TOTAL POETRY

Farsi poem about sadness

A wealth of research and finely written essays testifies to the unique value of poetry though it may be quite different from one culture to another.  Our own experience tells us that poetry is at least different from rationality, reasoning, or purely informational writing and at best is quite transcendent, almost religious, sweeping us into feeling.  But what IS the difference?  

In some cultures and individuals, it is the cadence of the words, the patterning for rhyme, sometimes specific subjects, its relationship to oral culture or music.  In some places it is assigned time and location: at night or on rising, some turn of the day/night.  It might be soft words of love, vigorous epithets of condemnation, or pledges of faith.

Just the same, it’s words.  I’ve been trying to push words off to the side, take wind out of their sails, reduce them and their grip on us in law, governance, required texts, fancy rhetoric that is NOT poetic, church.  And I relate this to neuron studies, particularly those that make explicit the evolution of the brain, whether reptile, mammal or human. Strangely, sometimes a wee simple worm is enlightening.

One of the most under-considered strategies of evolution is doubling back to use old structures in new ways, to link new and old structures, always to conserve.  Bells and whistles are accidents.  If the structure and function of the whole finds a way to use them -- “soooo, the larynx is in a slightly different place now -- what can it do there that it couldn’t in the old place?”  Like, TALK.  Make words by interrupting the flow of breath with sibilance and clicks and bitten-off air.  But that’s the tongue, the teeth, the palate and -- oh, the vocal chords.

The red chairs of the poets.

This is from a website (and book) called www.babelsdawn.com:

“It got me thinking about the FOXP2 gene (discussed here) that fine tuned control over the  lower jaw. One of the things we can do with that lower mouth is cough and clear our throat more easily than people without the mutation. It seems a trivial task compared with speaking precisely, but one peculiarity of human anatomy is the way our windpipe (trachea) and esophagus are available to  each other. The system allows us to speak, but at the risk of choking to death . . .

“The larynx works like a valve, opening and closing to let air pass. When it is shut, food can pass into the esophagus at no risk to the lungs. The best place for such a seal is right at the top of the trachea so that no food or drink accidentally goes even a little ways down it, but humans have a second use for the valve. We work it like a musical instrument shaping the sounds made by passing air as we speak. The musical valve works best if we pull it a bit down into the trachea so that the air wave shaped by the larynx can resonate before leaving the mouth.”

This is the entrancing stuff that babies discover by babbling.  We sing before we speak, making vowels, fricatives and plosives for the pure pleasure of the sounds.  We aren’t born speaking because anatomy recapitulates evolution -- at first the larynx is in the animal position so the baby won’t choke.  It takes four years for the larynx to have moved into the standard adult human position.  And boys who are becoming men will experience a second descent of the larynx and their voices.  Then they get guitars and are filled with emotion, potency, and new sound.  It is thought that this sexual voice change evolved earlier than baby larynx migration because deep sexy voices mean big dominant animals that make lots of babies.  Drums and brass.  Maybe.

“The fossil evidence seems to put the decline of body dimorphism based at about 2 million years ago, with the appearance of Homo in the fossil record. Is that when the male larynx began to descend?

“So far no conclusive evidence that the adolescent’s larynx descent preceded the descent of the infant larynx. Fossils might provide some ambiguous answers, but a more likely source will probably have to await understanding of the genetic control of these two processes. Then we can, perhaps, determine which genes are older.”  

Do I need to name Jane Goodall?

http://journals.lww.com/psychgenetics/pages/articleviewer.aspx?year=2006&issue=04000&article=00007&type=abstract

“Objective: A mutation in the FOXP2 gene has been the first genetic association with a language disorder. Language disorder is considered as a core symptom of schizophrenia. Therefore, the FOXP2 gene could be considered a good candidate gene for the vulnerability to schizophrenia.

“Conclusions: These results suggested that the FOXP2 gene may confer vulnerability to schizophrenic patients with auditory hallucinations.”

There are two other things FOXP2 genes can do.  They are related to “embedded recursions” which is a grammatical structure in which lists of description are attached to an object.  I taught it as “parallel structure.”  All the descriptors must be in a sequence of the same grammatical type: adjectives, or prepositional phrases, or participles.

The other thing is the FOX2P does is allow coughing to clear jams in the esophagus/windpipe crossover.  Before FOX2P, the people whose larynxes best allowed them to sing and chant poetry may have risked choking to death.

So oral poetry is made possible by anatomy, genes that control brain function (coughing is controlled by the brain and so are voices), allure in the time of human dimorphism, and a desire to share information -- but also emotion.  Writing it down is derived from the oral form.

Except that reasoning -- in the most extreme form mathematical formulas -- really needs to be written to be kept track of.  Bookkeeping is mathematical records.  But it’s embedded recursion: you have to keep the numbers in columns, parallel structures.  Maybe there’s a bit of crossover when poetry is meant to form a structure on the page as well as in speaking or even in thinking.

Adolescence is the “feeling” age which now is closely entwined with music again -- I mean, music with words, courtship music to keep the species surviving.  It’s not just physical creation of babies, but also the emotional support of lullabies and rhythm games.

The point is that we keep trying to make speech into a competition where some words are forbidden and others are imposed to show one is civilized or elite or gifted, but we neglect the older dark unconscious brain parts that are still there, still involved.  Poetry is a way to bring all the brain parts back into the game of communication: the laughter, the shivering, the capacity to trampoline to transcendence.  It must involve the sensorium, which is the only way to poke apertures through our boundaries against the world.  And that means that a poem might be memorably evocative through an object:  an old red wheelbarrow in the rain.

WHERE OUR HEADS ARE AT

The most recent neuroresearch has been so startling but so convincing that philosophers, writers, and speculators have been stampeding to catch up.  I love Barbara Ehrenreich’s writing, but it DOES give me a twinge to see her out there exploring what I thought was MY “wilderness.”  (“Living with a Wild God.”)  It’s worse that I will probably agree with her, once I catch up with the book.  Though I do NOT believe in personalizing some unknown singularity/unity/force.  But there’s no sense in hiding my cards now.

This is what’s in my hand at the moment.  First, a growing understanding of brain structure and function that came out of trying to understand what was going on with my brother and father when they had traumatic damage to their prefrontal lobe cortex that left them seemingly functional, but somehow empty.  

Second, an endorsed appreciation of the importance of the bodily sensorium, the raw intake of the WHOLE body which may in the end amount to a hundred different senses, not even counting the combined/blended senses like smell/taste.  (You know they’ve added a sense to taste?  Umami -- “yumminess.”)  The muscles are recording and sending, internal organs are recording and sending, gamma rays are shooting through us -- all this stuff goes on and we don’t even know we’re recording it: day length, for instance, and yet all creatures react to the sum and interaction of this information.

Third, the brain is not a bowl of jello.  Substructures, arranged in order of evolution, and specialized cells, imperceptible until recently, make a network with specialized organelles that connect through threads and by varying the chemicals in solution throughout the brain and into the blood.  We grow neurons, we form new nodes, we destroy old ones, in response to the sensorium which underlies and orders thinking through the use of sense memory, just as the Method acting coaches said.  We “grow” an internal world which is like a theatre with many different sets, depending on whether the action is opera, mystery, political speech, or intimacy.  

Some sophisticated “explainers” will teach the main structure of the brain by using a fist as a mnemonic device.  

Fist for a Brain

1. Extend both arms with palms open facing down and lock your thumbs. 
2. Curl your fingers to make two fists. 
3. Turn your fists inward and connect your hands until the knuckles
   touch. 
4. Cross over your thumbs. 
5. While the fists are touching, pull both toward your chest until you
   are looking down on your knuckles. This is the approximate size of your brain! Not as big as you thought? Most brains are 2% of your total body weight, about 3 pounds and the size of a small grapefruit. It’s not the size that matters, and they do not get larger with a larger person. What matters is the numbers of connections in neurons, and the number of deep crevasses or folds in the brain structure. Those connections form when stimuli result in learning. The thumbs are the front and are crossed to remind us that the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body, and the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body. The knuckles and outside part of the hands represent the cerebrum, or thinking part of the brain. 
6. Spread your palms apart and keep your knuckles touching. Look at the tips of your fingers, which represent the limbic system or emotional area. Note how this area is buried deep within the brain, and how the fingers are mirror imaged. This reminds us that most of the structures of the limbic system are duplicated in each hemisphere. 
7. The wrists are the brainstem where vital body functions (such as body temperature, heart beat, blood pressure) are controlled. Rotating your hands shows how the brain can move on top of the spinal column, which is represented by your forearms. 

From:  ©Jerry Clemens {http://www.LZ95.org/msn/faculty/jclemens}

Here’s another version on video with a little different detail.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD-lfP1FBFk  This is Daniel Siegel’s main schtick, the basis for “Mindsight.”  It’s a good gig.  And he added something new that I’ve never resolved, which is community.

Fourth:  Behind the forehead are cells that specialize in empathy: knowing how other people feel.  It’s a sense that is unconscious -- you can’t taste it or feel it -- but it is the loss of that sense that crippled and hollowed my father and brother.  Besides the connectome in the skull responding/comprising the various mind-modes of the brain, we need also to be able to connect to the other people around us -- a community connectome.  THIS is the basis of audiences and congregations, choirs and orchestras, dance troupes and athletic teams, even writers and their readers.

Some of our groups, like our families and lovers, reach deep into us.  Some groups are pretty impersonal -- riding the bus.  Some are chosen (friends), and some are imposed (boot camp).  Teachers, preachers, judges and lovers -- all propose for us a relational connectome.  How to act, esp. in regard to others.  What our social obligations might be.  Ways to survive.  Some people are gregarious and need to be in the midst of community; others are introverts who need a lot of time alone.

I feel privileged to write alone in a small town with few real-life interactions in person.  I’m also privileged to have the kind of education that makes my print people (like email) very close, very vivid, very different from each other.  So I write to them when I write this blog.  They would shock each other and actively avoid each other in person.  

Once (when considering the ministry but wondering whether I weren’t just reacting to the UU community and the PNWD’s exceptionally charismatic set of ministers in the Seventies) I was working with a counselor and we were discussing how very different people can be from each other and yet seem so intimate and meaningful to just oneself.  She said she once threw a party for all her closest friends.  They were so different from each other that they all got into a terrible row.  What I had in common with her was an appreciation of every sort of friend -- what perplexed us was that they refused to value anyone not like themselves.  This dynamic goes lethal.  

When I was a little Presbyterian, I went happily off to St. Andrews with my classmate.  Then I invited her to come to my church, but it was forbidden.  When I was a big retired UU minister, a couple was killed in a car accident.  The Methodist minister and I attended the funeral mass of the one who was Catholic.  The priest for the other person couldn’t attend the funeral for the one who was Methodist.  Hardened boundaries between the two denominations have plagued the Blackfeet for centuries.

My original UU minister, Alan Deale, used to tell a joke about a Methodist church and a Catholic church that were next door to each other.  They felt ecumenical about it and often cooperated to do good deeds.  When the Catholics had a fund drive for a new roof, the Methodists kicked in a generous donation.  Then the Methodists became prosperous enough and were growing fast enough to build a new church, but they didn’t have enough for a new lot, so they would have to demolish the old church.  They began fund-raising and went to the Catholics.  The old priest said,  “The church rules stipulate that I can’t ever help a Protestant church grow.  But I could help destroy one.”  Then he handed over a generous check for demolishing the old church building.  His name might have been Francis.

Clear away the outdated rules and fences, the institutional underbrush, so we can see the thalweg.  The point is that these religious bodies recognized that they were part of the same community, that they had connection which is a kind of communion, that they respected their differences, and they could even hear each other’s religious music when the windows were open.

Human brains start with the molecules of the world; develop sensoria;  then form thought patterns moving through nodes in the connectome of the brain; enact actions and ideas; share in community.  You know that little child’s hand-game?  “This is the church, this is the steeple, open the doors and see all the people.”  It’s the next step in the brain-as-a-fist metaphor.  In case you’ve forgotten, here’s a kid doing it.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uksssUfLdIs

Where’s the next step after that?  Hands UP!  Twinkle, twinkle, little star.  Cosmic connection.  Maybe Ehrenreich is already there.  Take my hand.

On a predawn walk in Lone Pine, California, Ehrenreich recalls, she encountered “something alive” which she describes as nothing short of a “cataclysmic experience” when “the world flamed into life.”
 
No visual hallucination, no prophetic voices; rather, the world opened up and was “rushing out to” her. Ehrenreich writes: “Something poured into me and I poured out into it…. a furious encounter with a living substance.” 

Yes.

HEADLANDS FOR LIMINALITY

In my idea of how to think about designing an experience that is intense, clarifying, and transformative (we’ll just assume that’s possible), and using a buffalo jump as a way of thinking about the stages of doing such a thing, the beginning is something like a “headland” though that’s a geological term usually reserved for a cliff next to a sea.  The headland of a buffalo jump is a broad grassy place hospitable enough to attract and occupy a group of buffalo.  Not the limitless hordes that used to surge back and forth over the prairie, but a manageable number, maybe only a few dozen.  A congregation. I want to talk about ecological “sensorium” related to the whole phenomenon of getting buffalo to jump over a precipice, and then try to translate that into what it means for a resource for an “intense” experience.

The knowledge needed depends upon the context.  As much of the out-skin world as possible should be absorbed into the in-skin brain memories: the smell of the grass and the plants that grow among it; the stroke of the wind and its direction; how it makes the grass bend; the stage of growth of the grass and whether the other plants are budding, flowering, or gone to seed; the sounds of the bison, their piggy grunting and lionine moaning, which record the stage of their reproductive year and the presence of calves.  How do the animals and the grass interact?  Do the bison bite deep, or do they tear away to the side?  Do they accumulate a mouthful, or swallow as they go?  Do they prefer certain plants and avoid others?  Do they graze in a straight line or wander?

Sometimes hunters disguise themselves with coyote hides, since those animals are taken for granted, always slipping among the buffalo, hoping they’ll stir up a rabbit or ground squirrel, enriching their own sensorium, lifting their noses into the wind, pausing to void.  But it is not enough to wear a skin since the buffalo also note movements, sound and smell.  The sly hunter must imitate what a coyote would do as cleverly as a Method acting student trying to “become” an animal.  Even more effective might be the imitating of a buffalo calf in trouble, which will bring “nursey” cows to see what’s happening.  The point in this accounting is not the actual killing of the animal, but the long, subtle, patient, absorbing of detail into imitation strong enough to become understanding, a cross-species mind-meld that is the stock in trade of a good hunter or fisherman.

I try to imagine a congregation’s liturgist watching the people.  Does such a person notice the smells of the church space and then the people who enter?  Once I sat in the congregation of Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago -- a huge and wealthy institution -- smelling wet fur coats and the intense, nearly toxic, perfumes popular at the time.  Most churches smell of cleaning products and some have a thin hint of mouse.  A Blackfeet Bundle-Opening in the Sixties smelled of smoke smudge, elderly people who used Ben-Gay and didn’t shower every morning, and the simmering berry soup.  

These are the details that poetry and novels use, but they are also attunements to the reality one must address to be an effective celebrant.  I’m not at all sure that a designer of deep experience can be effective without knowing the people, at least as a class of society and a location on the planet.  There will be histories shared and histories unknown.  The most common complaint I hear about traditional funerals is that the pastor didn't seem to know the deceased.

So the scout preparing for a buffalo drive needs to know the mood of the herd.  Are they nervous because of thunderstorms?  Are they in rut, the males starving themselves and on the prod as they try to establish a rutting order?  (I suspect that’s not a good time for a jump.)  Are the females calving or are they in the time after calving when the babies are nursing and growing and the business of everyone is grazing and digestion?  (Not a good time to imitate a wolf.)

Maybe that’s enough to make the point that a liturgist must know in subtle and immediate ways the nature of those who have come.  If this is an institutional congregation that defines itself according to certain premises, or ethnic origin, or economic status, or historical practices, all those things should be taken into account.  For some it is the reassurance of a predictable pattern that matters and they need the factor of recognition that allows their participation with confidence.  Others need to be jolted into paying attention: maybe blindfolded, maybe asked to lie down, maybe with strange sounds.  But such things won’t work if people aren’t physically able to do as requested.  

Starhawk used to include in her events what was called a Spiral Dance.  The people formed a long line, holding hands, and then the line was curled into itself with one end in the middle and the rest of the line wrapping around it.  For Westerners who are used to avoiding body contact, or at least not random body contact, this was a startling challenge and not always comfortable, even when it was women only.  In fact, having learned from experience, Starhawk warned people who might be claustrophobic under such circumstances to NOT position themselves at the inner end and gave them permission to honorably opt-out.

Half-psychiatrist, half-anthropologist, the liturgist by whatever name needs to have a repertoire of strategies and patterns, not just a library of readings or even a drawer full of effective sermons, but movement, sound, material objects.  It takes experiment.  I had a sermon on Persephone that I accompanied with six pomegranate seeds for each person, but they were sticky and staining.  Next time I used red glass beads that looked like pomegranate seeds, but they took too long to count out.  In future I would thread six at a time into a group unless it were a small group and patient enough to count them out.  

A psychiatrist once had a practice of asking his patients to hold their arms up and out to him and pucker their mouths, like a child asking to be picked up and kissed.  He said they often broke into tears and remembered old vulnerabilities.  Once I preached in a mental hospital and a dark, squat little woman came up and made exactly that gesture to me.  I didn’t pick her up, but I kissed her on the mouth.  She moved on easily, smiling.  I don't know what it meant.  I just recognized it.

Before doing a funeral or memorial, especially for someone not known well, many ministers will gather the closest people into a group to describe the person and their relationship.  The actual ceremony then comes from that material.  Often it is a small detail that gives release.  One old but flexible woman I had known was in the habit of drawing her feet up under her as she sat in a chair.  When I described that, there were mixed smiles and tears of recognition, which I hope meant release.  

There was a period of time -- after that watershed Aquarian time -- when such acted symbols got so elaborate and injudicious that people actually died pretending to “re-birth” and totally confused each other about boundaries and focus.  The recent “sweat lodge” deaths are a good example of moving from one context with safeguards learned from experience to another where one small change (using plastic tarps instead of hides, blankets, or canvas) killed people.  But in that same time-period, the Sixties and Seventies, the old Blackfeet were opening Bundles with dance-imitations of animals that were uncanny in their poetry, because they were based on long, patient, meaningful observation of the animals.

Bob Scriver's depiction of a Beaver Bundle Opening: the women are dancing 

with sticks in their mouths, holding beaver skins, "being" beavers

(to be continued)