Well, in my last post (here), referring back to a first post on the subject (here), I promised to pull some strands of thinking together, and deliver some verdicts as to what poetics refrains know about your brain.

First, what I think I have assembled so far.
* I have a set of questions and assumptions derived from cognitive science: that the processes of the brain must be linked together into something we could think of as more than the sum of its parts, i.e. a mind; that this linkage will tend to be, as evolved things tend to be, as economical as it can be; that this must be a very complex system even as it assembles itself to do relatively everyday tasks, there being billions of neurons in the system.
* I have an attempt by Rabinovich et al. to model — using the power of maths — how a network of operations might achieve this connectivity; among their suggestions there is an idea that some key mental resources must be usable, and re-usable, to hold such complex networks together; and there is another idea, that each time such resources reappear, they are never quite the same.
* I choose to see the way this idea reminds me of poetic refrains — repeating operations that hold complex networks together, never the same twice — as more than just a distant resemblance (like the way in which a marshmallow resembles a jellyfish is just a distant resemblance). I see them as two different kinds of cognitive theory, two ways of representing to us how our minds work, two ways of reaching after difficult answers.
* By reading through a couple of poems, and showing how I think their refrains register the continuity and the changeability of the poem’s efforts, I have tried to indicate their ‘dynamic bridge’ qualities, in line with the Rabinovich et al. essay.
And thus we are back with familar questions: Is this knowledge, then? What kind of knowledge?

*

Regular readers with excellent memories will know that I have noted a few possible routes to answers. For example, I quoted Jerome McGann here, describing literary knowledge as ‘knowledge at the level of experience’. And I cited Stanley Cavell, via Sean Keilen, here, for the distinction between knowing and acknowledging.
      They both seem pertinent. Their both suggest the possibility of a kind of knowledge that requires engagement rather than scientific detachment, a willingness to experience things from the inside rather than to isolate them and quantify them at a distance, but also a willingness to see things as different and to realise that minds don’t all work in the same way.
      That’s what I am getting at: the idea that reading refrains, experiencing the different ways in which they work, gives a series of vivid, particular versions (or perhaps propositions; they vary, and don’t presuppose convergence on a definitive answer) of how minds re-use key processes.
      A scientific experiment is upfront about knowledge. It tells us what it’s trying to know, appeals to concrete criteria, or defines them, and benefits from an intellectual environment today that has, in general, sympathy with these expectations. The thing it’s knowing gets shorter shrift: it is observed as coolly as possible, a thing doing its thing.
      This obviously isn’t how it’s going to be with poems, which work on us as we work on them. We read them for a variety of reasons, and any resultant knowledge about the mind might be seen as an incidental process. I prefer to see it as an organic acknowledgement, and that literature and its characteristic forms have developed to give us (amongst other things) varied opportunities to learn, by experience, about our minds, without even realising it.
      The job of a literary scholar is often to suggest what we’re learning from literature without realising, or what we or other readers, thinking in particular ways, could learn from it. So that is what I am doing, with conviction, because I think there is special richness and liveliness to our encounter with the mind’s work when it happens like this, something that’s complementary and necessary alongside the cooler rigour of the scientists.
      Rabinovich et al., then, might help us realise that refrains acquaint us with our mental resources, and they re-enact those resources at the same time, making us think about how poems think we think. This is how and what they know: work in progress.

In my previous post I proposed that poetic refrains might work in parallel with some features of cognition. If it’s true, as Rabinovich et al. suggested, that complex networks in our brains are structured around repeating features that operate differently each time they appear, then it may be meaningful that some poems are too. This post is mainly a commentary, of sorts, on a poem: William Dunbar’s ‘Lament for the Makaris’ (i.e. for the Poets), written in Scotland in the early part of the sixteenth century.
      It has a refrain, ‘Timor Mortis conturbat me’ (‘fear of death disturbs me’; ‘conturbat’ could mean ‘makes me anxious’, ‘confounds’, varying degrees of stirring up). It was a well-known phrase in the period, as it appears in the Catholic Office for the Dead. I have added notes to many of the difficult words, and a running account of what’s going on with the refrain, but I haven’t been exhaustive about every word. Scottish spelling of this period isn’t that difficult to work out if you just believe.
      In my next post – this one is going to be long enough anyway – I will elaborate on what I think these refrains might know about your brain. For now I just want to tune in to the way in which the repeating thought is a flexible resource, economical but never the same twice.

*

I that in was and gladness
Am trublit now with great sickness
And feblit with infirmitie:—
.

Our plesance here is all vain glory,
This fals world is but transitory,
The flesh is , the Feynd is :—
.

The state of man does change and vary,
Now sound, now sick, now blyth, now ,
Now dansand mirry, now like to die:—
.

No state in here standis ;
As with the wynd wavis the
So this world’s vanitie:—
.

Unto the Death gois all Estatis,
Princis, Prelatis, and ,
Baith rich and poor of all degree:—
.

He takis the knichtis in to the field
Enarmit under helm and scheild;
Victor he is at all :—
.

That strong unmerciful tyrand
Takis, on the motheris breast ,
The babe full of benignitie:—
.

He takis the campion in the ,
The captain closit in the tour,
The lady in bour full of bewtie:—
.

He spairis no lord for his ,
Na clerk for his intelligence;
His awful may no man flee:—
.

Art-magicianis and astrologgis,
Rethoris, logicianis, and theologgis,
Them helpis no conclusionis slee:—
.

In medecine the most practicianis,
, surrigianis, and physicianis,
Themself from Death may not supplee:—
.

I see that makaris amang the
Playis here their , syne gois to grave;
Sparit is nocht their facultie:—
.

He has done petuously devour
The noble Chaucer, of makaris flour,
, and Gower, all three:—
.

The good Sir Hew of Eglintoun,
Ettrick, Heriot, and Wintoun,
He has tane out of this cuntrie:—
.

That scorpion fell has done infeck
Maister John Clerk, and James Afflek,
Fra ballat-making and tragedie:—
.

Holland and Barbour he has berevit;
Alas! that he not with us levit
Sir Mungo Lockart of the Lee:—
.

Clerk of Tranent he has tane,
That made the of Gawaine;
Sir Gilbert Hay endit has he:—
.

He has Blind Harry and Sandy Traill
Slain with his schour of mortal hail,
Patrick Johnstoun might nought flee:—
.

He has reft Merseir his ,
That did in luve so lively write,
So short, so quick, of sentence hie:—
.

He has tane Rowll of Aberdene,
And gentill Rowll of Corstorphine;
Two better fallowis did no man see:—
.

In Dunfermline he has tane Broun
With Maister Robert Henrysoun;
Sir John the Ross has he:—
.

And he has now tane, last of ,
Good gentil Stobo and Quintin Shaw,
Of quhom all hes pitie:—
.

Good Maister Walter Kennedy
In point of Death lies verily;
Great ruth it were that so suld be:—
.

Sen he has all my brether tane,
He will naught let me live alane;
Of force I man his next prey be:—
.

Since for the Death remeid is none,
Best is that we for Death ,
After our death that live may we:—
.

Mikhail I. Rabinovich, Alan N. Simmons, and Pablo Varona, ‘Dynamical Bridge Between Brain and Mind’, Trends In Cognitive Sciences, 19 (2015), 453-61.

This is an intriguing article that, I’ll be honest, eludes me just a little because it’s unforgiving with its technical vocabulary, and has some pretty serious equations as well. The main idea, though, seems fairly clear: the authors are exploring ways of understanding and predicting how the brain’s various processes work together to create a mind. Their solution is suggesting mathematical models to describe the ‘dynamical’ quality of these processes, which are characterised by complex interactions and links that change over time.
      Early on there is a nice quotation from William James in 1890: ‘Thought is in constant change… no state once gone can recur and be identical with what it was before’. I take this to mean that it’s part of the Protean nature of thought that it should have components that can be used repeatedly, but that their recurrences will not be the same in manifestation or consequences. At this point I was already thinking about poems, and especially about refrains, those little repeating features of stanza forms.
      So I then began to form a parallel argument in my mind. Rabinovich et al. were explaining what mathematical models of dynamic networks of brain activity might achieve, while I was making their phrases resonate rather differently, as hints at how poetic refrains might themselves model the ways in which thoughts interconnect and resolve into mental functions.
      They were pursuing ‘itinerant brain activity’… ‘robust transient mind dynamics’… ‘functional networks, including hubs’; hubs made me think of refrains. They noted that ‘specific nodes have been identified as critical points in the connective network’… and ‘these adaptive networks change over time’… ‘in response to the perceived and predicted needs of the system’; adaptive critical points made me think of refrains. They put emphasis on an orientation towards the future: ‘predictive patterns of the mind result in predictable structured patterns in the brain’; predictive patterns made me think of the qualities of verse forms in general (including refrains).

*

Here’s a poem by Thomas Wyatt, written during the reign of Henry VIII. One story is that the poem is about the execution of Anne Boleyn; Wyatt himself was suspected of being her lover. Each stanza has a slightly different focus: the first says that if you want to remain at ‘ease’, avoid public life; the second says that in particular one must avoid the heights of society, from which there is a great fall; the third focuses this wisdom into the speaker’s harsh experience of ‘these days’; the fourth conveys that the speaker has seen something particularly awful that he cannot forget; the fifth reiterates the advice of the first two, with the additional point that ‘wit’ won’t help arrest your fall. Each stanza ends with the same phrase.

Who list his wealth and ease retain,
Himself let him unknown contain.
Press not too fast in at that gate
Where ,
For sure, .

The high mountains are blasted oft
When the low valley is mild and soft.
Fortune with Health stands at debate.
The fall is grievous from aloft.
And sure, .

These bloody days have broken my heart.
My lust, my youth did them depart,
And blind desire of estate.
Who hastes to climb seeks to revert.
Of truth, .

The bell tower showed me such sight
That in my head sticks day and night.
There did I learn out of a grate,
For all favour, glory, or might,
That yet .

By proof, I say, there did I learn:
Wit helpeth not defence too ,
Of innocency to plead or prate.
Bear low, therefore, give God the ,
For sure, .

*

In my book Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition I tried to develop the argument that renaissance rhetoric, in theory and practice, is a cognitive science, in that it contains all kinds of ideas about how thought works. I would say the same about poetic form and the study of poetic form: the article by Rabinovich et al. has enabled me to suggest one way in which a feature of poetry, the refrain, might show how minds, like poems, reuse key structural resources that are never quite the same twice.

Coming Soon: More Refrains; And An Attempt At Defining What Refrains Know.

This blog is two years old! A year ago I wrote a first annual round-up, which you can find here. I think I feel about as optimistic as I did then. It’s been more pleasure than pain writing regular posts, and I keep finding ways in which literary and scientific insights seem to speak to one another. A quick browse will lead you back through the topics covered. Consciousness kept sneaking in this year, as did the problems of knowing other minds; the limited language of smell, the aversive qualities of certain words (‘moist’), and ‘affective forecasting’ were other multi-post topics. Looking ahead to next year, I hope that some longer term research ideas I’ve had will feature, and I’ll keep on keeping track of Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

*

When I read back, one part of one post struck me more than most. Responding to an article called ‘Unsolved Problems in Neuroscience‘, which listed a lot of big scientific questions that lie ahead, I was in upbeat mood:

So question XXI asks ‘What counts as an explanation of how the brain works?’, to which I want to answer, in this serio-poetico-glib spirit, how about Ulysses, or Shakespeare’s Sonnets, or Endgame, or Kafka’s Metamorphosis, or Ovid’s Metamorphoses? And I would want to add the necessariness and also incompleteness of all of them together — and they all need reading again. And question XXIII asks ‘What are the different ways of understanding the brain?’. To its parenthetical suggestions (‘function, algorithm, implementation’) I want to add lyrically, epically, comically, tragically, novelistically, and on and on, blank verse and ottava rima, prose essay, verse essay, and on.

I wish I had been a bit less coy, because although ‘explanation’ may well not be the right word (it’s a bit too plain and functional), I do think that literature, especially in the variety and complexity of different literary forms, traces, and models, and knows about, the ways our thoughts work.

*

In my first annual round-up there was a passing reference to the film Field of Dreams, and for no particular reason I think that an annual baseball film reference could be a good tradition to consolidate. So you will find a typical moment from Bull Durham down below (which has some swearing in it, so if you’re in the habit of watching clips from this blog in church or with children, take heed). What a film that is: as subtle and acute as any romantic sport comedy could possibly be, with three top actors (Costner, Sarandon, Robbins) doing excellent work. I realise that readers may find it hard to wait for a year to know where next year’s clip will come from, so I’ll say now: it’ll be Moneyball (which I now have to watch again).