Proust Was a Neuroscientist
By Jonah LehrerHoughton Mifflin
Copyright ©2007 Jonah Lehrer
All right reserved.ISBN: 9780618620104
Walt Whitman
The Substance of Feeling
The poet writes the history of his own body.
— Henry David Thoreau
For Walt Whitman, the Civil War was about the body. The crime of the
Confederacy, Whitman believed, was treating blacks as nothing but flesh,
selling them and buying them like pieces of meat. Whitman's revelation,
which he had for the first time at a New Orleans slave auction, was that body
and mind are inseparable. To whip a man's body was to whip a man's soul.
This is Whitman's central poetic idea.We do not have a body, we
are a body. Although our feelings feel immaterial, they actually begin in the
flesh. Whitman introduces his only book of poems, Leaves of Grass, by
imbuing his skin with his spirit, "the aroma of my armpits finer than prayer":
Was somebody asking to see the soul?
See, your own shape and countenance . . .
Behold, the body includes and is the meaning, the main
Concern, and includes and is the soul
Whitman's fusion of body and soul was a revolutionary idea, as
radical in concept as his free-verse form. At the time, scientists believed that
our feelings came from the brain and that the body was just a lump of inert
matter. But Whitman believed that our mind depended upon the flesh. He
was determined to write poems about our "form complete."
This is what makes his poetry so urgent: the attempt to
wring "beauty out of sweat," the metaphysical soul out of fat and skin.
Instead of dividing the world into dualisms, as philosophers had done for
centuries, Whitman saw everything as continuous with everything else. For
him, the body and the soul, the profane and the profound, were only different
names for the same thing. As Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Boston
Transcendentalist, once declared, "Whitman is a remarkable mixture of the
Bhagvat Ghita and the New York Herald."
Whitman got this theory of bodily feelings from his investigations
of himself. All Whitman wanted to do in Leaves of Grass was put "a person, a
human being (myself, in the later half of the Nineteenth Century, in America)
freely, fully and truly on record." And so the poet turned himself into an
empiricist, a lyricist of his own experience. As Whitman wrote in the preface
to Leaves of Grass, "You shall stand by my side to look in the mirror with
me."
It was this method that led Whitman to see the soul and body as
inextricably "interwetted." He was the first poet to write poems in which the
flesh was not a stranger. Instead, in Whitman's unmetered form, the
landscape of his body became the inspiration for his poetry. Every line he
ever wrote ached with the urges of his anatomy, with its wise desires and
inarticulate sympathies. Ashamed of nothing,Whitman left nothing out. "Your
very flesh," he promised his readers, "shall be a great poem."
Neuroscience now knows thatWhitman's poetry spoke the truth:
emotions are generated by the body. Ephemeral as they seem, our feelings
are actually rooted in the movements of our muscles and the palpitations of
our insides. Furthermore, these material feelings are an essential element of
the thinking process. As the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio notes, "The
mind is embodied . . . not just embrained."
At the time, however, Whitman's idea was seen as both erotic
and audacious. His poetry was denounced as a "pornographic utterance,"
and concerned citizens called for its censorship. Whitman enjoyed the
controversy. Nothing pleased him more than dismantling prissy Victorian
mores and inverting the known facts of science.
The story of the brain's separation from the body begins with René
Descartes. The most influential philosopher of the seventeenth century,
Descartes divided being into two distinct substances: a holy soul and a
mortal carcass. The soul was the source of reason, science, and everything
nice. Our flesh, on the other hand, was "clocklike," just a machine that
bleeds. With this schism, Descartes condemned the body to a life of
subservience, a power plant for the brain's light bulbs.
In Whitman's own time, the Cartesian impulse to worship the
brain and ignore the body gave rise to the new "science" of phrenology.
Begun by Franz Josef Gall at the start of the nineteenth century,
phrenologists believed that the shape of the skull, its strange hills and
hollows, accurately reflected the mind inside. By measuring the bumps of
bone, these pseudoscientists hoped to measure the subject's character by
determining which areas of the brain were swollen with use and which were
shriveled with neglect. Our cranial packaging revealed our insides; the rest of
the body was irrelevant.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the promise of
phrenology seemed about to be fulfilled. Innumerable medical treatises,
dense with technical illustrations, were written to defend its theories. Endless
numbers of skulls were quantified. Twenty-seven different mental talents were
uncovered. The first scientific theory of mind seemed destined to be the last.
But measurement is always imperfect, and explanations are easy
to invent. Phrenology's evidence, though amassed in a spirit of seriousness
and sincerity, was actually a collection of accidental observations. (The brain
is so complicated an organ that its fissures can justify almost any
imaginative hypothesis, at least until a better hypothesis comes along.) For
example, Gall located the trait of ideality in "the temporal ridge of the frontal
bones" because busts of Homer revealed a swelling there and because poets
when writing tend to touch that part of the head. This was his data.
Of course, phrenology strikes our modern sensibilities as woefully
unscientific, like an astrology of the brain. It is hard to imagine its allure or
comprehend how it endured for most of the nineteenth century. Whitman
used to quote Oliver Wendell Holmes on the subject: "You might as easily
tell how much money is in a safe feeling the knob on the door as tell how
much brain a man has by feeling the bumps on his head." But knowledge
emerges from the litter of our mistakes, and just as alchemy led to
chemistry, so did the failure of phrenology lead science to study the brain
itself and not just its calcified casing.
Whitman, a devoted student of the science of his day, had a
complicated relationship with phrenology. He called the first phrenology
lecture he attended "the greatest conglomeration of pretension and absurdity
it has ever been our lot to listen to. . . .We do not mean to assert that there
is no truth whatsoever in phrenology, but we do say that its claims to
confidence, as set forth by Mr. Fowler, are preposterous to the last
degree."More than a decade later, however, that same Mr. Fowler, of the
publishing house Fowler and Wells in Manhattan, became the sole distributor
of the first edition of Leaves of Grass.Whitman couldn't find anyone else to
publish his poems. And while Whitman seems to have moderated his views
on the foolishness of phrenology — even going so far as to undergo a few
phrenological exams himself — his poetry stubbornly denied phrenology's
most basic premise. Like Descartes, phrenologists looked for the soul solely
in the head, desperate to reduce the mind to its cranial causes. Whitman
realized that such reductions were based on a stark error. By ignoring the
subtleties of his body, these scientists could not possibly account for the
subtleties of his soul. Like Leaves of Grass, which could only be understood
in "its totality — its massings," Whitman believed that his existence could
be "comprehended at no time by its parts, at all times by its unity." This is
the moral of Whitman's poetic sprawl: the human being is an irreducible
whole. Body and soul are emulsified into each other. "To be in any form, what
is that?"Whitman once asked. "Mine is no callous shell."
Emerson
Whitman's faith in the transcendental body was strongly influenced by the
transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson. When Whitman was still a
struggling journalist living in Brooklyn, Emerson was beginning to write his
lectures on nature. A lapsed Unitarian preacher, Emerson was more
interested in the mystery of his own mind than in the preachings of some
aloof God. He disliked organized religion because it relegated the spiritual to
a place in the sky instead of seeing the spirit among "the common, low and
familiar."
Without Emerson's mysticism, it is hard to imagine Whitman's
poetry. "I was simmering, simmering, simmering," Whitman once said, "and
Emerson brought me to a boil." From Emerson, Whitman learned to trust his
own experience, searching himself for intimations of the profound. But if the
magnificence of Emerson was his vagueness, his defense of Nature with a
capital N, the magnificence of Whitman was his immediacy. All of Whitman's
songs began with himself, nature as embodied by his own body.
And while Whitman and Emerson shared a philosophy, they could
not have been more different in person. Emerson looked like a Puritan
minister, with abrupt cheekbones and a long, bony nose. A man of solitude,
he was prone to bouts of selfless self-absorption. "I like the silent church
before the service begins," he confessed in "Self-Reliance." He wrote in his
journal that he liked man, but not men. When he wanted to think, he would
take long walks by himself in the woods.
Whitman — "broad shouldered, rough-fleshed, Bacchus-browed,
bearded like a satyr, and rank" — got his religion from Brooklyn, from its
dusty streets and its cart drivers, its sea and its sailors, its mothers and its
men. He was fascinated by people, these citizens of his sensual democracy.
As his uncannily accurate phrenological exam put it, "Leading traits of
character appear to be Friendship, Sympathy, Sublimity and Self-Esteem,
and markedly among his combinations the dangerous fault of Indolence, a
tendency to the pleasure of Voluptuousness and Alimentiveness, and a
certain reckless swing of animal will, too unmindful, probably, of the
conviction of others."
Whitman heard Emerson for the first time in 1842. Emerson was
beginning his lecture tour, trying to promote his newly published Essays.
Writing in the New York Aurora, Whitman called Emerson's speech "one of
the richest and most beautiful compositions" he had ever heard. Whitman
was particularly entranced by Emerson's plea for a new American poet, a
versifier fit for democracy: "The poet stands among partial men for the
complete man," Emerson said. "He reattaches things to the whole."
But Whitman wasn't ready to become a poet. For the next
decade, he continued to simmer, seeing New York as a journalist and as the
editor of the Brooklyn Eagle and Freeman. He wrote articles about criminals
and abolitionists, opera stars and the new Fulton ferry. When the Freeman
folded, he traveled to New Orleans, where he saw slaves being sold on the
auction block, "their bodies encased in metal chains." He sailed up the
Mississippi on a side-wheeler, and got a sense of the Western vastness, the
way the "United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem."
It was during these difficult years when Whitman was an
unemployed reporter that he first began writing fragments of poetry, scribbling
down quatrains and rhymes in his cheap notebooks. With no audience but
himself, Whitman was free to experiment. While every other poet was still
counting syllables, Whitman was writing lines that were messy montages of
present participles, body parts, and erotic metaphors. He abandoned strict
meter, for he wanted his form to reflect nature, to express thoughts "so alive
that they have an architecture of their own." As Emerson had insisted years
before, "Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say 'It is in me, and shall out.'"
And so, as his country was slowly breaking apart, Whitman
invented a new poetics, a form of inexplicable strangeness. A self-
conscious "language-maker," Whitman had no precursor. No other poet in the
history of the English language prepared readers for Whitman's eccentric
cadences ("sheath'd hooded sharp-tooth'd touch"), his invented verbs
("unloosing," "preluding," "unreeling"), his love of long anatomical lists, and his
honest refusal to be anything but himself, syllables be damned. Even his bad
poetry is bad in a completely original way, for Whitman only ever imitated
himself.
And yet, for all its incomprehensible originality, Whitman's verse
also bears the scars of his time. His love of political unions and physical
unity, the holding together of antimonies: these themes find their source in
America's inexorable slide into the Civil War. "My book and the war are one,"
Whitman once said. His notebook breaks into free verse for the first time in
lines that try to unite the decade's irreconcilables, the antagonisms of North
and South, master and slave, body and soul. Only in his poetry could
Whitman find the whole he was so desperately looking for:
I am the poet of the body
And I am the poet of the soul
I go with the slaves of the earth equally with the masters
And I will stand between the masters and the slaves,
Entering into both so that both shall understand me alike.
In 1855, after years of "idle versifying," Whitman finally published
his poetry. He collected his "leaves" — printing lingo for pages — of "grass" —
what printers called compositions of little value — in a slim, cloth-bound
volume, only ninety-five pages long. Whitman sent Emerson the first edition
of his book. Emerson responded with a letter that some said Whitman
carried around Brooklyn in his pocket for the rest of the summer. At the time,
Whitman was an anonymous poet and Emerson a famous philosopher. His
letter to Whitman is one of the most generous pieces of praise in the history
of American literature. "Dear Sir," Emerson began:
I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of "Leaves of Grass." I find it
the most extraordinary piece of wit & wisdom that America has yet
contributed. I am very happy in reading it. It meets the demand I am always
making of what seemed the sterile & stingy nature, as if too much handiwork
or too much lymph in the temperament were making our western wits fat &
mean. I give you joy of your free & brave thought. . . . I greet you at the
beginning of a great career.
Whitman, never one to hide a good review from "the Master," sent
Emerson's private letter to the Tribune, where it was published and later
included in the second edition of Leaves of Grass. But by 1860, Emerson had
probably come to regret his literary endorsement. Whitman had added to
Leaves of Grass the erotic sequence "Enfans d'Adam" ("Children of Adam"), a
collection that included the poems "From Pent-up Aching Rivers," "I Am He
that Aches with Love," and "O Hymen! O Hymenee!" Emerson wanted
Whitman to remove the erotic poems from the new edition of his poetry.
(Apparently, some parts of Nature still had to be censored.) Emerson made
this clear while the two were taking a long walk across Boston Common,
expressing his fear that Whitman was "in danger of being tangled up with the
unfortunate heresy" of free love.
Whitman, though still an obscure poet, was adamant: "Enfans
d'Adam" must remain. Such an excision, he said, would be like castration
and "What does a man come to with his virility gone?" For Whitman, sex
revealed the unity of our form, how the urges of the flesh became the feelings
of the soul. He would remember in the last preface to Leaves of Grass, "A
Backwards Glance over Traveled Roads," that his conversation with Emerson
had crystallized his poetic themes. Although he admitted that his poetry
was "avowedly the song of sex and Amativeness and ever animality," he
believed that his art "lifted [these bodily allusions] into a different light and
atmosphere." Science and religion might see the body in terms of its
shameful parts, but the poet, lover of the whole, knows that "the human body
and soul must remain an entirety." "That," insisted Whitman, "is what I felt in
my inmost brain and heart, when I only answer'd Emerson's vehement
arguments with silence, under the old elms of Boston Common."
Despite his erotic epiphany, Whitman was upset by his walk with
Emerson. Had no one understood his earlier poetry? Had no one seen its
philosophy? The body is the soul. How many times had he written that? In
how many different ways? And if the body is the soul, then how can the body
be censored? As he wrote in "I Sing the Body Electric," the central poem
of "Enfans d'Adam":
O my body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men
and women, nor the likes of the parts of you,
I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes
of the soul, (and that they are the soul,)
I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my
Poems, and that they are my poems.
And so, against Emerson's wishes, Whitman published "Enfans
d'Adam." As Emerson predicted, the poems were greeted with cries of
indignation. One reviewer said "that quotations from the 'Enfans d'Adam'
poems would be an offence against decency too gross to be tolerated." But
Whitman didn't care. As usual, he wrote his own anonymous reviews. He
knew that if his poetry were to last, it must leave nothing out. It must be
candid, and it must be true.
The Ghostly Limb
In the winter of 1862, during the bloody apogee of the Civil War, Whitman
traveled to Virginia in search of his brother, who had been injured at the
Battle of Fredericksburg. This was Whitman's first visit to the war's front. The
fighting had ended just a few days before, and Whitman saw "where their
priceless blood reddens the grass the ground." The acrid smell of gun smoke
still hung in the air. Eventually, Whitman found the Union Army hospital, its
shelter tents bordered by freshly dug graves, the names of the dead scrawled
on "pieces of barrel-staves or broken boards, stuck in the dirt." Writing to his
mother, Whitman described "the heap of feet, arms, legs &c. under a tree in
front of a hospital." The limbs, freshly amputated, were beginning to rot.
After seeing the dead and dying of Fredericksburg, Whitman
devoted himself to helping the soldiers. For the next three years, he
volunteered as a wound dresser in Union hospitals, seeing "some 80,000 to
100,000 of the wounded and sick, as sustainer of spirit and body in some
degree." He would nurse both Union and Confederate men. "I cannot leave
them," he wrote. "Once in a while some youngster holds on to me
convulsively and I do what I can for him." Whitman held the soldiers' hands;
he made them lemonade; he bought them ice cream and underwear and
cigarettes; sometimes, he even read them poetry. While the doctors treated
their wounds, Whitman nursed their souls.
All his life, Whitman would remember the time he spent as a
volunteer in the hospitals. "Those three [wartime] years," he later
remembered in Specimen Days, his oral autobiography, "I consider the most
profound lesson of my life." Never again would Whitman feel so useful, "more
permanently absorbed, to the very roots." "People used to say to me, 'Walt,
you are doing miracles for those fellows in the hospitals.' I wasn't. I was . . .
doing miracles for myself."
As always, Whitman transmuted the experience into poetry. He
told Emerson that he wanted to write about his time in the hospitals, for they
had "opened a new world somehow to me, giving closer insights, new things,
exploring deeper mines than any yet." In "Drum Taps," his sequence of
poems on the war — the only sequence of poems he never revised —
Whitman describes the tortured anatomy he saw every day in the hospitals:
From the stump of the arm, the amputated hand
I undo the clotted lint, remove the slough, wash off the matter and blood,
Back on his pillow the soldier bends with curv'd neck and side-falling head,
His eyes are closed, his face pale, he dares not look on the bloody stump.
Whitman did look at the bloody stump. The war's gore shocked
him. Volunteering in the canvas-tent hospitals, he witnessed the violent mess
of surgery: "the hiss of the surgeon's knife, the gnawing teeth of his saw /
wheeze, cluck, swash of falling blood." Amid the stench of dying soldiers and
unclaimed corpses, Whitman consoled himself by remembering that the
body was not only a body. As a nurse, Whitman tried to heal what the
surgeon couldn't touch. He called these our "deepest remains."
By the second year of the war, just as Whitman was learning how to wrap
battle wounds in wet cotton, doctors working in Civil War hospitals began
noticing a very strange phenomenon. After a soldier's limb was amputated, it
was not uncommon for him to continue to "feel" his missing arm or leg. The
patients said it was like living with ghosts. Their own flesh had returned to
haunt them.
Medical science ignored the syndrome. After all, the limb and its
nerves were gone. There was nothing left to cut. But one doctor believed the
soldiers' strange stories. His name was Silas Weir Mitchell, and he was
a "doctor of nerves" at Turner's Lane Hospital in Philadelphia. He was also a
good friend of Whitman's. For much of their lives, the doctor and the poet
wrote letters to each other, sharing a love of literature and medical stories. In
fact, it was Weir Mitchell who, in 1878, finally diagnosed Whitman with a
ruptured blood vessel in the brain, prescribing "mountain air" as medicine.
Later on, Weir Mitchell financially supported the poet, giving him fifteen
dollars a month for more than two years.
But during the Civil War, while Whitman was working as a nurse,
Weir Mitchell was trying to understand these illusory limbs. The Battle of
Gettysburg had given him a hospital full of amputee patients, and, in his
medical notebook, Weir Mitchell began describing a great variety of "sensory
ghosts." Some of the missing limbs seemed unreal to the patients, while
others seemed authentic; some were painful, others painless. Although a few
of the amputees eventually forgot about their amputated limbs, the vast
majority retained "a sense of the existence of their lost limb that was more
vivid, definite and intrusive than that of its truly living fellow member." The
bodily illusion was more real than the body.
Although Weir Mitchell believed that he was the first person to
document this phenomenon, he wasn't. Herman Melville, twelve years earlier,
had given Ahab, the gnarled sea captain of Moby-Dick, a sensory ghost.
Ahab is missing a leg (Moby-Dick ate it), and in chapter 108, he summons a
carpenter to fashion him a new ivory peg leg. Ahab tells the carpenter that he
still feels his amputated leg "invisibly and uninterpenetratingly." His phantom
limb is like a "poser." "Look," Ahab says, "put thy live leg here in the place
where mine was; so, now, here is only one distinct leg to the eye, yet two to
the soul. Where thou feelest tingling life; there, exactly there, there to a hair,
do I. Is't a riddle?"
Weir Mitchell, unaware of Melville's prescience, never cited
Ahab's medical condition. He published his observations of the mystery in
two neurology textbooks. He even published a special bulletin on the
phenomenon, which the surgeon general's office distributed to other military
hospitals in 1864. But Weir Mitchell felt constrained by the dry, clinical
language of his medical reports.He believed that the experience of the
soldiers in his hospital had profound philosophical implications. After all, their
sensory ghosts were living proof of Whitman's poetry: our matter was
entangled with our spirit. When you cut the flesh, you also cut the soul.
And so Weir Mitchell decided to write an anonymous short story,
written in the first person. In "The Case of George Dedlow," published in The
Atlantic Monthly in 1866, Weir Mitchell imagines himself a soldier wounded
at the Battle of Chickamauga, shot in both legs and both arms. Dedlow
passes out from the pain.
When he wakes, Dedlow is in a hospital tent. He has no limbs
left: they have all been cut off. Dedlow describes himself as a "useless torso,
more like some strange larval creature than anything of human shape." But
even though Dedlow is now limbless, he still feels all of his limbs. His body
has become a ghost, and yet it feels as real as ever. Weir Mitchell explains
this phenomenon by referencing the brain. Because the brain and body are
so interconnected, the mind remains "ever mindful of its missing [bodily] part,
and, imperfectly at least, preserves to the man a consciousness of
possessing that which he has not." Weir Mitchell believed that the brain
depended upon the body for its feelings and identity. Once Dedlow loses his
limbs, he finds "to his horror that at times I was less conscious of myself, of
my own existence, than used to be the case . . . I thus reached the
conclusion that a man is not his brain, or any one part of it, but all of his
economy, and that to lose any part must lessen this sense of his own
existence."
In his short story, Weir Mitchell is imagining a Whitmanesque
physiology. Since soul is body and body is soul, to lose a part of one's body
is to lose a part of one's soul. As Whitman wrote in "Song of Myself," "Lack
one lacks both." The mind cannot be extricated from its matter, for mind and
matter, these two seemingly opposite substances, are impossibly
intertwined.Whitman makes our unity clear on the very first page of Leaves of
Grass, as he describes his poetic subject:
Of physiology from top to toe I sing
not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the
Muse, I say the form complete is worthier far.
After the war, Weir Mitchell's clinical observations fell into
obscurity. Because phantom limbs had no material explanation, medical
science continued to ignore the phenomenon. Only William James, in his
1887 article "The Consciousness of Lost Limbs," pursued Weir Mitchell's
supernatural hypothesis. As Harvard's first psychology professor, James sent
out a short questionnaire to hundreds of amputees asking various questions
about their missing parts (for example, "How much of the limb can you
feel?" "Can you, by imagining strongly that it has moved, make yourself really
feel as if it had moved into a different position?"). The results of James's
survey taught him only one fact about sensory ghosts: there was no general
pattern to the experience of lost limbs. Every body was invested with its own
individual meaning. "We can never seek amongst these processes for results
which shall be invariable," James wrote. "Exceptions remain to every
empirical law of our mental life, and can only be treated as so many individual
aberrations." As Henry James, William's novelist brother, once wrote, "There
is a presence in what is missing." That presence is our own.
Copyright © 2007 by Jonah Lehrer. Reprinted by permission of Houghton
Mifflin Company.
Continues...
Excerpted from Proust Was a Neuroscientistby Jonah Lehrer Copyright ©2007 by Jonah Lehrer. Excerpted by permission.
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