The Body Electric

Dogs: secretly aliens?

What do you think of when someone says the word 'alien'? If you're as unoriginal as me, it's probably a cliche from science fiction: little green men with insect-like eyes. Or perhaps you just think of the more abstract notion of 'otherness'. A recent article in the New Scientist, 'Aliens, but not as we know them', poses some interesting and challenging questions about the nature of experience. Its author, Ian Bogost, considers what might define an 'alien' and argues that they could well be all around us (dogs, penguins, polyester and cornbread) since "the experience of "being" something else can never be verified or validated, but only speculated about."  Traditionally, when we think of aliens, the 'other' is still something we can recognise as being enough like us to warrant identification - the cartoon alien still has a near-human body, still has a language. But, as Bogost puts it, "why should we be so self-centred as to think that aliens are beings whose intelligence we might recognise as intelligence?" It's a good question and one that got me thinking about the importance of the human body in thought, intelligence and, of course, poetry.

Questions about what constitutes intelligence always lead back to Artificial Intelligence - the subject of a fascinating BBC Horizon documentary earlier this month. To put it very crudely, AI is based on the idea that, deep down, we are all rather like computers ourselves and that intelligence depends on a system's organisation and functioning as a symbol manipulator. The capacity of computers to be 'intelligent' in this way was famously demonstrated by Alan Turing's test involving a human judge in conversation with a human and a machine. The fascinating, fast-developing world of AI is underpinned by a computational theory of mind (the kind favoured by Stephen Pinker in his book 'How the Mind Works') and, as such, downplays the role of the human body in cognition. Cognition is logical, autonomous and disembodied. This, of course is nothing new: perhaps the most famous exponent of 'mind over matter' was Descartes, with his belief in mind / body separation.

Certainly, we all experience our bodies as strange, alien even, from time to time. Jane Hirschfield's poem 'A Hand' conveys some of the distance we sometimes feel from parts of our own bodies:

A hand is not four fingers and a thumb.

Nor is it palm and knuckles, 

not ligaments or the fat's yellow pillow,
not tendons, star of the wristbone, meander of veins.

A hand is not the thick thatch of its lines
with their infinite dramas,
nor what it has written,
not on the page,
not on the ecstatic body. 

Nor is the hand its meadows of holding, of shaping— 

not sponge of rising yeast-bread,
not rotor pin's smoothness,
not ink. 

The maple's green hands do not cup 

the proliferant rain.
What empties itself falls into the place that is open. 

A hand turned upward holds only a single, transparent question. 

Unanswerable, humming like bees, it rises, swarms, departs.

The kind of mind/body dualism favoured by Descartes might seem to be tempered by neuroscience, which emphasises physical processes in the brain - a part of the body. But is this really so different? Some would argue that, in neuroscience, the body is only important in terms of its representation in the somatosensory cortex; the body becomes a vessel for the mind and brain. As Raymond Gibbs puts it "neuroscientists...seldom acknowledge the role played by the body as a whole in the cognitive operation of the brain."

I was lucky enough to hear Gibbs give a short talk on Thursday at a symposium in Oxford, in which he made a compelling argument for the embodied nature of perception, language and experience, demonstrating how "human language and thought emerge from recurring patterns of embodied activity that constrain ongoing, intelligent behaviour." Gibbs is influenced by the philosophy of writers such as Merleau-Ponty, who defined perception as an organism's entire bodily reaction to its environment. One of the most interesting experiments he used to illustrate his talk was to do with metaphor and the body.

Participants in Gibbs' study were taken out into a field and shown the location of an object, some distance from them. They were then blindfolded. The participants were read two short texts, both of which used the familiar conceptual metaphor of a relationship as a journey. In one version, things were 'moving in the right direction' whereas in the other, the relationship had 'stalled', and the people were 'moving apart' rather than 'moving forwards together'. The participants were then asked to walk forwards to where they thought the object they'd previously been shown was. With remarkable consistency, participants overshot the mark after hearing the first, positive text and stopped short of it after hearing the second. Gibbs used this to illustrate the ways in which our understanding of many concepts is intimately related to our physical experiences (for example, the way we interpret a word like 'stand' with its many literal and metaphorical meanings has a lot to do with our bodies and the way we acquire language - see previous blog posts about the possible mimetic origins of language for more about this...).

I've briefly and badly described one experiment amongst many here - Gibbs' arguments were much more sophisticated and I could have listened to him talk all day. Inevitably, my thoughts strayed to poetry at some point and the different ways that poets think about and write about bodies. From poets who celebrate the earthy, or even the slightly grotesque aspects of physicality (I'm thinking of Craig Raine here), to poets who seem to operate best in the realm of out-of-body experiences (such as John Burnside), most poets have something interesting to say about the body. We can't get away from our bodies, after all. In fact, as writers, we're often overly-preoccupied with them: is it a coincidence that so many poets have a tendency towards hypochondria?

I prefer to write when I'm on the move,
ideally in a place like this...

I've written before about the physical aspects of my own writing and the fact that I write my 'best' (or perhaps just what I consider 'best') poems when I'm outside - running, climbing or even walking the dogs. The process of writing can't be easily separated from the kind of movement I'm involved in. I know there are quite a few other poets who write in the same way. For those who don't, physical factors are usually still important: where they are, what's going on around them, how they feel... Poetry is by no means an entirely cerebral activity. And when poets turn their attention directly to the subject of the body, the results can be startling, unsettling or just celebratory - I'm thinking of Lucille Clifton's great 'Homage to my Hips'.

I'll finish with a poem from Michael Symmons Roberts book 'Corpus', which considers the body with real subtlety and variety. It seems to me that this poem, 'Attempts on Your Life', has a lot to say about the relationship between mind, soul and body. It begins describing a winter night which

...slid from the hills to tap
your soul. It rubbed against you
like a cat in from the cold.
It frisked you gently so as not
to wake you....

It did so, we're told, because it believed that the soul has a location, that it might be 'written on a slip / of rice paper' or else 'tucked between / your teeth, behind your ear / like a cigarette.' Eventually, of course

...the night left empty-handed.
Worse, it swept the streets for litter
as you slept - intact - your soul as
heavy as your self; sleek, seal-like,
made of light, love, marrow,
milk and honey, made of body.

I don't know how the mind / body debate could be transcended better.