Olivia Judson, who writes about science for the New York Times, mentions in her column today the possibility that some facial expressions can cause certain emotions (in addition to being expressions of those emotions):

A set of experiments investigating the effects of facial movements on mood used different vowel sounds as a stealthy way to get people to pull different faces. (The idea was to avoid people realizing they were being made to scowl or smile.) The results showed that if you read aloud a passage full of vowels that make you scowl — the German vowel sound ü, for example — you’re likely to find yourself in a worse mood than if you read a story similar in content but without any instances of ü. Similarly, saying ü over and over again generates more feelings of ill will than repeating a or o.

She goes on to write:

Of course, facial gestures aren’t the whole story of emotions; moreover, languages can potentially influence emotions in many other ways. Different languages have different music — sounds and rhythms — that could also have an emotional impact. The meanings of words may influence moods more than the gestures used to make them. And just as the words a language uses to describe colors affects how speakers of that language perceive those colors, different languages might allow speakers to process particular emotions differently; this, in turn, could feed into a culture, perhaps contributing to a general tendency towards gloom or laughter.

(Sources of the studies she reports can be found below her blog post, at http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/a-language-of-smiles/

Years ago when I was thinking of the person on whom I modeled the subject of my poem “Desterrado, late 1960s” (in Sparrow: New and Selected Poems), I wrote this phrase:  “the language-shaped curve of his mouth.”  I was thinking about how something seems different in the configuration of the face in persons who speak Spanish vs. French vs. German.   And I was wondering if this had to do with lifelong use of the facial muscles to produce certain phonemes (especially vowels) and not others.

The empirical data that Judson points to may be the beginning of another rethinking of the idea, so popular in literary studies for decades, that language is a perfectly arbitrary system of signs that contain no inherent meaning in themselves.  The linguist Roman Jakobson wrote in one of his essays that in the early 20th century there were empirical studies that established that certain consonantal phonemes were associated with two opposed ideas–specifically, the idea of what is hard, sharp, pointed, etc., vs. the idea of what is rounded, soft.  Every speaker of English probably has a sense of which consonants those are, and the experiments that Jakobson cited were conducted in several different European languages, so there was little question of the ideas being associated with existing words.

And in fact other recent studies have shown that a word that is gendered in opposite ways in two languages (say, German and French) produces opposite associations that are indeed related to whether it is grammatically gendered masculine or feminine.  Of course this would not be true of all nouns, but it does contradict persuasively what our language teachers told us when we learned that the language we were studying gendered nouns–which was that the grammatical gender had nothing to do with the thing itself.  Fair enough; but it can have something to do with the associations and connotations.

This is one of the ways the mind receives, decodes, and plays with language.  If it weren’t true that language were so complex, then it would not have occurred to Victorian people of very proper upbringing and manners to put skirts around the bottom of a grand piano so that no one would see the legs, because to see the legs would then connote seeing human legs, and those would turn into female legs, very lovely ones, and the audience would be morally corrupted by the design of the piano. (!)  The thing (that which is signified) can change the signifier just as much as the signifier controls our idea of the thing.

Poetry brings such associations and connotations into play, at least in “the back of the mind.”  (And in the front of the mind, too, in those who, like musicians, have not only trained the back but are also restlessly, inventively thinking with the front.)  I have long been annoyed by the argumentative tendency to want such matters to be decisively one way or another–words are perfectly arbitrary signs (dog, perro, cane, chien)?; words are all mystically related to what they mean?.  Nope.  Neither.  (Some) words have some relation to what they signify (mama, maman, mami, mom, mater, mae, mutter, moder; or point, punto, punkt, ikkaku, pontertek; or words for spike… and others).  That’s one of the things we work with when we write and keep our ears open for the sounds our words make.

So much has taken my attention away from maintaining my rhythm of thinking in public, in these little essays, that I have fallen behind what I thought would be my regular schedule.  Even if I limit myself to events and demands and interests that have to do with poetry, I am amazed at how much there is to distract one–happily at best–from self-imposed disciplines of writing.  So I will cheat–what else is there for me to do?–and offer my happy excuses.

My colleague in the English Department at Northwestern, Ivy Wilson, and I have been forming a study group in Poetry and Poetics, which has immersed us and a number of colleagues–scholars (in several departments) and poets–in the exciting prospect of being able to spend time, every so often, talking together about so many interesting texts, problems of writing, problems of reading, enthusiasms for all of that.  (See humanities.northwestern.edu/news/workshoppage3.html)

The poet and now novelist Angela Jackson gave a superb reading from her just-published Where I Must Go at Northwestern on Oct. 6, and on the following night gave another, with poet Carolyn Rodgers, at the South Side Community Arts Center.  (See this New York Times feature on Jackson–nytimes.com/2009/10/13/books/13jackson.html.  And for information about the novel, see nupress.northwestern.edu/Title/tabid/68/ISBN/0-8101-5185-5/Default.aspx

Three writers from Eastern Europe visited the Northwestern campus on Oct. 15–Petra Hulova (Czech Republic), Ferenc Barnas (Hungary), and Drago Jancar (Slovenia).

Janet Burroway gave a commanding reading for the MA/MFA in Creative Writing (see http://www.scs.northwestern.edu/grad/cw/), along with a student, Adin Bookbinder, on Oct. 16.

At lunch on Monday Oct. 19 I met with Steve Young, the program director of the Poetry Foundation, and Steve Burns, the artistic director of the Chicago new music group, Fulcrumpoint (see www.fulcrumpoint.org).  The latter Steve is putting together the musicians (and rehearsals) for a performance of  the telling of the story of Oedipus and my reading of my translations of the five odes from the play, on Dec. 3 at the National Hellenic Museum (see “events” at poetryfoundation.org).

And yesterday (October 26) Raza Ali Hasan, Ibtisam Barakat, Fady Joudah, Kazim Ali, and Khaled Mattawa were at Northwestern all day to give readings and to discuss, in a very animated panel together, aspects of being an English-language poet in America, identified with Arabic-speaking and Muslim cultures (the idea of cultural identity was of course at the center of much of the discussion, which was about both self-chosen identities and those that others impose on one); and…

and all of this was immensely rich in artistic accomplishment, in sometimes heroic dedication to the art of writing, and in a dazzling variety of the situation of writers and writing.  So much to think about, to think with, to think.

And so many of us live at a pace that can bring us more experience in a day, and certainly in a week, than we could think through in a month or a year.

I can never catch up to all that, nor to what is coming in the next weeks and months.  I will try to catch up with my half-drafted posts to this site of my thinking in public, especially about poetry. 

I was out for a morning walk this past Saturday. The air was chilly, the lake was moving only slightly with very low swells blown in by light winds from the east, there were twenty or so sails moving across the water, far out and south, and also to the south, a dozen miles away, the Chicago skyline was standing dark and sharp-edged against the pale sky. Clouds were coming in from the west, and as I walked through the lakeside park at Northwestern University in Evanston, I realized I was getting the last of the brilliant but mild sunshine of the day. And I also realized that the tune in my head was from a high-school musical in which I had led a tiny band in a makeshift pit between the front row of seats and the high stage, banging away at a large, old upright piano (tuned for the performances), with only drums, a bass and a tenor sax. The show was Sandy Wilson’s “The Boy Friend,” a 1950s satire of 1920s musical shows–energetic, superficial, and fun to stage. And I asked myself—where in the world did that tune come from, as I am walking briskly along on this crisp, beautiful morning?

*

I tried retracing thoughts I had had already on this walk, working backward through the associations. And I saw that they made a kind of sideways sense.

*

I became aware of this possible process when years ago I read Christopher Bollas’s wonderful Cracking Up (1995). A fellow poet, Steve Berg, told me enthusiastically about this book. The subtitle is “The work of unconscious experience.” Bollas, a psychoanalyist who also has a PhD in American literature, and who has written many books, is keen to understand the freedom of the unconscious, and how in our unconscious, whether we are awake or asleep, many trains of thought are continuously being generated, developing, and then breaking apart and disappearing. This particular book has always seemed to me one of the most fruitful I have ever read in thinking about how the process of writing draws willy-nilly (and fortunately) on our unconscious trains of thought, unconscious feelings, unconscious memories of experience.

*

I mean the writing of fiction and poetry, drama and even the personal essay, although it is no doubt true that in even the most impersonal writing tasks there are flickers of unconscious choice to use this word and not that, to extend syntax this way and not that. What makes this interesting is the idea of freedom. We all know how deadening it can be when our choices, word by word, are made in a state of linguistic and cultural unfreedom—that is, when routine wording is what we put down, simply because that wording is easily available to us, is familiar to us, and in almost all the other writing we do, whatever it might be, we want readers to come with us without their having to work too hard. (A whole subject awaits us there, but I won’t go into it today.)

*

Bollas shows how and why a train of thought can be retraced, when we are lucky, from a thought or a decision which we feel to be unforeseen and spontaneous back through a whole train of ideas and feelings of which we have been only very slightly aware as we were thinking them. A kind of associational “logic” is revealed.

*

So all of a sudden I realize I am humming to myself the song, “Won’t You Charleston With Me?” (When I got back home I looked up that show online to find a list of song titles, and recognized–for I could never have remembered–which title went with the tune I was hearing from memories of forty-five years ago.)  And I began to try to go backward, to try to remember what else I had been thinking of. It went like this:

**

I remembered having been thinking, at an earlier point on the walking trail, of having performed at the piano very happily when I was sixteen, and so enthusiastically, I now remembered also, that my fingers had bled a little from how hard and for how long I had to keep hitting those keys in order to be heard in that auditorium, which was very big.

*

And I thought how I never enjoyed performing again, and I wondered if this was because my experience in competitions and in a concerto performance two years later had been simply awful. But why had I been thinking about that?

*

I then remembered having watched the first twenty minutes of a “Nova” program on Darwin earlier in the week. I couldn’t stay with it—it was a poor production, the acting was strained, the dialogue was hopelessly unconvincing as real talk between people, and… the flashback to Darwin’s romance with his wife, the devout Emma Wedgwood, was set in her family living room, where she was playing Chopin on the piano.   Beautifully, of course, because the playing had been dubbed into the soundtrack by a professional pianist.   And I, in a petty mood, had been annoyed that the young Victorian ladies portrayed in the movies always play the piano perfectly. But why on my walk had I thought of the Darwin movie?

*

And then I recalled the first moments after I got beyond the town street and onto the path leading into the Northwestern University park land, and how I started heading birdsong from a beach-side copse to the right (while on the left is a massive two-level concrete parking lot, but mostly empty on Saturday morning), and I thought about how often I advert, in my own mind although not in conversation, to evolution in general, as one of the great beauties of the universe (at least, when it is not nurturing new strains of virus and bacteria or wiping out “native” flora and fauna, and so on).

*

And why was I thinking about that? I had been completely unaware of these thoughts as a train of thought; I had not, after all, been thinking about what I was thinking—I had simply been thinking it, in the form of an occasional thought that surfaced for an instant and then was gone again while my conscious thinking was pretty much focused on the path, the lake horizon, the skyline downtown, the breeze, the sun, a women’s lacross scrimmage on the lakeside field, and so on.

*

Now I could see the under-sequence of thoughts as a very private version of what I try to do when I am at work on a poem—looking deeper into how the thought/feeling moves…   This is how I teach, sometimes, too– looking for the wobbly spots in a draft, the gaps or seemingly overly emphatic passages that, to me at least, imply that something important in the train of thought/feeling that the poet is trying to shape remains ungrasped, unexpressed, unrealized.  Flagging those moments, I make no attempt to guess what’s under the surface of the draft, since whatever it is that’s missing, if it is missing, only the poet herself/himself could find by using the draft as a trail of clues leading back…

*

Sometimes—the best times—this exercise opens up a space into which a new thought/feeling rises.

*

I don’t think I have any special talent for working back through a train of thought of which I was not aware. I manage to do it sometimes, and at most times not, and on most days I don’t even try.   But the surprising thing that comes to mind—that has already come to mind—fascinates me and seems to me intimately related not only to the ways in which dreams move (which was Freud’s interest) but also to the ways in which a poem gradually finds its shape as a sequence of ideas and feelings. One can’t move one’s whole creative process into the unconscious; one has to make artistic decisions that are more deliberate and more pondered than that; but one can’t escape—and one shouldn’t try to escape it, whether by distracting oneself from it, or by denying its existence—the unconscious dimensions of one’s writing.  One should use them, as I think all successful artists do.

From the obituary of Yehuda Amichai (b. 5/3/24, d. 9/22/00) that was published in the New York Times:

Metaphor “is the great human revolution, at least on a par with the invention of the wheel.”

“There’s an old Jewish saying, ‘If you meet the devil, take him with you into the synagogue.’  Try to take the evil of politics into yourself, to influence it imaginatively, to give it human shape.  This is my attitude toward politics.”

For him, all poetry was political.  “This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality, and politics is part of reality, history in the making.  Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.”

*   *   *   *   *  *

Marina Tsvetaeva in 1926 in “The Poet on the Critic”:

“Who am I writing for?  Not for the millions, not for one person alive, and not for myself.  I write for the sake of the thing itself.  The thing writes itself through me.”

*   *   *   *   *

Thomas Mann to Erich Kahler, 3/18/31:

“Give the times their due and publish what you have written.  I understand your inhibitions, but we believe until almost at the end that the decisive word remains to be written, and yet we have always set down far more of the decisive words than we ourselves can possibly appreciate.”

*   *   *   *   *

Franz Kafka (as quoted, who knows how reliably, by Gustav Janouch in his Conversations with Kafka):
Wealth is “material insecurity.”

Kafka’s works are, in his own words, “evidence of solitude.”  Hence his sincere desire to destroy them.

On Georg Trakl: ” ‘He had too much imagination,’ said Kafka.  ‘So he could not endure the war [WW I], which arose above all from a monstrous lack of imagination.’ ”

“My complaints about the disorder in the office, and especially around myself, are only a trick, by which I try to hide the insecurity of my existence from the accusing and inquisitive gaze of the outside world.  In reality, I only manage to live because of the disorder, from which I steal the last remnant of personal freedom.”

The Germans “do not wish to comprehend, understand, read.  They only wish to possess and rule; for that, understanding is usually a hindrance.”

” ‘Are they dancers?’ I stupidly inquired, with a glance at a well-disciplined chair of chorus girls.  ‘No, they’re soldiers,’ replied Kafka.  ‘A [musical] revue is a military parade in disguise.’ “