'Merely tolerated': MacCaig, mountains and metaphor

'Who owns this landscape?'

In his poem ‘A Man in Assynt', the great Norman MacCaig asks: ‘Who owns this landscape? / Has owning anything to do with love?’. 

He soon answers himself:

This landscape is
masterless
and intractable in any terms
that are human.

Me, running down Fairfield,
briefly tolerated by the Lake District hills.

It's a sensation anyone who has spent time in the mountains will certainly identify with. As Peter Habeler said of the highest peak in the world "I have not conquered Everest, it has merely tolerated me." Even in Scotland in summer, I've experienced the feeling that the mountains are biding their time, allowing climbers passage only so long as they respect the landscape their travelling through - at times, I've even tested their patience. MacCaig is the poet who evokes this sense of awe best because he's a poet who often found language unequal to the task of evoking the natural world. Images to him are a human imposition, detracting from the true essence of things. As he says in ‘No Choice’:

(I am growing, as I get older

To hate metaphors – their exactness

And their inadequacy…)

MacCaig is tormented by the impossibility of conveying the world as it truly is, not just the world as it seems to be. That's what makes his animal poems so poignant. In ‘Goat’ he wants ‘the nothing like him goat, goat-in-itself, / idea of goatishness made flesh, pure essence…’. In ‘Heron’, the bird stands simply ‘wrapped in heron’. This suspicion of metaphor might seem surprising from a poet best known for the clear-sighted, inventive imagery displayed in poems like ‘Movements’ and ‘Frogs’ (the latter are described beautifully in mid-leap as ‘parachutists falling…’). As Christopher Whyte observes in a great book of critical essays on MacCaig, it may be that he looks on metaphor with such suspicion precisely because of his outstanding gift for it: "only this innate scepticism can prevent him slithering into facility."

MacCaig's suspicion of the human tendency to impose a vision on the natural world is echoed by Iain McGilchrist in 'The Master and his Emissary'. Contending that language is but one means of communication and that thought exists without it (as partly evidenced by animals' remarkably subtle abilities of categorisation - trout can distinguish different types of classical music, for example) McGilchrist sees language as part of the left hemisphere's tendency to grasp and fix things: "what language contributes is to firm up certain particular ways of seeing the world and give fixity to them." It's telling, he believes, that we often use the 'grasp' metaphor to refer to language itself: 'I can't quite get a handle on what you're saying', 'I didn't grasp that', and so forth. Language helps us fix and possess things, it becomes an aid to a particular kind of cognition since "naming things gives us power over them."

No wonder MacCaig feels suspicious of the very medium he has such facility with - he recognises that, in some respects, language distances us from the very world we try to evoke through it. Two interesting books I've been reading this week about the evolution of language also illuminate how language might feel like a distancing mechanism at times. Merlin Donalds's 'Origins of the Modern Mind' and Steven Mithen's 'The Singing Neanderthals' both suggest that human language developed from an earlier 'mimetic' stage of communication relying on gesture, emotive vocalisations and movement. Like McGilchrist, both authors believe that this pre-linguistic, mimetic form of communication was quite adequate in itself, but social and geographical pressures (larger social groups and greater mobility) made a more structured, abstract system of communication necessary. The introduction of writing at a much later stage and the capacity for external information storage that provided introduced a further, necessary level of abstraction. In 'The Master and his Emissary', McGilchrist traces the development of language from pictograms to ideograms to syllabics and phonemics, suggesting that writing became more abstracted too and that in our remaining syllabic languages, "meaning is less arbitrary, more clearly rooted in the world out of which it emenates."

Merlin Donald argues that each early evolutionary stage of language development (episodic culture and mimetic culture) remains embedded within the overall architecture of the human mind in a vestigal way. How, then, does the holistic, mimetic, embodied communication we used to rely on find its expression nowadays? Steven Mithen believes music is the answer. Since he thinks that music and language share a common ancestor in mimetic culture, now that language is our chief means of conveying information, music is left as a system concerned almost entirely with the expression of emotion - one of the reasons it moves us so deeply.

But the expressive world of mimetic culture also survives in prosody, the music of speech. And which literary medium makes greatest use of prosody...? As language goes, it seems poetry is far closer to the embodied world than anything else we've got. Despite MacCaig's suspicion of the 'exactness and inadequacy' of metaphor, Iain McGilchrist believes it is metaphor that connects us back to the world of experience that language was initially used to control and categorise. He argues that "a metaphor asserts a common life that is experienced in the body of the one who makes it and the separation is only present at the linguistic level." True alchemy: metaphor really does make one thing something else. As such, it tries to bridge the gap between the world and the expressive system created by language.

Some of my favourite hills, the area around Glen Coe.

Anyone reading MacCaig's descriptions of what it means to exist in a landscape briefly experiences that gap as a narrow one. Whenever I read his poem 'Climbing Suliven' with its assertion that 'my parish is / This stone, that tuft, this stone / And the cramped quarters of my flesh and bone', I'm transported back to the first Munroes I ever climbed, an ascent I thought was endless through the snow-covered Easians. And anyone who reads a poem like 'Sounds of the Day' (1965) finds themselves inhabiting its personal landscape so fully they think they might never get out again.

Norman MacCaig would have wanted the hills to have the last word. In 'Humanism', having compared a glacier to an army, MacCaig turns on himself, the poet:

What a human lie is this. What greed and what

arrogance, not to allow

a glacier to be a glacier -

to humanise into a metaphor

that long slither of ice - 

...and he concludes ominously thus:

I defend the glacier that

when it absorbs a man

preserves his image

intact.

Confabulatory, my dear Watson

"Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another..." - Robert Frost

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty" - that is all ye know
on earth and all ye need to know'
- Keats' 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'.

Rita Ann-Higgins once observed that"to get at the poetic truth it is not always necessary to tell the what-actually-happened truth; these times I lie." We're all familiar with the idea that the truth of a poem may not always be a literal one, that the poet lies, even, in the service of a 'greater' truth (if, like Keats, we are willing to conflate beauty itself with truth). Perhaps less familiar is the notion that these creative distortions have a parallel in the functional asymmetry of the brain.

In 'The Telltale Brain', V.S. Ramachandran reports the case of an intelligent sixty year old woman who was paralysed after a right hemisphere stroke. Upon examination, the exchange between doctor and patient went like this:

"Nora, how are you today?" I asked.
"Fine, Sir, except for the hospital food. It's terrible."

"Well, let's take a look at you. Can you walk?"

"Yes." (Actually, she hadn't taken a single step in the last week.)

"Nora, can you use your hands, can you move them?"

"Yes."

"Both hands?"

"Yes." (Nora had not used a fork in a week.)

"Can you move your left hand?"

"Yes, of course."

"Touch my nose with your left hand."

Nora's hand remains motionless.

"Are you touching my nose?"

"Yes."

Later, when Ramachandran grabs Nora's lifeless left arm and raises it to her face, asking her whose hand this is, she replies that it's her mother's, not her's. Asked to touch her own nose with her left hand, she grabs and lifts it with her right hand and uses it as a tool to touch her nose, showing that, even though she was denying her left arm was paralysed, she must have recognised that it was on some level.

This process is known as confabulation, the spontaneous production of false memories. Obvious confabulation like Nora's is usually a result of the left hemisphere running unchecked after right hemisphere damage. One function of the left hemisphere is to stablilise our behaviour and make what we do seem internally consistent. It helps us to form a coherent narrative. The left hemisphere may often fabricate information in the service of the bigger picture, the overall view of the self. As Rama puts it, "if there is a small piece of anomalous information that doesn't fit your 'big picture' belief system, the left hemisphere tries to smooth over the discrepancies and anomalies in order to preserve the coherence of self and the stability of behaviour." Normally, we seldom notice this tendency, but it is strikingly apparent in the case of patients like Nora who have sustained damage to the right hemisphere, which acts as a check on the confabulating left, reminding us of holistic, external reality.

I'd suggest that poetry's relationship with truth can often be seen as a series of productive confabulations, designed to preserve the internal coherence of the poem. If taken too far, confabulation in real life can be pathological (deluding yourself into thinking you are rich enough to buy a Ferrari, for example) but, within the domain of the poem, confabulation is benign, sometimes even crucial. The very process of metaphor is a kind of elegant confabulation: producing a new truth from something that is not literally true but becomes so within the argument of the poem. For example, when Norman MacCaig tells us in his wonderful poem 'Movements' that 'lark drives invisible pitons in the air / And hauls itself up the face of space', we believe him in the service of the poem's truth, the idea poem's narrator 'sees' these animal movements so vividly he can 'become them, here, / In this room's stillness.'

When we write, poets confabulate all the time, sometimes without even knowing we're doing so. Since a poem is often forged from the connection between two otherwise unrelated ideas (embodied most strikingly in sonnets, where the 'turn' can take the poem in a different direction), facts become merged, discrepancies are necessarily smoothed over in the service of the poem's particular message.

Paul Muldoon has written amusingly about the origins of his well-known, off-kilter sonnet 'Quoof' (the title poem of his 1983 collection): 'Quoof' was a family word for a hot bottle, something Muldoon had taken to be passed on by his parents: "a shibboleth of the kind that occurs in the private language of any family".  In the poem, this becomes a symbol for language's limits and possibilities, how the narrator has used the word, 'taken it to so many lovely heads / or laid it between us like a sword'.  Discussing the poem, Muldoon remarks: "I wondered a long time about the etymology of this word 'quoof'. Did it come from Gaelic? From Elizabethan English, like so many of my father's words? According to him, he first heard it from us, his children."  To the poet, all remembering is a kind of half-deliberate misremembering.

Whilst I certainly won't make a habit of using my own poems in 'Poetry and the Brain' (luckily for all concerned) an example from my work seems fitting  here because I can offer insider knowledge about the process behind the piece and ruin its effect entirely afterwards by explaining some of it; a liberty I wouldn't dare take with someone else's work. Here's a poem I wrote recently, set in a well-known Sheffield pub:

Fagan’s

Themed quiz, the host part-drunkard, part-Messiah,

his long hair lapping at his mustard tie.

I’m trying to connect everything with fire:

the page reads starter, cracker, fighter, fly.

My pints of Moonshine and my team of one.

The strip lights catch the table like a spark.

I turned to ask you something and you’d gone -

the windows give their version of the dark.

Half way down West Street, you’ll be lighting up.

What links the fire of London, and the colour blue?

I’m wondering if a match would be enough

or if there’s really no smoke without you.


As I started writing it, this poem rapidly became a confabulation of different memories: the second grafted onto the first for illustrative purposes. This poem could be read as a straightforward, autobiographical narrative. There'd be no reason for the reader to suppose otherwise. In actual fact, here were two things: a memory of one of Fagans' remarkable, peculiar pub quiz nights (where we really did have to connect everything with fire) and a second notion of a personal loss, or perhaps an imagined, symbolic loss. The departure described in the poem didn't happen literally as it's implied in the narrative. Rather, the night in Fagan's became a vehicle for giving a vague idea a more concrete form - whether or not it succeeds, of course, is another matter! A series of smaller confabulations took place along the way. For example the details of the 'host' in the first stanza are invented too, though the words 'starter, cracker, fighter, fly' are faithfully recalled: we confabulate in the service of rhyme and meter as well as thematic unity.

Richard Wilbur

I won't say too much more about 'Fagan's', save for pointing out that many of my poems come about through this kind of confabulation of memory, this kind of juxtaposition. I'd like to finish with the words of someone much more erudite, Richard Wilbur, whose poem 'Lying' muses on some of these themes. Starting thus:

To claim, at a dead party, to have spotted a grackle,
When in fact you haven't of late, can do no harm...

The poem continues to argue this is justifiable, will not rupture 'the delicate web of human trust', for

...in the strict sense, of course,
We invent nothing, merely bearing witness
to what each morning brings again to light.

Finally:

...and so it is with that most rare conception, nothing.
What is it, after all, but something missed?

Poetry is the alchemy of turning myriad nothings into strange somethings. Such alchemy often relies on confabulation: a tendency we all have, embodied in the functional asymmetry of the brain.

Blood and narrative: the synaesthetic world

On Monday night, John Burnside won the T.S. Eliot prize for his latest collection 'Black Cat Bone', which also gained him The Forward Prize in October 2011. The word most often used to describe Burnside's work, it seems, is 'liminality' and it was no surprise to see The Guardian in September hailing 'Black Cat Bone' as a "tour de force of liminal expression". It's true that Burnside's narrators often occupy a melancholy no-man's land, somewhere between love and fear, between forest and village, between pursuit and capture. The character in the opening poem, 'The Fair Chase' is engaged in a hunt that leads him to nothing, leaves him trapped in

a search for something I could never name
the blue of a smile, or the curious 
pleasure of the doomed as they go under...

Lost childhoods, things 'glimpsed / but never really seen' ('Loved and Lost'), sinister worlds 'known since girlhood', presences that can only be guarded by being buried all stalk the pages of Burnside's new book. The world is expressed as its own negative. As Burnside says in 'Creaturely', 'the only gift is knowing we belong to nothing.' The metaphors Burnside uses to evoke this ‘other-world’ in his poetry are shadowy themselves, their vehicles vague, or sometimes even impossibilities, as in ‘Hearsay’:

At the back of my mind there is always

the freight-line that no longer runs

in a powder of snow

In a sense, Burnside’s are negative metaphors, relations between things that are often beyond our conception. In a 1970 study of Proust, Kamber and Macksey define negative metaphors as those in which an initially posited sensation moves towards an imaginary one; not rooting sensations in the known world, but moving beyond it. In Burnside’s metaphors, sometimes both tenor and vehicle are elusive or imaginary. 

Yet there's something dissatisfyingly vague about the term 'liminal' in relation to Burnside's work. I think the power of 'Black Cat Bone' partly lies in something of neuroscientific interest, in the phenomenon of synaesthesia. Recent work by V.S. Ramachandran has brought synaesthesia, the "perceptual experience by which stimuli presented through one modality will spontaneously evoke sensations in an unrelated modality" into the spotlight. Previously regarded as an epiphenomenon or even an illusion, synaesthesia has now been established as a neural condition with a genetic component, believed to affect between 2-4% of the population. Synaesthesia, Ramachandran believes, is the result of 'cross-activations' between different areas of the brain (most commonly, number and colour V4 areas, which are adjacent) as a result of defective neural pruning, leaving the synesthete with an excess of neural connections. Most intriguingly, Ramachandran proposes that synaesthesia - otherwise a trait of limited utility - remains in populations because of its relationship to metaphor. Unsurprisingly, synaesthesia is more common amongst artists and the cross-activations it involves are conducive to creative thought.

The poet John Kinsella, who withdrew from this year's T.S. Eliot prize is a synesthete and has written about some of his sensory experiences. Regardless of whether individual writers may benefit from the cross-activations of synaesthesia, I'd argue that a number of interesting poetic images try to emulate (and therefore stimulate) the synaesthetic process in the reader. 'Black Cat Bone' is a deeply synaesthetic collection. Burnside is fond of strange sensory pairings and his latest collection is teeming with them: 'musk and terror', 'blood-warmth and pollen', 'gunsmoke and cyan', 'blood and narrative', 'hymns / and ghost towns' the 'moss and curvature / of nightfall', or the 'tinnitus of longing'. Burnside's ghost-couplings often pair unlikely sensory qualities and surprise us with how right these seem. There's an easy profundity about some of these pairs at times, a sense of mystery-achieved-too-easily, perhaps, which isn't as present in his earlier collections.

Sometimes, these sensory transmutations are strikingly vivid. In 'Transfiguration' the final description of 'blood exchanged for fire' and 'thoughts for stone' shocks us with a near-physical force. It's strange, then, that what these images finally leave us with is a tantalising sense of 'something like the absence of ourselves / from our own lives' ('The Listener'). Their imprecision often gives them a paradoxical resonance.

As Ramachandran argues, we are all synaesthetes on a very basic level (language itself being a kind of synaesthesia). More than that, I'd say poetry readers long for the kind of rich, sensory experiences that some synaesthetes report. Luckily, we can approximate them or invent our own through the strange, absorbing imaginative experiences poetry affords us. But don't take my word for it. To experience the strange alchemy of 'Black Cat Bone' for yourself, you can hear John Burnside reading some of the poems from it here.

Bemused by The Muse

The Greek concept of the Muse is ancient (Ancient, even) but not forgotten. Robert Graves popularised the modern idea of the poet's Muse, suggesting its divine inspiration was manifested in certain women "in whom the goddess is to some degree resident". Whilst contemporary poets might not always see the Muse in Graves' terms ('Er, Bob, meet Karen, my Muse'), the notion that poems come to us from 'elsewhere' still holds firm. According to Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, "a poem is a smuggling of something back from the otherworld, a prime bit of shoplifting where you get something out the door before the buzzer goes off." Elsewhere, Stephen Dobyns has suggested that "writing poems is like waiting for lightening to strike". Whether our metaphors for inspiration draw on the underworld or the heavens, the idea that the best poems come unbidden is familiar to most poets. You can hear Ted Hughes talking about the strange arrival of his poem 'The Thought Fox' here.

Julian Jaynes' audacious book, 'The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind' suggests that Muses and the art of poetry itself are partly explained by the evolution of the human brain. His discursive exploration of what consciousness is (or, more intriguingly, what it isn't) offers the startling suggestion that human beings were not in fact 'conscious' (in the sense of having an analog sense of 'I' and 'me' and narratizing experience) until between 700 and 900 BC.

Up to this point, early man had developed a 'bicameral mind' with two unconscious halves, one symbolising man (the follower) and one symbolising God (the executive). Auditory hallucinations, believed to be from the Gods, told people what to do and imposed an order. In other words, one half of the brain 'spoke' while the other listened and obeyed. Later on, geological, social and economic changes created pressures that led to the bicameral mind developing the facets we now associate with consciousness (here, you'll have to forgive me for summarising an argument that Jaynes builds painstakingly, in great historical detail, since it's the concept of the bicameral mind that interests me rather than its later evolution). Suffice to say, the brain's inherent plasticity enabled it to evolve to meet the new needs of civilisation. The shift from the bicameral mind to consciousness is reflected, Jaynes believes, in the 'Iliad': whilst "the earliest writing of men in a language that we can really comprehend...reveals a very different mentality from our own", later additions to the 'Iliad' show signs of something more akin to modern, subjective consciousness.

This duality of ancient mentality is represented, Jaynes argues, in the duality of the cerebral hemispheres and the functional asymmetry of the brain: a different, if not entirely contradictory account of the brain's historical duality can be found in Iain McGilchrist's 'The Master and his Emissary', of course. Some of the holistic guiding and planning functions of the right hemipshere echo the function of God in the bicameral mind. Discussing the left hemisphere's specialisation in some structural, literal aspects of language, Jaynes suggests "the language of man was involved with only one hemisphere in order to leave the other free for the language of the Gods". He is over-simplifying his case here - both hemispheres have important, complimentary roles in language comprehension and production (see writers such as Hellige if you want an excruciating level of detail) - but as a metaphor, it's fascinating.

Most crucially for our purposes, Jaynes believes that the evolution and decline of the bicameral mind is intrinsically linked with the nature of poetry. Poetry, Jaynes argues, began as a form of incantatory, divine knowledge, "the language of the Gods". The "association of rhythmical or repetitively patterned utterance with supernatural knowledge" gave poetry the ability to command where prose could only ask. Speech is primarily of the left hemisphere (or the domain of man), but song is of the right hemisphere (or the realm of the gods and auditory hallucination): strikingly, patients with left hemisphere damage who have lost the ability to speak often retain the ability to sing. Thus poetry, with its origins in song, retains something of that early, hallucinatory quality, even though it has since become a hybrid form with "the metrical feet of song and the pitch glissandes of speech", its evolution from incantation to more conscious recitation mirroring the breakdown of the bicameral mind.

The Muses were once seen as a very real phenomenon. Now, Jaynes suggests, they are evoked as part of our nostalgia for the bicameral mind. The mystery of why poets feel they write better when they aren't consciously constructing but rather 'listening' lies in poetry's transition from divine gift to human craft. Take heed, poets: if Jaynes is to believed, "consciousness is a witch beneath whose charms pure inspiration gasps and dies into invention". That's why you get your best lines when you're running for the bus, or trying to concentrate on what somebody else is saying, or giving a lecture, or chasing your wayward dog. Great poetry retains that sense of the 'other' world it was once believed to belong to. The auditory hallucinations reported by Milton, Rilke and, of course, Blake are part of this bicameral aspect.

Writing about 'The Asylum Dance' in a piece quoted in the prose collection 'Don't Ask Me What I Mean', John Burnside said:  "if anything could have served, for me, as a reminder that poetry is a shared practice, ...inspired by the pauses in conversation and the sounds and silences of habitat, it was the writing of this book, where so much arose from the relationship between the making of a poem and the act of listening, not only to other humans, but - in a hopelessly clumsy way - to the land and the water and the air." It seems only appropriate, then, to end with his poem 'The Inner Ear':

It never switches off; even asleep
we listen in to gravity itself.

Crossing a field is one long exercise
in equilibrium - a player's grace -

though what we mean by that
has more to do

with music
than the physics we imagine.

A history of forest and the murk
of oceans, nice

adjustments
in the memory of bone

lead us to this: the gaze;
the upright form

Lemur and tree-shrew linger in the spine
becoming steps: a track worn in the grass

a moment's pause
before the rain moves in.

The drunkard's walk and the red wheelbarrow

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain 

water

beside the white

chickens

...that's if you take William Carlos Williams' word for it. And, on the whole, we do. So much depends... but why? The spare elegance of this now classic poem relies not just on its deft simplicity and nicely audacious line breaks, but on our capacity for over-signification. In truth, so much depends on you, dear reader.

In my last blog post, I was looking at the notion of an optimism bias and how it might influence reading behaviour as well as a general outlook on life. But we aren't just overly optimistic by nature. In his recent book 'The Believing Brain' (2011), Michael Shermer takes a fascinating look at a more fundamental cognitive bias, a tendency he calls 'patternicity'. Patternicity is 'the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless data'. Shermer describes the brain as a 'belief engine' and argues that patternicity is also accompanied by agenticity, 'the tendency to infuse patterns with meanings, intentions and agency': in other words, we see patterns everywhere and we assume that they aren't random.

I first came across the notion of patternicity in a Cambridge pub (where else) late at night when someone far more intelligent and eloquent about these matters lent me a copy of Leonard Mlodinow's 'The Drunkard's Walk'. It's a fascinating, statistical and mathematical examination of how we miscalculate probabilities in daily life and often underestimate the role of chance. Amongst other things, such miscalculations can influence gambling behaviour, social and political decision making and economic decisions. To quote Tim Radford in The Guardian, Mlodinow engagingly demonstrates that 'almost everything that happens in life is contingent upon a series of unconscious gambles: of turnings taken, of chance encounters and unconsidered choices - in short, the drunkard's walk of the title.'

Why do such tendencies persist? In 'The Believing Brain', Shermer makes a compelling if basic case for the role of natural selection. Imagine a hominid, three million years ago, walking along the savanna and hearing a rustle in the grass. Is it just the wind or is it a dangerous predator? Assuming the latter when it's really just the wind would be a Type 1 statistical error or false positive - a non-existent pattern. But in this case, the Type 1 error has no negative consequences. Assume the noise is nothing to worry about, however, when a predator is lurking in the bushes and you're prehistoric mincemeat, no longer a member of the homonid gene pool. False positives are less harmful than false negatives.  Thus, as Shermer suggests 'there was a natural selection for the cognitive process of assuming that all patterns are real and that all patternicities represent real and important phenomena.'

Amongst other things, we use these patternistic tendencies for facial recognition and for mimicry, an essential aspect of learning. Thus, it's not surprising that Shermer goes on to posit a connection between mirror neurons and agenticity. Our capacity for Theory of Mind makes us more likely to assume patterns (particularly with regard to human behaviour) are meaningful. Shermer also believes that dopamine - a chemical transmitter substance - is most closely related to neural correlates of belief. Put simply, dopamine assists learning behaviour on a neural level, enhancing the transmitting ability of neurons at a given time and thus increasing synaptic connections in response to a perceived pattern. Interestingly, experimental research by Brugger and Mohr showed that people with high levels of dopamine were more likely to find significance in coincidences and patterns where no real patterns existed in an experimental context.

Creativity, of course, is a kind of discriminate patternicity (as opposed to some forms of psychosis, which can be characterised by indisriminate patternicity). But reading poetry can be an unconscious exercise in patternicity too. Don Paterson has written about the 'contract' the reader enters into when they know they are reading a poem: in simple terms, we assume that the words in the poem have connotative as well as denotative meaning. We assume that no image is arbitrary. We assume that William Carlos Williams couldn't just as easily have chosen a blue wheelbarrow and some slightly off-colour ducks (to your left, a group of said ducks in North Yorkshire this Christmas). Reading a poem is an over-signifying enterprise. As Paterson puts it in 'The Lyric Principle':

'Humans – no doubt in an act of vital compensation for their habit of hypercategorization, and the fragmented perception it brings - will connect any two unrelated things you care to throw at them...Poets take advantage of this by prompting or initiating just such a game of connection, presenting the reader with elements that, on a casual glance, seem only indirectly related - or not related at all.'
Of course, this means readers may see patterns or connections the poet did not intend - most writers will have read an over-analytic response to one of their poems at some point, or been accosted after a reading and commended on a meaning they never dreamt of themselves. Billy Collins pokes gentle fun at this in his poem 'Litany', a piece that suggests the arbitrary nature of some imagery:

You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker,
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air...


(I strongly recommend listening to the whole poem).

Poets can exploit the patternistic tendencies of readers too. To quote Don Paterson again: 'when the poem is too discontinuous, and insufficient context has been provided to link its elements, the reader compensates by sending their connecting faculty into overdrive, and starts finding connections and significances for which they were given absolutely no cue.' (I did an experiment with small focus groups in 2007, which involved a blind reading of transcribed schizophrenic speech alongside certain poems with their lineation taken out to see if participants could tell the difference - the results were interesting, but would warrant a blog post all of their own!).

To suggest that reading poetry involves our innate patternistic bias isn't to diminish poetry's power. Our tendency towards patternicity is part of what gives us continuing pleasure in reading poems, full of rich connections in sound, sense and structure for us to enjoy. I'll leave you with a poem by Paul Muldoon, that master of hyperconnection. William Logan has described his recent poems as driven by 'gusts of rhymes' and 'whirlpools of puns': 'a phrase in Muldoon may scuttle in and out of a poem, meaning something different each time'. The effect in his later collections can be bewildering on a first read; patternicity accelerated, perhaps. This poem is taken from his 1987 collection 'Meeting the British' and I've always thought it has something interesting to say about the nature of connection-making itself.

Something Else

When your lobster was lifted out of the tank
to be weighed
I thought of woad,
of madders, of fugitive, indigo inks,

of how Nerval
was given to promenade
a lobster on a gossamer thread,
how, when a decent interval 

had passed
(son front rouge encor du baiser de la reine)
and his hopes of Adrienne

proved false,
he hanged himself from a lamp-post
with a length of chain, which made me think

of something else, then something else again.

None more black

Poets are used to accusations of being depressing. It practically goes with the territory. Sometimes, such accusations are pointed. Reviewing Don Paterson's collection 'Rain' in the TLS in 2010, critic Robert Potts quoted Spinal Tap's Nigel Tufnel: 'it's like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black'. Writing in the New Criterion in 2001, William Logan suggested, in passing, that it helps to be a masochist to read poetry. Certainly, a good, bleak poem can make us question our own complacency. I'm reminded of the moment at the end of Michael Donaghy's marvellous 'Upon a Claude Glass', (part-meditation on the folly of gazing at 'the romance in the box' instead of the real landscape) where he turns on the reader:

Don't look so smug. Don't think you're any safer
as you blunder forward through your years

straining to recall some aching pleasure,
or blinded by some private scrim of tears...

In one of Anthony Hecht's most powerful, bleak poems, 'The Book of Yolek', Hecht involves the implied reader, the 'you' of the poem directly, describing how they will be haunted by a holocaust victim. Great poems can be highly and deliberately active in their cheerlessness. Here's a poem that makes for uncomfortable reading by that acknowledged master of pessimism, Philip Larkin, which just happens to be one of my favourites:

Wants

Beyond all this, the wish to be alone
However the sky grows dark with invitation cards
However we follow the printed directions of sex
However the family is photographed under the flagstaff
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone.

Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs:
Despite the artful tensions of the calendar,
The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites
The costly aversion of the eyes from death---
Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs. 

An extract from Tali Sharot's new book 'The Optimism Bias' published in yesterday's Guardian implies we might find such poems slightly uncomfortable reading because we are all subject to cheerful delusion. According to Sharot (whose work examining recollections of 9/11 almost a year on showed that people's memories of unpleasant events are altered by their optimism about the future) we are 'hardwired for hope'. This has something to do with the nature of memory: as alluded to in previous blog posts, memory is a narrative, reconstructive act. In an interesting aside, Sharot suggests that memory is so fallible because it evolved to help us imagine the future. The 'mental time travel' we engage in on a daily basis has evolutionary advantages, enabling us to plan ahead and thus optimise our resources. 

Sharot and Phelps conducted an fMRI study, monitoring subjects' brain activity while they imagined specific future events. Not only did subjects tend to imagine positive future events more vividly, but the more optimistic a person was, the higher the level of activity in the amygdala and the rostral anterior cingulate cortex, central to the modulation and processing of emotion respectively. These are the same areas of the brain which show reduced activity in those suffering from depression. As such:

"while healthy people expect the future to be slightly better than it ends up being, people with severe depression tend to be pessimistically biased...People with mild depression are relatively accurate when predicting future events. They see the world as it is. In other words, in the absence of a neural mechanism that generates unrealistic optimism, it is possible all humans would be mildly depressed."

The world of Larkin's 'Wants', then, is a more accurate picture. Is it that our innate optimism enables us to live despite the 'desire of oblivion'? With our capacity for mental time travel comes an awareness that we are travelling towards death, a sense of what Freud called 'Thanatos'. Sharot suggests that the only way to supercede the defeatism that accompanies such an awareness is to develop an optimistic bias alongside it: "knowledge of death had to emerge side by side with the persistent ability to picture a bright future."

Why don't poems like 'Wants' shatter our optimistic illusions? When I first read Larkin's poem, I was incredibly moved by it because I recognised a deep truth in his evocation of 'the wish to be alone' and the 'desire of oblivion'. Art, at its best, gestures towards something we know implicitly. But 'Wants' and other similar poems don't leave us permanently depressed. Sharot argues that knowledge that we are under an illusion is not always enough to remove the illusion itself. Our cognitive biases are neural predispositions: "the glass remains half full. It is possible, then, to strike a balance, to believe we will stay healthy, but get medical insurance anyway; to be certain the sun will shine, but grab an umbrella on our way out - just in case."

Nonetheless, poetry remains an important means of challenging our complacency, showing us that our world is, for the most part, dreamed. To quote Michael Donaghy's narrator in 'Upon A Claude Glass' once more:

I know. My world's encircled by this prop,
though all my life I've tried to force it shut.