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My antennae have been out recently for the splicing together of different worlds and languages in an attempt to make a gateway for the reader from a more familiar to a less familiar world. I’ve also been plundering the library at the Tavistock, where I’m supposed to be reading about working groups, for things on narrative and narrative therapy, and anything that looks like a way of writing that slightly startles and unsettles, so making the space for the reader to breathe more deeply. This is all entirely selfish, as I’ve finally started moving into writing the book I promised the publisher longer ago that I care to confess and I’m trying to find a voice for it.
One of the books I stumbled over is by Paul Broks, and it’s called ‘Into the Silent Land’. Broks is a neuro-psychologist who, as the back blurb has it
draws on his many years as a neuropsychologist to create a unique mosaic of neurological tales, metaphysical parable and autobiographical reflections.
It’s true, he does. And I what I notice is that, even where I’m less immediately drawn to the tale I’m reading, I stay with the book, because it’s also a kind of first hand testimony of an expert witness to brain damage and its consequences. In this sense it satisfies the poetic in me, and the thirst for that kind of technical dressing that is hook for detective stories, or a television series set in a hospital. It also strikes me that the power of the personal holds me there. I can see the author, not the person, but the author, and the sense of intimacy that offers means that this feels like a private conversation with him.
I particularly liked this, storytelling-wise, from a piece called ‘The sword of the sun’ (which gets its name from an Italo Calvino story about a man who sees the sun’s reflection as a shining sword, and swims towards it but can never overtake it):
From a neuroscience perspective we are all divided and discontinuous. The mental processes underlying our sense of self – feelings, thoughts, memories – are scattered through different zones of the brain. There is no special point of convergence. No cockpit of the soul. No soul pilot. They come together as a work of ficiton. A human being is a story-telling machine. The self is a story.
What strikes me is that the poetry, the personal and the scientific accuracy are each a leg in a three legged stool, that allows me to sit somewhere quietly, look out at the view and contemplate. Without any one of three legs, the stool would fall over.
It reminds me of an article I’ve quoted before, a few years back in the New Scientist by Simon Armitage, a poet, called ‘Where science and poetry meet’. In it he says:
Science, like poetry, deals in likeness, similitude and equivalence. If you’re gambling with the world and its actions, science gives you better odds, because its logic is linear, whereas the logic of poetry is radial, or at its very best, entirely spherical. Just as life, as we know, imitates art, science imitates life. I don’t suggest that as a hierarchy, but to reinforce the interconnectedness of the two disciplines through the intermediary of the human presence.
And then:
Science didn’t take men to the moon. It may have worked out the trigonometry, but it was a poetic dream that propelled us into the heavens.
In passing, and in closing, I should mention that I’m finding a recommendation of Twyla Tharp from ‘The Creative Habit’ very useful just now. She calls it ‘reading archaeologically’ – start with your current book, and work back through the references and influences that brought it into being. If I apply that to ‘Into the silent land’ I’ll be reading, among others
Better get reading.
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