Donc Je Suis.” A patient of proprioception
deficit disorder feels as if his mind and body
have separated. His mind, in other words,
cannot orient his body in space and thus he
has difficulty walking, sitting, holding objects,
or clenching his jaw. He cannot multitask with
his body, so to speak. If he is walking to his car,
he cannot also hold a suitcase, cup of coffee, or
jacket. Schmeidler writes,
they are observing those activities performed by
other animals.
While mirror neurons may not be a special
cell type in themselves but rather regular
cells that exhibit mirroring as one of many
functions—the complexities and extent of
which are unknown—the finding that our
brain can mimic the excitation patterns of
observed movement is interesting, to say the
least. Roripaugh writes of a 1998 discovery
“Once I wished I could be all
by Michael Arib, a neuroscientist at the
lovely mind: unsexed, body-free University of Southern California: “…language
itself appears to rise from the same syntactic
I thought I’d paddle
understanding of action generated by our
philosophy’s rapids, write
mirror neurons.” In 2005, Rizzolatti determined
that hearing a sentence of action results in the
poetry.”
same reaction the mirror neuron might display
upon seeing that action. When I read aloud
She later wonders, “Have I ever really owned
Schmeidler’s devastating stanza in “Flagellant’s
my hands?”
Ball”—“Severed/her foot nicely/with a home
guillotine,/trading existential pain for/
The irony is devastating: Schmeidler’s
gangrene”—my brain experiences the sentence
intelligent speaker, who is aware of the
as if I were seeing the self-mutilation.
strangeness of embodiment, longs for the
ordinariness of physical movement, the control
A poem, in turn, is much more than just
of limbs. Intellect seems fruitless when the
lines strewn on a page. To read an action in a
mind cannot galvanize the body. Proprioception poem might bring about in the reader the same
deficit disorder seems to move beyond
neurological response of actually witnessing
Descartes’ preoccupations: the mind has
that action in person. The reader is somewhat
intellect but it needs the body to express that
of a vessel. And the poem that focuses on
intellect.
neuroscience heightens the performative nature
of that poem.
The Reader as Vessel
It’s a daunting and old idea, the one where
The ways in which poetry can relate our
the reader breathes life into the poem through
neurological complexities in beautiful,
intellectual interest and interpretive will. But
complicated ways is more than just coincidence. it’s also something more when the ever-shifting
This hunch, which I devise after comparing
history of science and poetry are reined in by
the chaos of Schmeidler’s works to that of T.S.
neuroscience.
Eliot’s, proves to be true. In the twenty-first
issue of Jubilat, a journal of contemporary and
classic American poetry, Lee Ann Roripaugh
writes about ‘mirror neurons’ and the linguistic,
emotional, and psychological elements of
poetry. Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s,
Italian neurophysiologist Giacomo Rizzolatti
and a group of researchers discovered the now
hotly contested mirror neurons, a purported
‘special type’ of neuron that is found in the
premotor cortex as well as the language,
emotion, and pain centers of are brains. These
neurons fire up not only when animals are
performing specific activities but also when
SciArt in America October 2014
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