(b)rain(s)! Pt. 2

This poem found me today:

The Door (I)

Robert Creeley 

        for Robert Duncan 

It is hard going to the door

cut so small in the wall where

the vision which echoes loneliness   

brings a scent of wild flowers in a wood.

What I understood, I understand.

My mind is sometime torment,   

sometimes good and filled with livelihood,   

and feels the ground.

But I see the door,

and knew the wall, and wanted the wood,   

and would get there if I could

with my feet and hands and mind.

Lady, do not banish me   

for digressions. My nature   

is a quagmire of unresolved   

confessions. Lady, I follow.

I walked away from myself,

I left the room, I found the garden,

I knew the woman

in it, together we lay down.

Dead night remembers. In December   

we change, not multiplied but dispersed,   

sneaked out of childhood,

the ritual of dismemberment.

Mighty magic is a mother,

in her there is another issue

of fixture, repeated form, the race renewal,   

the charge of the command.

The garden echoes across the room.   

It is fixed in the wall like a mirror   

that faces a window behind you   

and reflects the shadows.

May I go now?

Am I allowed to bow myself down

in the ridiculous posture of renewal,

of the insistence of which I am the virtue?

Nothing for You is untoward.   

Inside You would also be tall,   

more tall, more beautiful.

Come toward me from the wall, I want to be with You.

So I screamed to You,

who hears as the wind, and changes   

multiply, invariably,

changes in the mind. 

 

Running to the door, I ran down

as a clock runs down. Walked backwards,   

stumbled, sat down

hard on the floor near the wall.

Where were You.

How absurd, how vicious.

There is nothing to do but get up.

My knees were iron, I rusted in worship, of You.

For that one sings, one

writes the spring poem, one goes on walking.   

The Lady has always moved to the next town   

and you stumble on after Her.

The door in the wall leads to the garden   

where in the sunlight sit

the Graces in long Victorian dresses,   

of which my grandmother had spoken.

History sings in their faces.

They are young, they are obtainable,   

and you follow after them also

in the service of God and Truth. 

 

But the Lady is indefinable,   

she will be the door in the wall   

to the garden in sunlight.   

I will go on talking forever.

I will never get there.

Oh Lady, remember me

who in Your service grows older   

not wiser, no more than before.

How can I die alone.

Where will I be then who am now alone,   

what groans so pathetically

in this room where I am alone?

I will go to the garden.

I will be a romantic. I will sell   

myself in hell,

in heaven also I will be.

In my mind I see the door,

I see the sunlight before me across the floor   

beckon to me, as the Lady’s skirt

moves small beyond it.

 

...

Since I don't really have very many regular readers (a handful if I'm lucky), I thought I'd do a little experiment. Experiments are fun! And they tell you really interesting things about the human mind. And they require PARTICIPATION.

Richard Wiseman did a version of this experiment on his blog  a while ago. He blogs about the quirks of the brain & it's pretty neat (& a hundred times better than mine). Check it out if you want: http://richardwiseman.wordpress.com/. I'm interested to see if my results will be the same as his.

...

Let's play a game!

That's right, word association!

Today is Sigmund Freud's birthday (how uncanny), so to honour the twisted & depraved man himself, let's play a word association game. I'm going to give you a word & you will tell me the first word that comes to mind when you read it. And since I'm not a mind-reader (that you know of), in the comments section, write your word (I JUST realized you had to sign in with OpenID to comment on the blog, but I've since fixed that little problem) So it's easy. Ok? Go!

BLACK


...

Brains! Part 1

*these ideas are not my own, except the part about the zombies

Every idea I've ever had belonged to someone else first.
                                                    -James T. Hellcat

In his book How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker wrote, "...the mind is a naturally selected computer." I like this metaphor. For one, I'm a Darwinist/Dawkinsist, so the idea that the brain has evolved to be the crazy thinking machine it is is not so surprising/terrifying, & for another, the brain as data processor seems to me completely plausible given its nature.

What do I mean by its nature? Well, the brain has several data processing functions. It is a counting machine, a language processor, it has an expandable memory, and it is capable of crashing, to name a few. For more on the brain: http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/1997_09_naturalhistory.html

But it's the misfirings of the brain that I really want to talk about. The other day I experienced a classic blunder (in Statistics, a Type 1 error/false positive). I was sitting on my couch enjoying a visit with a friend, when I looked to my left & noticed my cat hunkered down beside the couch, no doubt stalking a fly or spider or a bit of fluff. I then looked up & saw that the cat was sprawled out on the dining table. A quick double-take back to 'the cat' next to the couch & I realized that it was actually a black bag I had earlier set on the floor. Duh!

Called pareidolia or simulacra, this 'uncanny' phenomenon occurs when the brain fills in false information & recognizes a vague image as a specific one. Sort of like the mind's auto-complete, if you will. Human self-delusion is fascinating, don't you think?! Pareidolia (not aliens, God, ghosts, etc.) is also to blame when we insist that we 'recognize' a familiar face, only to realize upon looking closer that it is not at all the person we had thought, & it is what causes us to see faces on random objects such as the moon or a slice of toast. It also makes us susceptible to the power of illusion/magic.

Traditionally (& still today?!), these misperceptions have most often been attributed to supernatural beings/occurrences. But it's just your mind playing tricks on you ... literally! So why do we insist on perpetuating these supernatural myths? Evolution, baby. Our minds have evolved to take on some pretty herculean tasks, so it makes sense that the brain would try to make things easier on itself, say perhaps by switching off/turning down consciousness when it is not directly necessary in order to accomplish the task at hand. ie. making sense of the black lump protruding from behind the couch. That black lump could have been almost anything, so in order to save time & costly cell activity, my brain made a guess based on a number of things (previous experience/memory, what I imagine it to be, & what I hope it is). So why DID I see my cat & not a dog, or a sweater, or a panther, or a black hole, or the black bag that it really was? 

I'll quote Mr. Pinker again, if only because he says things so much more learnedly & eloquently than I (he's the Psychologist, Cognitive Scientist, Linguist, & I'm the English major): "...the mind is a system of organs of computation that enabled our ancestors to survive and reproduce in the physical and social worlds in which our species spent most of its evolutionary history" (Pinker 2005).

1. Our brains are still evolving & are, therefore, not without imperfections.
2. Our social & physical worlds have evolved much faster than our brain's have.

While the costs of making a mistake in perception may be different (but not less) in the contemporary social & physical worlds, our brains are still hardwired to be on the lookout for both the things we know that are safe & the things we don't that are potential dangers. It may be nothing more than a perceptual error when we misinterpret vague images, but it pays in the long run. The brain's auto-complete function enables us to quickly locate our mates/family in a jungle of faces, locate food & shelter sources & avoid danger. Only sometimes, the brain gets it wrong (like Google?!). I am familiar with the sight of my cat (I've had her for about 6 months now), I do not own a dog, the particular shape & colour of the bag was consistent with that of my cat's (rather large) posterior, I completely forgot that I had set the bag there myself a few hours earlier, & there are no panthers or black holes (that I know of) in my home, so it makes sense that I would infer that the shape I saw was my cat, Vampira. Human perception is a subjective approximation/guesstimation rather than a fundamental, objective truth.  

Everything is a lie.

...

The other day I wrote about my brain. Specifically, how superior I think it is. You may dismiss me as an egomaniac, and to a certain extent, you'd be right. I am genetically hardwired to be selfish (or rather, my genes are). But that does not make me a selfish (and therefore, according to some, bad) human being. As intelligent as I am, as you are, as anyone can ever be (and trust me that person would be a gazillion billion times smarter than me & you put together), there is so much that we don't know, it makes what we do know seem infinitesimal. I may be gifted according to some subjective standardized test, but I am far from being a know-it-all. I am no better (or worse) than the lot of humankind.

In essence, when it comes to the human brain, degrees of intelligence are irrelevant. We're all pretty damn smart (in comparison to protozoa, say) or stupid (compared to superhuman robots, which thankfully, don't exist). Think about it. From an evolutionary perspective, we aren't that much more evolved than primitive man/woman (which explains a lot about our current disordered world!). I may be an intelligent being, but most of the time I find myself shambling about like some ravenous, slobbering zombie. 

And like I always say, I am a self-portrait of you.

...

The human brain, with all of its capabilities, its imperfections, & its limitations, truly amazes & confounds me. It is not only the source of, but quite possibly, the best example of the 'uncanny' there is.

Which brings me to zombies. The words 'uncanny' & 'zombie' are practically synonymous in my world.

I really like zombies. They are my favourite monsters, despite my theory that zombies, vampires, werewolves, Frankenstein, golem, ghosts, demons, mythological monsters such as Medusa & Hydra, succubi, human monsters--serial killers/cannibalists/necrophiliacs etc.--even the Devil himself, are all incarnations of the same thing: the inherent darkness within the human brain. Zombies aren't real, but they are useful as a metaphor for the things we don't understand/like/are afraid of about ourselves. It is much easier to create an 'other' to bear the weight of our troubles, one who is capable of acting out all of the nastiness we can imagine, than it is to accept that we ourselves ARE monsters. Lest you think I am being incontrovertibly pessimistic about humankind (and truthfully, most of the time I am), I also believe that our brains have advanced far enough for us to accept this & move on. We are not merely devils, we are angels, too.

And, although logically impossible, zombies are, nonetheless, quite frightening to anyone with a brain.

...

Welcome to the Age of the Zombie.

...mmmmm brains!

...

The Computation
John Donne

For my first twenty years, since yesterday,

I scarce believed thou couldst be gone away;
For forty more I fed on favours past, 

And forty on hopes that thou wouldst they might last;
Tears drown'd one hundred, and sighs blew out two;

A thousand, I did neither think nor do,
Or not divide, all being one thought of you;

Or in a thousand more, forgot that too.
Yet call not this long life ; but think that I
Am, by being dead, immortal; can ghosts die ? 

...

Sources


Carroll, Robert T. http://www.skepdic.com/pareidol.html
Chalmers, David. http://consc.net/zombies.html
Dennett, Daniel C. http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/unzombie.htm
Pinker, Steven. http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/papers/So_How_Does_The_Mind_Work.pdf
___________. http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/1997_09_naturalhistory.html

Just when you thought it was safe to be dead!

I was 11 when I first watched Return of the Living Dead Part II (1988). My best friend & I sat in her livingroom & ate popcorn & drank pop & watched it over & over & over & laughed & laughed & laughed & cried & cried & cried. We also hung out with the cows in her barn & later checked out the Hustler mags her Stepdad kept between his mattresses, but that's another story (& trust me it's NOT as perverted as you think).

Return of the Living Dead Part II wasn't my first zombie flick, but it was almost as memorable. The first was a little known Z-grade classic called The Children, about a group of kids who become zombified after the school bus they're riding on passes through a mysterious fog. I was 8 & watched it with my Dad. For some reason I thought the children ate the adults when they hugged them (they don't, they burn them) & it was because of this movie that I was terrified to go into the shed. There was a lot of junk in the shed & consequently a lot of hiding places for the children, you know!

But Return of the Living Dead Part II. THAT one made me laugh pretty much from beginning to end. Good-bad acting, cheesy dialogue, blood, guts & brains galore! It was the day my love affair with all things slashy & trashy truly began. I've seen better zombie movies since (much better in fact), but it was crucial to my psychological development. If it weren't for movies like this, I wouldn't be the mentally deranged person I am today! I also wouldn't have this:

That's right. Return of the Living Dead Part II Original Motion Picture Soundtrack on vinyl. Framed. Oh hell yes, baby, can you dig it!

Besides arousing in me a feeling of total nostalgic bliss, this album is important because a) it was released in 1988 around the same time as the movie, b) other than a small hole in the cover itself, it's in near mint condition, and c) due to rights issues or some other damned thing, the soundtrack for the DVD is not the same as the soundtrack for the VHS. This puppy's rare. Ca-ching!

Thanks, Tom D. (Told you no one else would buy it!)

...

And for your viewing pleasure:




 ...

dying is fine)but Death
e.e. cummings

dying is fine)but Death

?o
baby
i

wouldn't like

Death if Death
were
good:for

when(instead of stopping to think)you

begin to feel of it,dying
's miraculous
why?be

cause dying is

perfectly natural;perfectly
putting
it mildly lively(but

Death

is strictly
scientific
& artificial &

evil & legal)

we thank thee
god
almighty for dying
(forgive us,o life!the sin of Death

...