Category Archives: Spring Reveries

To provide a prompt for the development of poetry that recycles neurons, that jolts, that cleaves our heads, that mediates our passions, that evokes the sensation of reading in the brain, a weekly reverie based on that week’s reading assignment from Neuro is required. You may choose your own favorite passage from the assigned chapter of Neuro and then create a reverie in response to it modeled on the form of reverie Bachelard demonstrates in The Poetics of Reverie. (Students new to the program spring quarter will want to purchase this book, which is available in the TESC Bookstore and browse peers’ winter quarter versions of Bachelardian reveries.) Post your weekly 100 word reverie on the assigned chapters of Neuro here no later than midnight Wednesday during weeks 6-9 of spring quarter. Your poetic reverie (or riff) should begin with what you experienced as a particularly evocative passage from that week’s reading, including page number. Your quote does NOT count in terms of your 100 words of writing. Rather, quote this passage of 1-3 lines from Neuro and then create your own reverie.. The work here is to feel, trace or map the network of meanings associated in your brain/mind with a given word or phrase. While these weekly reveries are brief, they might develop into poems for inclusion in your field study term paper.

Week 8 Neuro Reverie

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Renee Ingersoll

As Poetry Recycles Neurons

5/20/13

Neuro Reverie

“…the twenty-first century brain is not an organ whose fate is fixed at the moment of conception and birth, but is a plastic and open to external influence throughout development and indeed throughout life.”
(Rose and Abi-Rached, Neuro; 217 (Chiao 2009))

Today I was reading a blog called ‘Humans of New York’
The guy Takes photographs of people and then asks them questions.
One picture had these two kids sitting backs against a building.
The girl looked my friend Bailey and had the most beautiful smile on her face
The boy had a clump of red curly hair, shaven on the sides
leg outstretched with neon green tape around his boot
He looked like he wanted to laugh because she was.
That moment where laughter becomes contagious
The quote under said
“Where did you grow up?”
“We’re growing up right now.”
It made me cry
There’s beauty in change
and i’ve been thinking lately that we were all born to die
in the literal and poetic way
but i’m beginning to think we die
because living is a process
if there’s no end
there’s no process.
My mom told me I cried every birthday when I was little
I’d tell her
“I’m one year closer to dying.”
But I have to live to die
Maybe that’s what growing up is,
Realizing living life includes death
A needed part of the equation.
And as humans, our potential to change is phenomenal
So I shant waste this plasticity
on why the world is so bad
and why my death is to imminent.

Neuro Reverie w8

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Siproena Johnson

As Poetry Recycles Neurons

5/20/13

Seminar / Reverie week 8

Word Count 242

 

“It is not only that their arguments need to be located ‘in context’ as the saying goes (Tully 1988, 1993), but that philosophers draw, sometimes explicitly but usually implicitly, upon the empirical knowledge and cultural beliefs of the times and places they inhabit.” (p. 204 Rose, Abi-Rached)

 

Origins of a particular idea are a blur yet self-proclaimed definitive truths by title alone are given an upper hand.  I think of the text used almost as frequently as it is revised.  What if westernization did not turn into a plague with its first visit?  This is the word…because it is bound.  One could only imagine the course the new world’s original inhabitants could have made and sustained.  Still the human mind and its plasticity would eventually with time adopt a new mode.   When it is first written, the mind, fingers, eyes, and ink of one person portrays the events as they were for their time.  These developments are by one’s particular experience but lies waiting to be rewritten anew by another who sees their own perspective to applicably fit.

Some knowledge is not all knowledge and is often reduced or embellished with or without the intent of its initiator or reproducer.  Perhaps there is a self-gratifying motive when using implicit language when a story is reformed.  Reformed to dictate and impose this new writer’s ideas.  Who consistently sets aside the time to survey the source when what is printed seems askew?  Whose words and whose identity was originally portrayed?   It might be much simpler to initially follow the present system as it now stands but all encounter change with time.  Adaptations of cultural beliefs past a present are necessary for adaptation of the brain as one takes on more age.

i- week 8 neurorev

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We are Neuron, nothing more

nothing more

nothing more

every one a synapse

every one the same

But what is it they do not tell you?

Neurons fire, all the same

you are nothing, just a brain

that is, after all, the logical conclusion

arrived at from this indisputable fact–

we all are what’s under our hats

but one thing they never tell you..

muscles move before you think.

some things happen

that cannot be “logically” deduced.

Reactions occur with no direct stimulus

and patterns don’t fit inside the boxes we’ve made.

I mean guys, with all the research you’ve been doing,

Haven’t you heard of the neurons in the Heart?

i- week 6 neurorev

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“…[T]heory of mind has come to be a central concern for social brain theorists and a key element in their explanatory repertoire. One dimension has come to be termed mentalization—a kind of built-in intersubjectivity in human experience, perhaps shared with some other primates. Mentalization refers to the ‘largely automatic process by which we “read” the mental states of others’ and which helps us make predictions about their future actions.”                        —Neuro [145]

 

Intersubjectivity

 Another fancy word for it

—Intersubjectivity—

It seems the Noble Sciences

Have found what we call “Nwyvre”

In a seeming act of almost pure

Serendipity.

 

The interweaving web of World

(though not the ‘world wide web’)

They say hides in everything

So all the little boys and girls

Don’t need to say anything

Intersubjectivity—

I suddenly hear Science sing.

 

The secret web within the planet—

Intersubjectivity.

No single one of us can plan it,

Not you alone or him or me.

Now ‘mentalize’ this, goddamnit,

It’s not just automatically.

Week 7 Neuro Reverie

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Week 7 Neuro Reverie

 

 

“The headline on Sky News on April 26, 2010 read: ‘Murdered Gangster’s Brain Donated to Science: Scientists Have Been Given the Chance to Get Inside the Mind of One of Australia’s Most Notorious Gangsters.’ It was reporting the fact that Roberta Williams had given ‘experts’ permission to examine the brain of her husband, Carl Williams, who had been murdered in Melbourne’s maximum security Barwon Prison less than three years into a thirty-five year sentence. ‘I believe it’s to help with research,’ Mrs. Williams is quoted as saying, ‘and might help explain why guys like Carl do the violent things they do.’”

 

-Rose , N., & Abi-Rached, J. (2013). Neuro: The new brain sciences and the management of the mind. (p. 165). Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

 

Who can fathom the thoughts of a notorious murdering gangster? Who can fathom any thought that does not stem from their own brain in the present moment? I picture a team of neuroscientists, suiting up as they prepare to enter into a dead mind that once thought dark thoughts. They are going to shrink to the size of brain cells and venture into the mind of Carl Williams like hikers venturing into wilderness. “What is there to find?” they wonder as their latex gloves began to coax sweat from eager, clammy hands. They will find dim and endless forests, pools of love at the base of extraordinary mountains and mazey caves without exits leading into them. They will see the cancerous growth of violence protruding from the earth like the head of a stone giant aroused from buried sleep. They will see the tense expression of anger and sadness, his behemoth fears, the innocence that fuels his rampant trample over the beauty around him. He sculpted a criminal mind with looming silence and the pounding of his massive fists.

E – Week 7 Reverie

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“…your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules,” page 200

“…the self/nonself distinction provides the basis for consciousness,” page 216.

Who am I when I am not you?

Because I am neurons and fibres different

From you.

But when you leave where do I go?

Am I gone? But I am different.

I feel hollow. I search and I search

To fill this hollow space inside my chest

My head, my heart, but

You are gone and the hole is there

It is what I have.

I am gone. I feel gone. Where do I find myself

When I am alone?

You find me, put me back

Tell me who to be. But now

You are gone and I am alone.

I am gone, gone, gone

Where the goblins go,

Or the cobwebs the lonely

Toys in the attic,

The soul discarded to dust.

T W6 Neuro reverie

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“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)

 

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.

 

 

Pilg – Week 7 Neuro

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“And the means to be used were multiple – perhaps behavior therapy, cognitive therapy, and even psychopharmaceuticals – for the aim is to reshape brain mechanisms in order to nip those budding psychopaths in the bud.”

Mental Hospital

1700 – Waiting

In line with the others

white robe on my back

lose fitting scrubs adorn my body

I shuffle along

1730 – waiting

There is nothing to do at this time

I am told I have to be here

I am abnormal along with the others

we come from all over

and we are different

1800 – pills

this is how they control us

we all have tendencies

an urge to commit random acts of antisocial behavior

we do not fit in

we are not normal

1805 – waiting

there is nothing to do

but sit and wait

the time is told through waiting

time between appointments

waiting for someone to judge us

1900 – waiting

it is night and all have gone but the few defenders

we must be kept under constant watch

for we are different

but we are ourselves

and all of that is changing

I can feel it each and every night

as pharmaceuticals are thrust down my throat

on a constant regiment

2000 – waiting

I am just waiting to die

one second hand at a time

I am locked in a prison

and all there is to do is wait

I am a threat to society

to my own safety

and they seek to change me

to form me into something malleable and moldable

they seek to make me social

2100 – lights out

 

Pilg – Week 6 Neuro

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“And we have a social brain in that this organ is now construed as malleable, open to, and shaped by, social interactions – shaping sociality as it is itself reshaped by it.”

 

Looking into the mirror

I can see the faces of the world

staring back at me.

I am because of them,

I have grown into the creation you see before you

through the dependency of absent thought.

You are, because of me.

My thoughts have been shaped

and molded to create the reality I perceive.

Could this, truly, be MY reality?

Have you not shared a glimpse into your own mind?

Unwittingly you have become

my mentor, my voice, my mind.

Together through the abyss

our minds touch,

through the conscious and unconscious,

shaping each other into the void.

Look into the mirror,

see me staring back at you…

Let us be alone together in this shared reality.

P – Week 7 Reverie

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“Lombroso’s catalogue of physical deformities and anomalies of behavior…laziness, frivolity, use of argot, tendency to adorn body and surroundings with hieroglyphics, moral insensibility, and emotional instability.” (Rose/Abi-Rached, 170)

Tattoos spelling out a destiny they don’t remember, a life they never knew and cannot have…the slang of another time and place firmly planted in the lexicon without knowing the source, bread for money, raspberry tarts and glass bottles, cats marking their territory with paint rather than scent—can you find your own way home or do you need a map that no one can read anymore? Laziness and frivolity in spades, I would share with you but I need it all for myself. Emotions are running hot and bothered and my morality is severely lacking in fortitude and grace.  The stakes are high but my expectations are low.

Word count:  108