Category Archives: bachelard

Ab – Spring Reverie Week 7

Marisa Malone

Neuro Reverie #2

Wk. 7

Word Count: 85

 

“The mechanism is the growth and pruning of synapses in response to experience—synapses that become “hard-wired” by repeated use.” (Abi-Rached, Rose, 194)

 

Humans are conditioned/conditional creatures, we live through patterns, repetition, ritual, routine and consistency. The repetition creates a thought path in our neurons that brings us comfort and familiarity and habituate our actions and reactions accordingly. These synapses get fired and welded together from rewards and consequences regarding behavior, appearance, class, and gender based on the expectations that fill such labels from the powers that be. The “mechanism” in place imposes the foundation of what will or wont make us “feel good” hard-wiring a consumer mentality.

T W7 Neuro reverie

Taking on Traffic

“This is an element in a wider shift in strategies and policies in many societies toward preemption of unwanted incidents, including criminal offences.” (166, Rose, Abi-Rached)

 

Impatience grows, tolerance runs thin,

It is 8:30 in the morning and the mutterings begin.

Should I merge with the flow or just cut off the next guy?

This person in the driver’s seat has PTSD and is in the position of control his agitation continues making his passengers more aware of the dangers that could occur.

A groan comes from the back seat and a sigh from the passenger front,

The driver’s speech has more clarity while the demeaning language aimed at other drivers through his mouth continues to flow at us four passengers too.

Two women; I and his wife, two dogs; one is a female and the other is an unneutered male.

The animals grow restless with the female’s high pitched barking comes from atop the wheelchair parked rear.

This barking is nearly aimed in the driver’s ear.

The other dog; male said to supposedly be calming the barking dog down, begins barking, thrashing, and growling while cornering the female in passenger left side rear.

Passenger front interjects, proclaiming the female dog’s fear yet the driver claims the female is at fault for first barking near his ear.

Animalistic argument between husband and wife,

The male and female dogs as animals depict this same strife.

“Don’t question my driving!” “Are you the one at the wheel!?”

This stands as a reminder of who is currently in charge.

Communication proved useless in other situations with them.

Although considered family, other voices in competition with his continuous power hungry state of mind have never been able to break the bind.

 

E – Week 6 Reverie

Images do not speak for themselves.

But what happens when they do?

It is easy to see criminal acts, we do

Through computers. But what makes

The brain so amazingly different?

Why is the brain immune to this idea

That pictures have meaning?

So much that we can’t see, inside.

Is there social on the inside?

Lives and cultures, language all

Mashed up inside a skull. People, words

Jammed together in three pounds of tissue.

Such a heavy burden to house criminality.

But what if our culture is criminal? What if

We tear it apart and realize that there is nothing

But violence against humanity?

Week 6 Psychoanalysis of Fire

“Indeed, I do not think I lit a fire myself before
I was eighteen years old. It was only when I lived alone that I
became master of my own hearth.
(Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire; 9)

Like a drop of rain, my mantra forms and orb
iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiyyyyyyaaaaaaaammmmmm 
It feels like my mouth forms a bead with each repetition
Each drop a synapses
My mind finds meaning in only a sound
In this dim stairway I mind tingling sensation of sound

Have I become this sound if I am what my mind experiences?
Can I stay like this forever?
I wonder if people could get addicting to meditating,
and left my trance on that thought.

Like beautiful tears from melancholy god’s 
The glass oozes from the fire’s touch
Blushing a bright orangey red
at each lick of flame
Watching all this sand and flame brings
of course, only one thought to my mind,
Am I the sand or the flame?
Are you the blistering heat I bend and droop away from?
To form something beautiful after the burns?
Or am I your flame, 
shaping you to your best interest
without a thought to my own fuel source…

Lost in Translation

Siproena Johnson

As Poetry Recycles Neurons

5/6/13

Tuesday Seminar Pass W6

Word Count 197

 

 

“No doubt for much of our history, these assumptions have been derived from a mixture of folk wisdom, theoretical doctrines, philosophies, and the accumulated experience of those who have exercised authority in different domains.” (Abi-Rached, Rose, 160)

“Such loss of identity, Tawada suggests, has its value, for the reader/listener begins to notice things that may well escape the poem’s Western audience.” 141, Perloff

 

Romanticisms run rampant in Westernized stories from tribes or other nations.

Roots from German literature, a poem in this case manipulated.

Stories from one language to the common often lose their identity.

A rhythm is lost, awkward for the transcriber and reader/listener well versed in the piece.

Claiming with the Westernized translations the ease of communication becomes a fallacy pushed with English to the point of monochrome sublimation.

Even genders from original folklore are not immune to the decidedly ideal.

Is this for originality or to simply paraphrase?

When a translation doesn’t make sense to us the reader/listener how often do we pursue answers for the questions texts raise?

Misunderstandings between dialects or particular accents often create translations that are askew.

As a translator collecting the story live time, questioning what is believed to have been said could be one of the best things you do.

It gives justice to the presenter of an unfamiliar tale.

This action helps to obtain the reassurance the notation you have is at its best and ready to set sail.

When in the doctor’s office receiving a diagnosis should the details be omitted?

Take medication prescribed without questioning the adverse symptoms.

Practice makes permanence.

A – Neuro Reverie Week 6

“Becoming aware of the social and biological conditions that underpin our actions can, it seems, help each of us develop our competencies and understand and manage our cognitive facilities.” (pp.160)

Developing a cognitive-map, a self-imaging process. Memetics – information stored in the memory bank of society. The self- image is a reconstruction of fragmentary data, filtered through largely unconscious processes. Information stored as logos (history) forms a hermeneutic exegesis of our human cultural history, which is an extension of the cognitive-map. Social cognition reflects the structure and hierarchy of the human brain. A hall of mirrors. Of Mirrors. Reflection and replication of memes – like DNA. THe human world is fit together by the fusion of an invisible soul. Mentalization is key to our cognition (built-in intersubjectivity). From mans synergetic roots, we have had the capacity to mirror – to empathize – with our environment. A symbiosis between predator and prey, internalization of the mind-state of the place and place-beings of our environment.

Week 6 Neuro Reverie

Renée Ingersoll

As Poetry Recycles Neurons

Tuesday Reverie

5/7/13

Word Count: 182

 

Neuro Reverie

“It appeared that this challenged the conventional, rationalist accounts of ascription—that we understand the intentions of others by creating theories about what lies behind their appearance or their acts, on the basis of our own commonsense psychology about their desires and their beliefs about how to achieve them. It was not through theorizing about others, but through feeling what they feel, that we understand the mental states of others. I really do ‘feel your pain.’” (Rose & Abi-Rached, Neuro; 146)
If you gathered my life’s data, could you understand me through theory alone?
A stew of memory snipets, scents and what I can put into words

All my wants, needs, favorites, reactions, morals, significant others, friends, traumas and elations

Compiled into an equation to show you how it feels to see a person who isn’t there

Have your best friend choose an internet lover over your 12 years together

Get the call that one of your closest friend is locked up for 10 to 25

Be completely in love with two people

Hate yourself to the point of seven suicide attempts

To just name a few

You can’t put that sadness into numbers, I can barely put them into words

That utter despair, only desperate howling wails can truly convey

That hopelessness that refuses your sleep, pacing like a madman around the walls of your heart

That anxiety pressing into the soft flesh of your throat like a tightening noose

I used to say all life could be put into an equation, the chemicals at least

but what are the elements that make up suffering

 

Hh – Week 6 Reverie

“We live in groups, families, communities, societies. We work collaboratively in organizations, fight in bands and armies, take pleasure in events where we gather together to dance, party, watch or play sports. We interact in pairs, and small and large groups, whether in love or in hate, in teams and gangs, and in everyday activities. We care for one another and experience sympathy, empathy, or a sense of obligation to some, though not to others.” (Neuro, 142)

This passage really spoke to me because during this time of my field study i’ve been dealing alot with defining who I empathize with and where I see those empathetic interactions around me.

I ask myself every time I write, who is this for? Who am I trying to speak to?

Am I empathizing or showing lack of empathy?

What have I seen of empathy?

I’ve watched groups of people in different environments come together

I’ve seen gangs form on the streets, and watched gangs take another form on a college campus

I’ve known well what happens when groups come together out of love and when they come together out of hate.

I’ve experienced what happens when people from different backgrounds come together to party

I’ve been a part of different communities and i’ve been apart from different communities.

Where do my obligations lie?

If I had to give an answer, i’d say my obligations lie with the oppressed.

Yet, my biggest obligation is to myself, to maintain who I am

But to learn from the other groups of society’s oppressed people

I will be the loud speaker that they can scream through

Because I empathize with them, as they do with me.

And that is the reason I want to make music.

Neuro reverie #1

Human beings dance for this
History with others
Human contact does not just
establish the conditions for
the social and human sciences.

Across the “two Cultures”
We are governed or govern ourselves

We live in groups
Weather in love or by hate,
is it as one might say,
in our nature.
For the human sciences,
we are not born
like that of our primate ancestors

The forms that it takes,
this social brain
bridging left and right hemisphere,

So Popular.

P – Week 6 Reverie

“What is in our nature is the fact that we humans are born incomplete, requiring interaction with others, and enmeshing in language, meaning, and culture, to be completed…we are not born, but become social.”  (Rose/Abi-Rached, 142)

Monkeys with wire cages for mothers, Romanian babies, feral children, Victorian orphanages, Jodi Foster, Genie, the Jungle Books, the founding of ancient Rome, Ramachandra.  It is a problem if your mother didn’t hug you enough; likewise, it is a problem if she hugged you too much.  Why are tales of orphans so popular? Lack of parental guidance, some children would be better off. The Boxcar Children were polite and properly socialized, but they got to keep their glass bottled milk in a brook, too bad Violet was sickly and ruined it for everyone. Lord of the Flies. How quickly we revert back to our natural(?) states when there isn’t proper dinnerware available.