"Countless Lives Inhabit Us" (Pessoa)

Here is Fernando Pessoa’s “Countless Lives Inhabit Us”:

Countless lives inhabit us.
I don’t know, when I think or feel,
Who it is that thinks or feels.
I am merely the place
Where things are thought or felt.

I have more than just one soul.
There are more I’s than I myself.
I exist, nevertheless,
Indifferent to them all.
I silence them: I speak.

The crossing urges of what
I feel or do not feel
Struggle in who I am, but I
Ignore them: They dictate nothing
To the I I know: I write.

I happened to flip Pessoa’s Selected Poems open to this page the other day, and was struck by how perfectly the poem embodies the notion of the “decentered self,” that slippery theoretical construct that was all the rage back in the eighties, and well into the nineties, when I was slogging through grad school. I guess the phrases “decentered self” or “decentered subject” are not quite en vogue by now, but certainly some variant of the concept lives on in other characterizations of postmodern subjectivity like the “posthuman.” Pessoa give us yet another case of a poet getting there before the theorists (and of course Rimbaud was there even earlier with Je est un autre), not just in this poem, but in his whole poetic practice, since he crafted entire personal histories and poetic styles to go along with the set of “heteronyms” under which he wrote. The Selected is divided into separate sections for each of these heteronyms, giving us “Alberto Caeiro: The Unwitting Master,” “Ricardo Reiss: the Sad Epicurean” (the “author” of the poem above), “Alvaro de Campos: the Jaded Sensationist,” and finally “Fernando Pessoa-Himself: the Mask Behind the Man.” I haven’t read enough of the poems to get a clear sense of all these alter egos and how they relate to one another, but what hits me in browsing around the book is how nearly unavoidable the sense of fragmented and multiple identities must be for just about any writer, or so it seems to me. I mean, who the hell knows what’s going to come out when you sit down to write? The remarkable thing is that it took so long (until nearly the twentieth century) for the problem to arrive at full expression, as it does in “Countless Lives Inhabit Us.” And despite Pessoa's comfort with heteronyms, this "decenteredness" is clearly a problem in the poem; Pessoa/Reiss gives us a real struggle for mastery, a willed subsumption of those “crossed urges” under the “I” doing the writing at the moment. But of course the victory is temporary, accounting for just one poem under just one heteronym, and the struggle begins all over again with the next writing. Some poems, of course, do refuse the struggle and make a virtue of their decenteredness, but even these need a compelling reason for existing in just the form they do, which is another (displaced) sort of struggle for identity.
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Anyway, if I am at all interested these days in a theoretical take on this issue, it is to wonder how the concept of the “decentered self” might intersect with a whole set of developments out of cognitive science having completely different intellectual antecedents (i.e., these developments come out of neuroscience rather than “French theory”). I have in mind, for example, Daniel Dennett’s “multiple drafts” theory of consciousness in Consciousness Explained. And thus I end up not too far from yesterday’s post, with Damasio’s discussion of the insula as a brain region that seems to be involved in “mapping” a whole set of disparate subcortical bodily signals into a “coherent” experience of emotion.

Introducing: The Insula

The image to the left comes from an article in today's NY Times, "In Clue to Addiction, Brain Injury Halts Smoking." But whether you're interested in quitting smoking or not, the real story here seems to be the powerful role of a region of the brain called The Insula, about which I have so far heard little to nothing. As for the smoking study, researchers have been taken by surprise to see that an addiction like smoking can be wiped out by an injury to a single, small area of the brain, since they also know there is "a whole neural circuit critical to maintaining addiction." Eliminating this one region, though, seems to get rid of the bodily craving underlying the urge to smoke. The insula has already been studied by Antonio Damasio (I'm a fan of his work, including the book The Feeling of What Happens). In an interview for the article, Damasio says the insula is "a critical platform for emotions": "“It is on this platform that we first anticipate pain and pleasure, not just smoking but eating chocolate, drinking a glass of wine, all of it.” As the article goes on to say "This explains why cravings are so physical, and so hard to shake...they have taken hold in the visceral reaches of the body well before they are even conscious. " Earlier studies of addiction had looked at regions of the brain involved in thinking and decision-making, but this study seems to get closer to the bodily, unconscious root of the matter. The insula has connections to both the thinking cortex above and to "subcortical areas, like the brain stem, that maintain heart rate, blood pressure and body temperature, the body’s primal survival systems." Damasio thinks the insula maps these kinds of subcortical signals "so the conscious brain can interpret them as a coherent emotion"(and I guess the "emotion" in this case is the experience of pleasure associated with smoking, though the article doesn't quite say). Anyway, I'm always interested in the ways that emotion arises from the body, and after that, the ways that emotions get tangled up with what we call "thinking." It looks like understanding the insula will give us another piece of the puzzle.

In a further bit of conjecture the article wonders if people looking at MRIs of their own brain can be taught to deactivate the insula, thus reducing their cravings (in another study, people have been able to reduce the sensation of pain by looking at an MRI and modulating neural activity in a cortical region dealing with pain). How long, I wonder, before we have some sort of portable brain-monitoring unit that allows us to become expert at neural self-modulation? This sort of thing has been dreamed about, and even marketed, since as far back as the '80's, when we began to learn about "alpha waves." So far nothing has caught on, but I predict we'll get there in the not too distant future.

On Virgil's Peace, and Ours

With the latest news from Baghdad still stinging my ears, I dipped into The Aenead this morning and was struck by the passage where Jupiter assures Venus that her beloved Trojans, now beset by adversity, will one day know peace:

The gruesome gates
of war, with tightly welded iron plates,
shall be shut fast. Within, unholy Rage
shall sit on his ferocious weapons, bound
behind his back by a hundred knots of brass;
he shall groan horribly with bloody lips.

I would rather be able to think of Peace as a thing in itself, a kind of center to which we might find our way. But there is undeniable truth in Virgil’s “gruesome” image of Peace as the absence, or rather containment, of an “unholy Rage” that is always straining at its bonds. And the image is even more disturbing when we give up the comforting personification of Rage as some creature apart and realize that it comes from within ourselves, from each of us but also all us, with a terrible cumulative power. Where exactly does this rage come from? Why are we so susceptible to it? What can we do about it? I suppose it “comes from” our evolutionary past and the story of primal struggle, of us against them, that lies behind the founding of every civilization. As for what we can do about it, the answer of the evolutionary biologists might very well be “nothing,” since those evolutionary conditions shaped our very beings—our likes and dislikes, our propensities and predispositions—over many millennia. So what exactly are the limits of the power of choice within the framework of such a “given”? That’s a question for a new philosophy.

New Eyes

I’m certainly not the first to notice that when a young child enters our lives we are, in effect, given new eyes. Layers (years) of experience and habit peel away and we are granted the chance to discover the world anew—stone by stone, bird by bird, and blade by blade of grass. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, the biologists used to tell us*, and to watch a child grow is almost to see the history of human life on the planet played out all over again. The infant breathes and sucks and eats and expels, then the child crawls, and walks shakily, then runs and speaks. From the first, a kind of music is central to the growing life, the baby in the bosom tuning its small, eager existence to the inhalation and exhalation of breath, the steady beating of its mother’s, or father’s, heart--the raw fretfulness of life in the wide world soothed by coos and hums and melodies. Then, after a while, stories are as important as air and food to the continued life of the growing being. The world is fascinating but also bewildering, teeming with possibilities and mysteries, many of them terrifying. The child demands explanations, solaces--just as they were demanded by the first humans discovering the forms of communal life.
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Right now, Nicholas lives in a world that seamlessly blends magic and science. The fantastic worlds of the storybooks—and for us that means especially L. Frank Baum’s Oz books--call for explanation (“How can he turn from a scarecrow to a bear?”), and so do the natural laws and forces that make our mundane world run (“How can a plane fly through the sky?”). Indeed, what we have learned to call mundane is no less wondrous to him than the magical realms in his bedtime tales. That the sun rises each morning and sets each night—or rather that our planet is orbiting the sun and revolving on its own axis at the same time—is no less miraculous than that a child should fall to the center of the earth to wind up in a city made of glass and inhabited by vegetable people (as happens in an Oz story we read recently).
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Yesterday we did some experiments in Pop Bottle Science, working from a book Nicholas got for Christmas, with the goal of observing rudimentary principles like buoyancy and surface tension in action. I was nearly as fascinated as he was, even though I had done these same kinds of experiments long ago and would never have taken the time, or found the interest, to repeat them if I were not now seeing through Nicholas’s eyes. Doing the experiments, as familiar as they were, reminded me of all that I don’t know, even about the simple objects of daily life. Indeed, the fun ratcheted up a few notches when we left the book behind and just started playing around with what was near to hand. I thought a Clementine would float, but didn’t know for sure until we plopped one in the water and watched it bob to the surface. An apple floats, too, but as a bonus we also noticed how large its submerged portion had come to seem. I was reminded that water can work like a magnifying class, but was also amused and instructed to see that for Nicholas there was a real question as to whether the apple simply looked bigger or had actually increased in size. I knew oil would confine itself to its own layer when poured on top of the water, but when you look at this layer from above where do those variously sized circles come from? I still don’t know the answer to that one, but would no doubt find out something interesting if I pursued the matter. Even now, without further investigation, I have the pleasure of having noticed something intriguing with my own eyes.
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Einstein was led to important insights about the relation between macroscopic and submicroscopic objects by thinking about capillary action – a phenomenon you can easily witness in your own kitchen if you have on hand a cup of water, a stalk of celery, and some food coloring. And in his own estimation, one of his greatest strengths as a scientist was that he never lost his essential childishness. As a kid, he was fascinated by the fact that the needle of his compass always pointed north, and this fascination led him to think deeply about all the invisible, yet rational and explainable, forces that might be at work in our world. The “thought experiments” that helped him arrive at his world-transforming theory of relativity have an almost zany, whimsical, kid-like quality. What would happen if you could ride a beam of light? Would you be able to see your own reflection if you held a mirror in front of you? And so on.
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Einstein also said an explanation should be as simple as it can be – but no simpler. This is a powerful formula for all those who wish to think seriously, and to communicate what they have thought. But in order to follow this formula we would have to give up two bad habits. On the one hand, we would have to stop “dumbing things down” for the sake of expediency; on the other, we would have to refrain from over-complicating them in order to bolster our sense of authority. The fear, of course, is that if we dismantle the linguistic arsenal we customarily deploy in service of our Authority it may turn out that what we have to say will not sound all that impressive. But if, beginning today, at the start of 2007, we would only look at the world with new eyes and then speak to each other simply about our findings, what might we accomplish?

* Only a weaker version of the formula survives now. "Recapitulates" is too strong a word, but there are, at least, "numerous connections" between ontogeny and phylogeny (See Recapitulation Theory).