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 6 Psychoanalysis of Fire

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“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

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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

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“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

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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

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“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

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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

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“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.

lp – Bachelard Reverie: Neuro .1

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“We have a social brain in that the brain has evolved to favor a certain type of sociality manifested in all the interactions between persons and groups that come naturally to humans in our social lives. And we have a social brain in that this organ is now construed as malleable, open to, and shaped by, social interaction—shaping sociality as it is itself reshaped by it.” 163

 

Neurons finely tuning themselves, reacting to all and every interaction perceived.

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Shaping me as I am shaping you, we will forever be stored in the neurons firing in each other’s brains,

and changing each other always as we grow older.

For inside me, there will always be you there,

shaping you as you shape me.

Yet, when the natural response to change is resistance,

I find myself, not only accepting, but actively constructing the change itself.

Pursuing the depths of uncertainty that these constructs may bring.

As if you are the oyster, and you are tasting me

as I am tasting you.

Dive in.

Week 6 Neuro Reverie

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“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 , N., & Abi-Rached, J. (2013). Neuro: The new brain sciences and the management of the mind. (p. 146). Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

“We have a social brain in that the brain has evolved to favor a certain type of sociality manifested in all the interactions between persons and groups that come naturally to humans in our social lives. And we have a social brain in that this organ in now construed as malleable, open to, and shaped by, social interaction—shaping sociality as it is itself reshaped by it.”

-Rose , N., & Abi-Rached, J. (2013). Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind. (p. 163). Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

The masses dethrone the mind so that we wake up at night and hate ourselves and hate our lives and reach out for flesh and LED screens and the bottles and the needle and the scalpel that’s only purpose is to divide and divide and divide. Now I picture a brain surgeon alone in a sterilized space, dressed in pale green garments with a scalpel raised about his naked brain. I wish that for a moment I could hold my mind in the cup of my hands. To turn it over like the heavy weight it is and to mold what I am told is malleable. So this is why my heart beats and where it pumps most of its blood. Oh my mind, my mind, you’re a thirsty beast aren’t you? Thanks for the daydream; something in me was parched for some poetry.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Ab – Spring Reverie week 6

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Marisa Malone

Reverie on Neuro ch. 5

Spring qt. wk.6

Word Count: 131

“Imaging technologies, with their focus on the localization of function and the experimental manipulations they require and utilize, impose their own constraints and logics as to what can be thought.” (Rose & Abi-Rached, 158)

Do we chose what we want to see? Are these images of brains showing the viewer a portrait of themselves? And if so, where is the point at which these two brains (the one in the skull and the one on screen) connect?

Brain imaging technologies only show but those with the power to view are the ones who tell. By viewing the brain, watching where it illuminates and cast shadows, the viewer is faced with their own constraint of thought to try and explain that of an others. The meaning given to these images and translators supplies the truth in their story. The truth becomes power and power defines the “normal.” These translations are fictive, they are subjective, they are the constraint of ones thoughts viewing a brain under constraint.