Tag Archives: g-bachelard

Week 8 Neuro Reverie

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.

Week 7 Neuro Reverie

Renée Ingersoll

As Poetry Recycles Neurons

5/14/13

Neuro Reverie

 

Neuro Reverie

“..The criminal as, anatomically and physiologically, an organic anomaly.”
(Rose and Abi-Rached, Neuro; 169)

“During the last fifteen years there is no specific work in criminal anthropology to be recorded…”
(Rose and Abi-Rached, Neuro; 169)

Call me a criminal anthropologist,
working with those anatomic
physiologic
anomalies
you call delinquents
I’ve ridden the ride
without the jail time
just the person on the other end of that payphone
hoping it will only be months, not years

Call me a criminal anthropologist
whose fallen in love with her subjects
once she saw the other side of their dark moons
why they’re even pushing to begin with
which moms and dads were
abusive
alcoholics
crack addicts
or just too young for parenting
hoping they won’t turn out like them

Call me a criminal anthropologist
torn between my real world
and trying to pull them out of the game
if everyone knew them like I do
they wouldn’t be looked down upon
in that way that stops them from trying to get jobs
one felony doesn’t mean they don’t deserve to eat
without food stamps
or flipping molly for gas station food

Call me a criminal anthropologist
but i’d rather be called their friend

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…

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