States of Mind II

States of Mind: Experiences at the Edge of Consciousness — An Anthology, ed. Anna Faherty (Wellcome / Profile, 2016)

I mentioned the Wellcome Collection’s ‘States of Mind’ exhibition once before (here). Now I’ve been to see its eclectic arrangements of arts and sciences exploring the edges of consciousness. The exhibition is smaller than I expected (smaller than the handsome café downstairs, but that’s modern museums for you) but consistently thought-provoking. I’ve been thinking about two things since:

* Louis Darget’s ‘Thought Photographs’ from the 1890s, produced by pressing unexposed photographic plates on people’s foreheads, and asking them to project images from their minds. He was able to explain some of the shapes that arose in relation to the particular thoughts his sitters were working on. I was most struck by the tenacious intuitive power of the idea that the mind works with visual representations, to the extent in this case that the difference between thought and light waves (or rays, or whatever model Darget was working with) were interchangeable.

* Aya Ben Ron’s video ‘Still Under Treatment’ (2005), an intense five minutes of film depicting the moments at which patients lose consciousness under general anaesthesia. The moment of transition wasn’t always obvious to the untrained eye, I felt; at least there wasn’t a single definitive sign shared by all the individuals. What was obvious was the change in behaviour of the medical professionals, who knew – but checked – when they could start handling the bodies with a more abrupt, business-like approach. That’s what struck everyone I saw watching.

Wellcome have published a book to complement the exhibition, which traces similar themes relating to consciousness through a range of written sources. Those who played close attention to my first post about the Helsinki conference (here) may spot what caught my eye in this sentence from Mark Haddon’s introduction:

If nothing else, the passages printed here should convince you that novelists, poets and artists have intuitively understood many of the mind’s oddities since long before doctors and scientists began taking an interest. (p. xiii)

Yes, it’s intuition again. It’s harmless. It’s mostly harmless. Literature and art more generally are characterised as intuitive, and sometimes only intuitive, in the way they may understand (apprehend… process… study… experiment with… know about) the mind. Doctors and scientists starts with ‘interest’ but you know they’ll end up further in. Maybe I am taking intuition too negatively; maybe this is testimony to a very special and privileged level of insight. And Haddon’s introduction is a good piece so I shouldn’t focus on just one moment for too long.

*

My single favourite quotation in the book is from Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. It describes the heroine Fanny Price enjoying a walk through a garden, and thinking about how it has changed:

‘Three years ago, this was nothing but a rough hedgerow along the upper side of the field, never thought of as anything; and now it is converted into a walk, and it would be difficult to say whether most valuable as a convenience or an ornament; and perhaps, in another three years, we may be forgetting – almost forgetting what it was before. How wonderful, how very wonderful the operations of time, and the changes of the human mind!’ And following the latter train of thought, she soon afterwards added: ‘If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient – at others, so bewildered and so weak – and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! – We are, to be sure, a miracle every way – but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.’ (p. 154)

There is so much in this passage it’s hard to know where to start. I like the matter-of-fact witty way Fanny wonders whether this ‘walk’ (a fancy path) is a convenience or an ornament; she is able to see the contradictions of garden design. I particularly treasure the representation of a thought process about memory that leads her to marvel at the its complexity. The ‘train of thought’ is evoked quite specifically and it’s not an obvious one. It goes ‘forgetting… almost forgetting… changes of the human mind… memory’. That is, the capacity or characteristic (ironically) that makes her exclaim about memory is, I think, ‘almost forgetting’; that’s a nice energetic hypothesis about the nature of our memories. Let’s not think about them as coherent or complete and somehow compromised at times, but rather as things which persist in spite of the prevailing trend. To remember is really to (only) almost forget.
      What does Jane Austen know? What does Fanny Price know? Perhaps they only have intuitions; maybe these turn into hypotheses. Perhaps the knowledge, if that’s what it is, seems esoteric. It’s a neat touch that the next sentence in the novel is ‘Miss Crawford, untouched and inattentive, had nothing to say’. Fanny’s insights don’t mean a lot to other people.
      When I think about what Jane Austen knows, I remember a quotation from Martin Amis’s novel The Pregnant Widow, where Gloria says she gave up Sense and Sensibility on page 7: ‘She makes me feel like a child. All that truth. It frightens me. What she knows’. Now Amis’s novel and this particular character have particular and unusual knowledge in mind, I think, but still: you can see why, with my worries about how to talk about what literature knows, I remember that bit.

E-mail me at rtrl100[at]cam.ac.uk

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.