memories . . . Every person you’ve ever known or loved or
hated everything you are afraid of in the world and in yourself. In the cave is your rage and your fury
and your passion” (Writing Poetry to Save
Your Life, 13).
In neuroscientific terms, Gillan’s “cave” is affect, the
primary process affective brain
systems that underlie secondary processes like memory and cultural
learning. Affect is the bedrock
poets draw upon, and it is informed by the reactions in the ANS & CNS that
neuroscientist Stephen Porges, in his "Polyvagal Theory," calls “neuroception.”
Tomorrow I will discuss the seven basic affective systems in
further detail, especially as they are instantiated in the work of the poet Joe
Weil. Later posts will explore Polyvagal Theory, its concept of “neuroception”
and the vagal ventral complex that links the heart, face, and brain. Using this work from affective
neuroscience, I will discuss the movement from neurophysiology to affect to
aesthetics by way of Panksepp’s seven affective systems in conjunction with the
Polyvagal Theory and its implications for memory and how creative writers use
it via the work of poets Gary Soto, Bruce Snider, Jack Bedell, Vivian Shipley,
and James Reese. The work of all
these poets and the affective neuroscience that helps explain their aesthetic
projects will be linked to the need for narrative poetics, and narrative as one
of our most interactive, bidirectional brain processes.
