Poetry and Human Nervous Systems

Eight years or so ago I read a book called The Psychobiology of Mind-Body Healing, by Ernest L. Rossi. Subtitled "New Concepts of Therapeutic Hypnosis," it was challenging and almost unduly interesting. When we hear or read words, a fantastic world of non-conscious systems gets kicked into gear. The ramifications staggered me. I remember thinking something along the lines of, "This is too powerful. It can't be correct...can it?" 


We already have life-experiences with language, words, phrases, the way they're conveyed...all of this effects the limbic system and hypothalamus (emotional brain), which reverberates to the frontal cortex. But the emotional brain, being involved, means that information cascades to all parts of the body via the neuropeptide system and involves the endocrine system/autonomic nervous system, and the immune system. And that's just the basics. The book was a tough slog, but a total buzz, and even if I only understood 30% of it, it was worth it. 


The upshot: just more evidence that Descartes was wrong. Mind and body are not separate at all. They have always been a unity, and Descartes fell prey to an overweening rationalism, or a "tender-mindedness," as William James might have put it.


(Around age 12 I accidentally "discovered" that, if I summoned a certain type of image in my "mind" almost immediately a radical reaction took place in an area near my pelvic region...Some academics would hear my personal story, and vis a vis Descartes, say my experience constituted "dissentual data." Okay, but it seemed fairly "sensual" to me!)


In the ensuing months, I began to feel haunted by some ideas Rossi's book seemed to suggest. The book was concerned with the psychobiology of hypnosis and how it "worked" in healing. But it also "suggested" almost too much about the electronic media and politics, how advertising works, how political language could be used...I started to feel paranoid. On this topic of language and politics I will blog in future days, goddess willing, but I'd rather use this time to talk about something beautiful along the lines (hypnotically?) suggested in Rossi's book: poetry, and how it might infuse us, psychobiologically.

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I recently read a lecture that one of my favorite living poets, Robert Hass, gave in May, 2003, in Berkeley, "On Teaching Poetry." In the middle of the lecture he talks about teaching Keats's "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," a poem he fell in love with in high school.

Here's Hass:

"The narrator of that poem comes across a lonely knight who is 'alone and palely loitering' around a withered lake. The narrator asks him what his ailment is, and the knight tells the story of a beautiful woman, or some kind of female creature, who took him into her cave and made love to him and abandoned him before he woke up in the morning; and he, the knight, can't leave the place where this occurred because she might come back again [...] One of the delicious moments in the poem is the young knight's description of his seduction:

                She looked at me as she did love,
                 And made sweet moan.


"Now, if you will, say that last phrase aloud. 'And made sweet moan.'"

Hass says that when he teaches this, young men in his class are not daydreaming. They are paying attention. But there's a nuance to this charged eroticism about paralysis by ideal beauty, and it's in the physicality of a line like "And made sweet moan." Hass again, on what happens when you say those words:

"...if you articulate just the sequence of vowel sounds - ahhh, aayyy, eeeee, ooooh - is that they begin in the far back of the throat, move to the mid-back, to the mouth, and then breathe out through the lips, in a perfectly modulated and progressive release of breath. That's one of the first things poetry is: the physical structure of the actual breath of a given utterance and its emotion."

Hass says, and I believe him due to personal experience, that even if we read the musicality of poetry to ourselves, there's a mental equivalent to the physical sensation, and it becomes deeply implanted in us, its effects are deeper than any of the "ideas" the poem may be offering. The resonance of our nervous systems and the ideas comes a bit later.

Let us attend to the sounds of words and their musicality.

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The Mad Poet Ezra Pound called this musical aspect of poetry melopoeia. In his essay from 1927 or '28, "How To Read," he says this about melopoeia:


"The melopoeia can be appreciated by a foreigner with a sensitive ear, even though he be ignorant of the language in which the poem is written. It is practically impossible to transfer or translate it from one language to another, save perhaps by divine accident, and for half a line at a time." - p.25 of Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, but "How To Read" is found all over the place.


NOW: what does this line from Ezra Pound do to all the non-conscious systems in your body?:


                                          As cool as the pale wet leaves 
                                               of lily-of-the-valley,
                                          She lay beside me in the dawn.


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The Hass lecture is from a pressing of only 400 paperbound copies, but it will probably turn up in some collection of his, if it hasn't already. I highly recommend his book of poems, Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005. It'll do unspeakable things to your entire nervous system!