Matter over mind

In London on Tuesday, I was lucky enough to have a sneak preview of the Wellcome Collection's new exhibition, 'Brains: The Mind as Matter' which opens today on Euston Road. As Ken Arnold says in his introduction to the accompanying book, the exhibition is 'stubbornly concerned with the brain as a venerated physical object' and focuses on how matter has been seen as the key to mind. There are striking photographs by Daniel Alexander of brains in jars at a Berlin hospital; there are incredible images of what the brain looks like before it's preserved (strangely pink and fleshy - almost like an uncooked chicken); there's even the left hemisphere of mathematician Charles Babbage. The deliberate focus on physicality put me in mind of Charles Simic's poem 'Harsh Climate' which begins:

The brain itself in its skull
Is very cold...

Simic goes on to paint an interesting picture of detachment. The brain is:

Something like a stretch of tundra
On the scale of the universe.
Galactic wind.
Lofty icebergs in the distance.

Polar night.
A large ocean liner caught in the ice.
A few lights still burning on the deck.
Silence and fierce cold.

Yet the Wellcome Trust exhibition has used this idea of the brain as a detached object, a venerated thing studied in isolation as a means of generating surprising collaborations. The boundary between art and science is deliberately and repeated blurred, with scientist Ramon y Cajal's amazingly intricate drawings of synapses and neurons displayed next to Katherine Dowson's remarkable 3D laser-etched lead crystal glass representation of the brain. Artist David Marron was invited to attend a brain dissection at a London tissue bank and his response, 'Nervous Tissue Note Panel' is a spectacular collage that reflects the strange effect of what must have been both a distancing and intimate experience.

For me, some of the most striking work in the exhibition was found in Ania Dabrowska's photographs of people who have decided to donate their brains after death for research. Simply shot against black backgrounds, they show the whole person, an interesting contrast to the iconic image of the disembodied brain which figures throughout.

It's impossible to do justice to the substance of this fascinating, thoughtful exhibition. Intensely physical (the room is laid out in 'slices', which mirror the brain samples in one display cabinet and reflect the notion of the 'modular mind'), 'The mind as matter' needs to be experienced. I heartily recommend a visit.

It's not ambiguous. Is it?

'Ambiguity' is a term that those in the business of talking about poetry are always chucking around, whether that's positive ('the last line contained a pleasing ambiguity') or negative ('I think that's a bit too ambiguous'). But do we really know what we're talking about? The dictionary's always a good place to start and the OED describes ambiguity as something

1.  doubtful, questionable; indistinct, obscure, not clearly defined
2.  admitting more than one interpretation, or explanation; of double meaning, or of several possible meanings; equivocal (the commonest use.)

But is there more to it? Does ambiguity have a specific neurological basis? And how do poets exploit this?

A poem I'm fond of discussing with other people is Simon Armitage's 'Homecoming', partly because I really like it, but partly because it often wrongfoots its audience and generates a bit of a debate. Armitage starts by asking us to do something difficult:


Think, two things on their own and both at once.
The first, that exercise in trust, where those in front

stand with their arms spread wide and free-fall

backwards, blind, and those behind take all the weight.

The second, one canary-yellow cotton jacket

on a cloakroom floor, uncoupled from its hook,

becoming scuffed and blackened underfoot... 

Having imagined these two things and tried to perform the impossible feat of holding both in our minds at once, we're taken on a journey back through the addressee's childhood. A family argument (we assume, about the damaged jacket) has taken place.Having been sent off to bed, at midnight, the addressee sneaks out of the house and slips out to a phone box at the end of the street. Here, the poem shifts again from simple anecdote and surprises us, the narrator declaring:


I’m waiting by the phone, although it doesn’t ring

because it’s sixteen years or so before we’ll meet.

Retrace that walk towards the garden gate; in silhouette

a father figure waits there, wants to set things straight.

This surprising interjection and the mental time-travel it involves brings the focus of the poem back to the relationship between the narrator and the person he or she is addressing. It sets us up for the final stanza, in which another shift is required of us:

These ribs are pleats or seams. These arms are sleeves.

These fingertips are buttons, or these hands can fold

into a clasp, or else these fingers make a zip

or buckle, you say which. Step backwards into it

and try this same canary-yellow cotton jacket, there,

like this, for size again. It still fits.

I'm always very interested in the different conjectures people make about the narrative details of this moving, deceptively simple poem. 'Homecoming' involves a certain level of ambiguity, but it also invites us to think about the nature of ambiguity at the same time, that strange process of trying to 'think, two things on their own and both at once.'

Scientist Semir Zeki has attempted a neurobiological definition of ambiguity which might challenge the OED in some ways. In a 2003 paper examining the ways we deal with visual stimuli that are open to more than one plausible visual interpretation, he looks at the role of what he calls 'essential nodes' in the micro-consciousness of appraising a certain visual stimuli for its plausibility. At any given time, only one plausible interpretation of a stimuli is possible. But where that stimuli is ambiguous, consciousness must be shifted from one plausible interpretation to another. Furthermore, once we have seen something in more than one way, this ambiguity is stable: it's very difficult to switch to just one interpretation. This is illustrated by certain ambiguous pictures; once we are aware of two ways of seeing an image like the Rubin vase (above), we will always see two.

Young woman or old woman?

Zeki suggests "a neurobiologically based definition of ambiguity is the opposite of the dictionary definition; it is not uncertainty, but certainty—the certainty of many, equally plausible interpretations, each one of which is sovereign when it occupies the conscious stage". 

To leap back into the world of poetry, there seem to be a few interesting parallels. The Armitage example is a particularly good one, but poems often involve a certain degree of ambiguity and thus a certain amount of work on the part of the reader to fill in the gaps. Narratives often lead us a merry dance through time (as in Michael Donaghy's excellent 'Black Ice and Rain'). Even images themselves can be ambiguous (what's the significance of a particular metaphor? Or why has the poet chosen to tell us one glove was left on the table? It can't be arbitrary...can it?) Because poems are defined by their relative brevity, everything within them becomes connotative. The poem is the art of leaving things unsaid. But readers are often very certain in their interpretations - once we've navigated a path through the poem's ambiguity, we aren't going to retrace it in a hurry in case we get lost. Even when those interpretations verge on the comical, critics tend to defend their particular approach to a poem's ambiguity. Uncertainty can lead to a kind of dogmatic certainty. It seems another pleasant irony of the human condition!

Such stuff as dreams are made on

Let dreaming whippets lie...

Dreams can be gifts to poets, as far as material goes. Not that dream where you're 16 and being forced to sit your G.C.S.Es again, unaccountably naked, but those other, stranger dreams - the ones that intrude on waking life, the ones that absorb you so completely, you aren't sure if they really happened or not. As the poet Andrew Greig puts it:

...the best thing a dream
can do is remind you
it's not true

and the distressed lady
carrying her mutilated liver in a handbag
will not die,
not because you've saved her or failed her
as you rummaged frantically through her entrails,
but because she does not exist.

His poem deals with that state between sleeping and waking, where everything seems half-true and

...to truly wake up is to know the reason
you cannot grasp that rope underwater
is there is no rope, no water,
only grasping -

'Grasping' is an apt word to describe dreams: we've all known what it's like to wake up with a sense of something half-remembered, the sense of having emerged from a world we'd like to get back to if we could, but the dream's slipping away faster than we can remember its details. Dreams recollected in poems are constructions and they often capture the nature of dreaming better than the world of the individual dream itself.

Of course, that acknowledged, grand interpreter of dreams, Sigmund Freud had much to say about what creative writing and daydreaming have in common. Michael Donaghy makes an arch nod to the significance of dream interpretation in therapy with his poem 'Analysand' which begins:

I've had an important dream. But that can wait.
I want to talk about Ephraim Herrero
And the cobalt-blue tattoo of Mexico
That graced his arm above the wrist.

Dreams for poets are often points of departure and there's often something easy, something liberating about bringing dreams into writing: the strange logic of the dream seems to permit a certain freedom. Irving Massey (2003) has written at length about the nature of language in dreams in his book The Neural Imagination.

Massey is interested in the fact that dreams are (usually) primarily visual rather than linguistic and that, when language does feature in dreams, it seems far more disconnected and less functional than language in everyday life: as he puts it, language in dreams never 'tells'. Massey gives the example of dreams in which he can just remember a particular phrase or pairing of words, attached to an image. A vivid example of my own springs to mind: I once dreamt I was on a stage in front of an audience, trying to decipher a piece of paper that just contained images like the pictures on fruit machines. The words I kept hearing in the dream were 'two people'. Their relationship to the scene, or to the pictures on the paper was unclear, but the words stayed in my head when I woke up.

Massey tentatively suggests that dream language is a product of the left-hemisphere with its vigilant, logical linguistic approach (for a much less simplistic account of this, see previous posts on Iain McGilchrist or, better still, read his book) 'resting' for the night. As such, freed from these categorising tendencies "language in dreams is not required to be responsible, it does not have to follow the rules." When left hemipshere control is relaxed, language is looser, more associative and more musical. Massey likens this to a kind of 'private language' and suggests that the way we use words the rest of the time is a product of the intrusion of others into our mental life. As such "dreams...have a way of jogging us into the uncomfortable awareness that thought and word may be incompatible." Words in everyday discourse tell us something about the thought that gave rise to them, but they are not direct representations of that thought. Therefore "in dreams, we achieve a coherence that consciousness cannot hope to imitate."

This put me in mind of  Ignacio Matte-Blanco's concept of the 'indivisible world', an unconscious understanding that exists in us that all things in the world are really one, which exists in parallel to our conscious tendency to form categories. It might be speculated that this is part of the reason we find metaphor so appealling; in forging strange, new links between separate things it takes us back to the indivisible world (Don Paterson has written at more length and in more interesting ways about this elsewhere).

Massey's argument is attractive, not least because he goes on to suggest that the way poets use language in their poems mimics the way language operates in dreams - poetry, he believes is a kind of 'learned relaxation' in which the ordinary communicative functions of language may not always be dominant. To me, this neglects the extent to which poetry is construction as well as inspiration. Massey's argument is seductive but still a bit simplistic: the idea that the left hemisphere is selectively 'switched off' in sleep would need to be refined to make it convincing.

All the same, there's a sense of the inevitable, the unforced about language in dreams. I once had the strange experience of falling asleep and waking up with an entire (short) poem in my head. I didn't try to make sense of it, but wrote it down as it was:

I watched the anorexic patient

in a room denied by light.

She was staring at a portrait

of a dancer by Degas,

hungrily taking in the legs

slim as white candlesticks,

the gather of the waist,

caught in the alchemy of her desire

imagining a look could be enough:

the picture turning to a mirror

and her arching into it

like a dancer lifted up

and handed through the frame

from dark to dark.

I haven't a clue what that means. How much of the poem was really 'dreamed' and how much quickly constructed as I woke up, I'm not sure, but it was certainly thought-provoking. None of which gets us any closer to understanding the mysterious way language operates in dreams, but it's interesting that my poem was very visual, as poets' replications of dreams often are too. Let's go back to Michael Donaghy's 'Analysand', who leaves us with a visual sequence so sharp it almost nicks us:

Which brings me to the dream, if we have time.
I'm wading across a freezing river at night
Dressed in a suit and tie. A searchlight
Catches me mid-stream. I try to speak.


But someone steps between me and the beam.
The stars come out as if for an eclipse.
Slowly, he raises his finger to his lips.
I wake before he makes the tearing sound.