Brain Waves (2)

In my last post, I got swept up by discussions of brain oscillations. Underlying the mind’s directional, end-pointed work are waveforms, on-and-off switchings. Somehow or other these two things are necessary to one another. I thought about poetry, with the up and down of metrical stress, as an oscillating form that goes somewhere. There were provisos. Rapid changes in brain activity play out on a very different timescale from those of an iambic poem.
      Nevertheless, it stuck in my mind, and I thought of a poem that seemed, in interesting ways, to work with different sorts of underlying motions as it thinks its way towards understanding. This poem is John Donne’s ‘Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward’. Its speaker describes a journey heading away from the rising sun, and heading away also from the sight of the Crucifixion, the thing that comes into view as the day dawns. The poem ranges metaphorically from cosmic grandeur to bodily wretchedness and finds a way, eventually, to ‘turn’ towards Christ.
      I’ve been tempted towards thinking that this is something like the ‘neural sublime’ that I discussed not long ago. The poem makes me think of the clip-clip of the swaying horse, it makes me work through the regularity of its metre, with patterned stresses and rhymes, and it sets up bits of adventurous thinking that rise and fall. These turn into the ‘turn’. Perhaps that conversation of oscillating energy into directional energy is not just analogous to how our brains seem to work; perhaps it delivers that neural-sublime encounter with those workings. I am not ready to go there, quite, I should say. This is partly because of a chicken-and-egg problem: I am looking at the poem because of things I’ve been thinking about the mind, so it seems a potentially false step to then go back and discover those characteristics of the mind as if it’s a result of reading the poem.
      I’ll let the poem speak for itself, mostly, and I won’t try to explicate all its complexities. But there will be a few comments here and there — if you hover your mouse or equivalent over highlighted words, they’ll blossom.

      Let mans Soule be a Spheare, and then, in this,
      The intelligence that moves, devotion is,
      And as the other Spheares, by being growne
      Subject to forraigne motion, lose their owne,
      And being by others hurried every day,
      Scarce in a yeare their naturall forme obey:
      Pleasure or businesse, so, our Soules admit
      For their first mover, and are whirld by it.
      
      This day, when my Soules forme bends toward the East.
      There I should see a Sunne, by rising set,
      And by that setting endlesse day beget;
      But that Christ on this Crosse, did ,
      Sinne had eternally benighted all.
      Yet dare I’almost be glad, I do not see
      That spectacle of too much weight for mee.
      Who sees Gods face, that is selfe life, must dye;
      What a death were it then to see God dye?
      It made his owne Lieutenant Nature shrinke,
      It made his footstoole crack, and the Sunne winke.
      Could I behold those hands which span the Poles,
      And tune all spheares at once peirc’d with those holes?
       that endlesse height which is
      Zenith to us, and our Antipodes,
      Humbled below us? or that blood which is
      The seat of all our Soules, if not of his,
      Made durt of dust, or that flesh which was worne
      By God, for his apparell, rag’d, and torne?
      If on these things I durst not looke, durst I
      Upon his miserable mother cast mine eye,
      Who was Gods partner here, and furnish’d thus
      Halfe of that Sacrifice, which ransom’d us?
      Though these things, as I ride, be from mine eye,
      They’are present yet unto my memory,
      ,
      O Saviour, as thou hang’st upon the tree;
      I turne my backe to thee, but to receive
      Corrections, till thy mercies bid thee leave.
      O thinke mee worth thine anger, punish mee,
      Burne off my rusts, and my deformity,
      Restore thine Image, , by thy grace,
      That thou may’st know mee, I’ll turne my face.

This seems a more important line to me now than it used to. After setting up the first expansive line of thinking, about the way that human souls move and are moved in the world, Donne returns us to the basic motion of the rider (but it’s very important that he is ‘carryed’) and the poem.
For a Christian, the death and resurrection of life are the most important oscillation of all; the poem aligns its basic rhythm with it here.
Repetition makes us feel oscillation in another way. The Zenith / Antipodes that follow gives us another oscillation.
Another oscillation, looking out, being looked-back-at…
I like the way that this phrase could be thought of as metrical, in that it fills out the line, delivering the necessary syllables in the appropriate stress. But it’s also stretched and strained, feeling how much punishing ‘correction’ the sinner should accept in order to receive ‘grace’.
The last movement, the decisive directional turn, is preceded by a final, understated but powerful, mid-line oscillatory ‘and’.
E-mail me at rtrl100[at]cam.ac.uk

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