In the "Prelude," Lehrer tells us his purpose: "This book is abot
artists who anticipated the discoveries of neuroscience.... Their
imaginations foretold the facts of the future." (p. vii) And, "The
moral of this book is that we are made of art and science. We are such
stuff as dreams are made on, but we are also just stuff." (p. x)
The book consists of eight chapters, each about a different artist.
Chapter 1 deals with Walt Whitman and "The Substance of Feeling."
Lehrer starts by noting that "Whitman's fusion of body and soul was a
revolutionary idea" (p. 1). Previously, going back to Decartes and the
Rationalists, mind and body had been separated, but Whitman's poetry
attempted to "wring beauty out of sweat." (p. 2) For him, "the profane
and the profound were only different names of the same thing." (p. 2)
Lehrer gives a brief background on Decartes' influence and the 19th
century development of phrenology, a pseudoscience. Lehrer says, "Like
Descartes, phrenologists looked for the soul solely in the head,
desperate to reduce the mind to its cranial causes." Whitman regarded
this as an error, Lehrer says, because "the human being is an
irreducible whole." (p. 5)
Lehrer describes the impact of Emerson on Whitman. "Without Emerson's
mysticicm," Lehrer says, "it's hard to imagine Whitman's poetry." (p.
5) Then he briefly recounts Whitman's work as a journalist and
newspaperman in New York before the beginning of the American Civil
War. He left New York when the newspaper he worked at folded, and
traveled to New Orleans. There he witnessed a slave auction, which
deeply affected him. Then he went by paddle-wheeler up the
Mississippi. During this period of unemployment, he began to write
poetry in his journals. Lehrer notes, "Whitman had no precursor. Ho
other poet in the history of the English language prepared readers for
Whitman's eccentric cadences.... Whitman only ever imitated
himself." (p. 8)
He published "Leaves of Grass" in 1855. (Lehrer notes, btw, that the
title refers to printer's jargon, "leaves" means sheets of paper and
"grass" means "compositions of little value.") It was received with
mostly negative reactions. Emerson called it "the most extraordinary
piece of with and wisdom that America has yet contributed." But others
were repulsed to the unmistakable sexual references, and even Emerson
advised him to tone it down a bit, but WW refused to do so. "For
Whitman, sex revealed the unity of our form, how the urges of the
flesh became the feelings of the soul." (p. 10)
Whitman volunteered as a battlefield nurse in the Civil War. There, he
tended to the injured soldiers, many of whom had amputated limbs. He
encountered the phenomenon of the "ghost limb," what we call "phantom
sensations" of the missing limb. A doctor, Silas Weir Mitchell, noted
these reports of "ghost limbs," and eventually published articles on
the experiences, and although he thought he was the first to publish
information on the phenomenon, Melville had already described a
similar experience. In "Moby Dick," Melville wrote that Captain Ahab
could feel sensations of his missing leg. (p. 13) Lehrer makes the
point that "after all, their sensory ghosts were living proof of
Whitman's poetry: out mater was entandgled with our spirit. When you
cut the flesh,you also cut the soul." (p. 14)
Whitman's poetry influenced William James. The developer of the
philosophy of pragmatism and also a psychologist, James was
unconvinced by the prevailing mechanistic view of cognition and
psychology. He was more interested, Lehrer says, in the parts of the
mind that cannot be measured, and this led James "directly to the
question of feelings." James reasoned that because we experience a
feeling as a whole, not as a sum of the parts, to break the emotion
apart would make it unreal. He wrote, "the actual contents of our
minds are always representations of some kind of ensemble." Lehrer
notes that this is the same word that Whitman used: "I will not make
poems with reference to parts / But I will make poems with reference
to ensemble." Lehrer said that James believed that our emotions emerge
from the constant interaction of the body and brain; an emotion cannot
be abstracted from its carnal experience nor can it be separated from
the mind, which endows the body's flesh with meaning. (pp. 17-19)
In the section "The Body Electric," Lehrer brings up the current work
of Antonio Damasio and draws parallels between Whitman's poetic
hypothesis, that feelings begin in the flesh, and Damasio's
conclusions that the feelings generated by the body are an essential
element of rational thought. (pp. 19-22)
Lehrer's conclusion: Whitman's poetry of the whole person, his
emphasis that thoughts and feelings are intimately connected with the
body and are not just mental constructs prefigured Damasio's research
findings.
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Michael Brady
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
