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.

Ms – Week 9 Bachelardian Reverie

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“For, as so many ethnographic studies of laboratory life have shown, the laboratory is not a ‘non-space': it is itself a real configuration of persons, devices, and techniques, which imposes its own characteristics on the data generated, as well as the interpretations made of them, and all the more so when the subjects are individual living creatures, be they human or other animals” (Rose & Abi-Rached 228).

This about sums up how my views of laboratory science have been changed. Laboratories are not a blank white page that – well, here is a poem:

LABORATORY

white lab coats and

beakers.

that’s what I see

in laboratory.

what have those

white coats done…

in experimenting on the brain?

the brain was like a spirit

before I could see

that experimenting

is precise

it is not a game

(or at least it shouldn’t be).

Now I understand what

laboratory

means.

Because even

a blank

white page

is still made

of something.

 

P – Week 9 Reverie

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“Emotions course through the veins, engage the heart and the lungs, the bowels and the genitals, the muscles, the skin and face.” (Rose/Abi-Rached, 230)

The physical reactions of the non-physical…can emotions be mapped in the blood even if they can’t be found in the brains? My heart stops and my lungs contract and my muscles ready themselves for the chase whenever I look at love, my veins quicken and quiver with excitement, but I have the same reaction when I look at hate…so far removed and yet so close. Does my body recognize the nuances of difference or only the heat of the response? My face is the only thing that changes and that is cultural conditioning, not something written in my bones and blood.

Word count: 101

P – Week 8 Reverie

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“Our Perception of the World Is a Fantasy That Coincides with Reality” (Rose/Abi-Rached, 207)

Our perception of the world is a fantasy that coincides with reality on occasion if we’re lucky but we never really know if we’re lucky because we never really know what reality is. Is it what we see or is it something more or something less? It changes from person to person moment to moment memory to memory and changes every time it is remembered. There is know knowing in the muddled soup of our brains whether we are up or down and that is a confusing slide of behavior, a merry go round of an experience.

Word count: 97

**Sorry for the lateness.  We had to make a sudden move to Indiana last week and I haven’t had internet until now…

Week 9 Psychoanalysis of Fire

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“We are inclined to excuse all these naive beliefs, because
we now interpret them only in their metaphorical translation.
We forget that they corresponded to psychological realities.
Now ‘it oEren happens that metaphors have not completely lost
their reality J their concreteness. There is still a trace of concreteness
in cerrain soundly abstract definitions. A psychoanalysis
of objeccive knowledge must retrace and complete this
process of de-realization”
(Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire; 70)

With meditation comes the refinding of meaning in simple thoughts already thought,
realizations already come to or epiphanies once mulled over; seen with a new light.
How clear things can become with cliche metaphors, and common ideas.
They are this way because that’s why they became common in the first place.
But like all things, should be revisited, re-thought over.
Explore different facets of sound advice,
what different meanings could be applied to ‘practice makes perfect’
how perfect in all reality is inconceivable,
and therefore to achieve perfection, an eternity of practice is needed
but the more it is done the closer to eternity you are.
‘All things change’
It lies within the basic facts of our existence.
Within our evolution as a species,
and even the amount we age each day.
When we think we know something, that is when it is known you don’t. 

i-week 9 neurorev

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“It’s far too early”

author says

“to say anything for sure”

but culture is a hungry beast

and will say whatever might be said.

“Is Neuron a contemporary god?” I was once asked.

the unspoken message believes it so

all the funding says “look at the brain

and see the meaning of insane

and see me–authority

i can fix and fill your neural cavities.”

so much focus on the brain.

you don’t have to speak

what’s really being said

to know that the Powers That Be

are harnessing us further

I think–

based on no definitive statements–

individuality is coming to an end.

Tactile-Letters-blog-pic-231x300

Ab- Spring Reverie Week 9.

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Marisa Malone

Neuro Reverie Conclusion.

Week. 9

Word Count: 107

“Emotions course through the veins, engage the heart and the lungs, the bowels and the genitals, the muscles, the skin and face. As for cognition, do we not think, literally here, with hands and eyes?” (Rose, Abi-Rached, 230)

My body is a translator of the tangled neurons and synapsis that line layers of skin.

My brain functions through my entire body–or, my body functions through my entire brain (?)

Through western culture, through education, through privilege, through ability, my hands and eyes have evolved to become the translators of the world, the word, the thought, the image, the feeling, filtered through my body-brain. If I literally think with my body and my body is emotion and my body is female and my body is object and my body is seen and I frame my body in cultural values…do I trust my hands and eyes?

E – Reverie Week 8

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“As for cognition, do we not think, literally here, with hands and eyes?” pg 230

“..there is nothing to fear in the rise to prominence of neurobiological attempts to understand and account for human behavior.” pg 232

Why does something physical

Have more weight than something

Ideological? If it exists physically

We give something more thought, more

Courtesy than if it is an idea.

 

A man does not have himself killed

For a petty distinction

You must speak to his soul.

But how do you do that if

His soul is neurons and clusters

and brain cells? Surely the same way.

With words, ideas. Sounds.

Sounds that are physical, waves

To be interpreted by a brain.

But their meaning will resonate long after

The waves have dissipated.

 

Ideologies have weight. Nazism, communism,

Slavery, sexism, racism, transphobia.

Weight, and

Body counts.

But we cannot see sexism, or touch

Transphobia. If it exists in our neurons

It is most likely because it exists in

Our culture.

So why so much emphasis

On what is physical?

Week 8 Neuro Reverie

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Week 8 Neuro Reverie

 

“…your brain is amazing; it is flexible; it can be trained, developed, improved, optimized: learn to use it well for your own benefit and for that of your society, perhaps even for the world. It is not that you have become your brain, or that you are identical with your brain, but you can act on your brain, even if that brain is not directly available to consciousness, and in so acting, you can improve yourself—not as a brain, but as a person.”

 

-Rose , N., & Abi-Rached, J. (2013). Neuro: The new brain sciences and the management of the mind. (p. 222). Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

 

If I have not become my brain then I must be tucked away somewhere within its pinkish folds, muddling thoughts and breaking my focus. Recently, I made the decision to shave my head completely and it’s actually brought me closer to my brain. Looking at the eggish shape of my head it’s easy to imagine a mind encapsulated inside my awkward skull. That line about how the brain “is not directly available to consciousness” sort of gives me the creeps. To not know who or what you are can be extremely dooming when it happens at inopportune times.

 

Bachelardian reverie week 7

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“Strategies week to create the kinds of persons who can take responsibility for their actions, and they attempt to enhance self-control by acting on the brain” pg 196

“The boat inside the painter inside the boat
Inside the eye watching the painter moving beyond himself.”
From Discovering your subject
There are many men and women who have devoted themselves to the intricate depictions of the brain. They have consistently painted the same subject under many different circumstances, many different lenses. But have they been able to move beyond themselves in this pursuit? Have they transcended the mind that created the reality they live and strive in? How can anyone claim to have any sort of understanding of the mind – the intangible, immeasurable spirit and watcher – or the brain – this physical mass of thousands of neurons; fibers brought to life and beaded by iridescent drops of myelin? If they are trying to free others from this physical prison, must they first learn how to transport themselves beyond it first?