Yesterday I discussed how the poets Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Joe Weil enact what I am calling an affective poetics: a poetics that demonstrates the bedrock of our affective response outlined in the work of neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, whose empirical work in affective neuroscience has established the basis for emotional continuities across species. Panksepp’s seven affective systems, which he represents in all caps to indicate their primary process nature, include SEEKING, PANIC/GRIEF, PLAY, JOY, CARE, LUST, RAGE, AND FEAR. These systems are situated sub-cortically in the brain, inform and serve as the building blocks for cognition, and represent one of the first levels of response to stimuli. Today I will discuss how behavioral neuroscientist Stephen Porges’s Polyvagal Theory, which articulates a level of affective response to stimuli that is an elaboration on Pansepp’s seven primary process systems, and occurs at an even deeper level, itself contributes to an affective poetics as seen in the work of poets Kate Gale and Bruce Snider. While Panksepp’s work lets us understand neural circuits between higher brain structures and those in the brainstem; Porges’s work allows us to understand the neural circuits between the brainstem and visceral organs: “neural circuits mediating the reciprocal communication between body states and brainstem structures, which impact on the availability of these affective circuits” (The Polyvagal Theory, 258).
The main postulates of the Polyvagal Theory are the following:
• Emotional regulation and social behavior are psychological processes that respond to events, environment, and people. They shape our sense of self, help form relationships, and determine whether we feel safe in various contexts. Neural circuits are bidirectional, biobehavioral processes that mediate reciprocal communication between body states and brainstem structures: psychological processes influence body states, and body states influence psychological processes like perception (Polyvagal Theory, 257, 259, emphasis mine).
• Polyvagal Theory provides the context for cognition—the bodily states it describes make cognition possible or impossible.
• Neuroception—the unconscious perception of safety—triggers a response according to these systems, starting with the social engagement system (SES) and ending with the “freeze” behaviors as a last resort. It precedes perception.
- “The evolution of the
mammalian autonomic nervous system provides the neurophysiological substrates
for affective processes and stress responses” - We react to real-world,
environmental challenges with three neural circuits, in this order: - 1) We react with our
evolutionarily newest system, the Social Engagement System, a parasympathetic
neural circuit that is expressed in the newer myelinated vagus nerve
that “functions to facilitate pro-social behavior and to maintain calm
behavioral states” (265-66). - 2) If this doesn’t satisfy
our quest for safety, we react spontaneously with the older, sympathetic
nervous system that supports fight/flight behaviors. This system mediates between the two vagal
circuits. - If fight/flight fails, we
resort to the oldest vagal circuit, a parasympathetic circuit expressed
in the older, unmyelinated vagus nerve that inhibits motion and is linked to
disassociation in response to trauma (playing dead, and having the sensation of
floating out of your body). - Pathways regulating the
striated muscles of the face and head and the myelinated vagal fibers
regulating the heart and lungs” (270). - The SES calms the viscera
and regulates facial muscles, “enabling and promoting positive social
interactions in safe contexts” (270).
- Porges calls this the
“brain-face-heart circuit,” and is both a stress reliever and responsible for
the pro-sociality often exhibited by our species. - “Specific bodily states
foster different domains of behavior”
(Porges, 278).
The phylogenetic stage of the autonomic nervous
system determines the behavioral, physiological, and affective features of
reactivity to things in the environment.
Physiological state limits the range of adaptive behaviors and psychological
experiences (265). Trauma can limit an
individual’s ability to engage the vagal brake associated with the SES because
trauma victims often have faulty
neuroception and become hypervigilant, always reacting to the
environment/people as though they are a threat.
The SES helps detect and express signals of
safety in the environment—it “distinguish[es] and emit[s] facial expressions
and intonation of vocalizations . . . By calming the viscera and regulating
facial muscles, this system enables and promotes positive social interactions
in safe contexts” (270). In other words,
it helps us read body language, which is what dogs do as their primary modality
of communication, and which is what we do when we are using our pre-conscious neuroception.
Implications of the Polyvagal Theory for poetics
include the following:
- Affect is primary process
and occurs before and informs cognition - Polyvagal response in the
CNS & ANS inform affect - Both are evolutionarily
earlier processes linked to survival value.
One of
the main implications for poetics is that if we understand the affective basis
of memory and cognition, our poetics will proceed from and value the “bottoms
up” approach to information processing as do all our affective and cognitive
processes. Again, these processing
levels are bi-directionally linked and indissociable, so even if affect
triggers other processes, it is still informed and shaped by secondary and
tertiary process memory and cultural learning.
Language and its effects are not primary, or secondary, but rather part
of an integrated circuit in this approach.
We can see these patterns of bidirectionality as
they are informed by Polyvagal Theory
and its systems of response in the poem “Hotel Room, Patterns of Light” by the
poet Kate Gale, from her aptly named book Mating
Season (Tupelo Press):
HOTEL ROOM, PATTERNS OF LIGHT And now you whose face I have nearly forgotten Remember how you said you would change the world? Remember how you smoked weed and drank tea and told me in one hotel room after another how glad you were you knew your purpose? Remember how you painted me a picture on birch bark, a canoe paddling upstream carrying light in the stern? As if one canoe could make a difference. Remember how you went to Flagstaff to visit your mother? When you came back you said, I slept with this hooker over the holiday, Sweetness, had to see what it was like to order a woman around. I remember the pattern of light on the hallway floor shadowed with these little slivers of darkness that kept disappearing. I opened and closed my mouth several times without speaking. Like a fish I was. Before I left, I dropped the birch bark on the floor. You left it there, sat rocking back and forth. Don't go, you said. But you looked all hollow to me. I could see the door right through you. Your voice sounded faraway, like a radio station you can never tune in. I walked out into the cold air, open sunlight. Last I heard you were in furniture sales. Measuring success one couch at a time.
In the poem, Gale’s narrator’s affective responses replicate the phylogenetic hierarchy articulated by the Polyvagal Theory in terms of a freeze and dissociative response, and then move through Panksepp’s brainstem affects such as SEEKING, RAGE, and GRIEF before arriving at a cognitive evaluation of the main character that maintains within it traces of that RAGE. The poem begins with a direct address and an invocation of both forgetting and memory: an old lover’s face that is “nearly forgotten” is displaced by his words, which are not: the lover had claimed to “change the world,” to “know his purpose.” He honors the narrator by painting her a picture on birch bark, a “canoe paddling upstream carrying light in the stern.” The engagement this triggered in the narrator is made clear only by her dismissal: “as if one canoe could make a difference.” Clearly, however, it did, because the narrator has such a powerful response to what comes next: the lover had “slept with a hooker” to “see what it was like/to order a woman around.”
At
this moment the narrator demonstrates the “freeze” response connected to the
oldest manifestation of the central nervous system, a reaction triggered
through the unmyelinated vagus that produces a dissociative response in
response to trauma, a sense of floating out of ones’s body that the narrator
experiences as she focuses on “the pattern of light on the hallway
floor/shadowed with these little slivers of darkness.” She is frozen, reduced
to that much evolutionarily earlier system that is characterizes the autonomic
responses of reptiles, amphibians, and fish.
She becomes a fish through
this response, “open [ing] and clos[ing] my mouth/several times without
speaking. Like a fish I was.” She disassociates from the other character
and the scene: “Don’t go, you said. But you looked all hollow to me./I could see
the door right through you.” The
narrator comes back to herself enough to move, and “walk[s] out into the cold
air/open sunlight.” The poem travels
through the polyvagal responses of freezing and detachment, and then the
primary processes of SEEKING and movement, an abandonment of this scene for
something else. Still, the ending of the
poem indicates a continuation of that first-stage autonomic response, more
detachment. There is some kind of
cognitive resolution through the recreation of the scene in the poem, but
something remains unresolved on the affective level because the last lines
still contain an expression of RAGE, though cognitively mediated through the
secondary tertiary strategies of cynicism and evaluative judgment: “Last I heard you were in furniture
sales./Measuring success one couch at a time.”
We are left with the thunderstrike of the narrator’s RAGE, channeled
into a triumph of (almost, but not quite) transcendent aesthetics.
Similarly
to Gale but with the difference of a different affect valenced, the poet Bruce
Snider recreates the hierarchy of affective response in his poem “Closing the
Gay Bar Outside Gas City,” in his book
Paradise,
Indiana published by Pleiades
Press:
Closing the Gay Bar Outside Gas City
As if I’d dreamed it up, the front door
Still swings, and the dance bell rings
Before it dies amid alfalfa, stalks of corn.
On the floor: a faded pair of jeans,
Buttons from a shirt. Two condoms
Coil like sleepy salamanders
In the back. In Indiana nothing lasts
For long, though here the bathroom lock
Still sticks, nourished each winter
By ice and snow. Outside: bones
Of rabbits, possum-blur, some ghost’s
Half-eye through the window screen
Where now the only seed that spills is thorny
Vine and thistle taking back what’s theirs.
Even the magpies, locked in some
Blood-sleep, stir in the eaves as if
to speak of patience and regret. Stains
from tossed eggs mar the sides, dents
from stones pitched through windows
boarded up where FAG and AIDS
are sprayed in flaking paint along
the front. In fifty years, only birds
will couple here. Deer will pause
where a door once opened out to starlight,
locust thorns tearing like some last testament
to beer and lust. Even now, a raccoon
stirs near the window, looks in at me
as it moves past, like some stranger
no longer interested, some boy
who left his lip print on the glass.
Here
the poet perceives a set of artifacts from a different, lost time, which had
profound affective significance for the poet.
Like Gillan, Weil, and Gale, in this poem and in his work more
generally, Snider grants precedence to affect even as he shows it in dialogue
with the sometimes violent defamations of culture, themselves rooted in the
RAGE that is in turn rooted in FEAR:
“stones pitched through windows /boarded up where FAG and AIDS are
sprayed in flaking paint along/the front.” It is precisely the relationship
between primary process affects like FEAR as they interact with the
presuppositions and names assigned through the cultures of cognition and their
attendant hierarchies of values, the in-group/out-group exclusions that label,
stigmatize, and segregate. What will
surpass those labels, and undercutting them, is the shared infrastructure of
bones and ice, condoms and “buttons from a shirt,” but these objects from both
human and ecological worlds interact indissociably in the poet’s mind with the
memories of those times when the bar was as full of LUSTful activity as the
birds and deer. A shared affective infrastructure
unites them in the narrator’s mind. The
human world morphs into and shares a neuroceptual kinship with the animal: condoms become “sleepy salamanders,” magpies
“speak of patience and regret.” Grief, loss, and longing radiate through the
narrator’s world with palpable presence, taking on the ecological forms of
“locust thorns tearing like some last testament/to beer and lust.” The human is itself an enactment of affect,
the “beer and lust” which form the structure of desire that drives the poem.
The
poem’s closing image—the raccoon experienced as a “stranger/no longer
interested/some boy/who left his lip print on the glass”—is a powerful image of
secondary emotions of pride and shame as they interact with the basic affects
of GRIEF in response to this particular loss, and the larger, ontological loss
the poem indicates: “In Indiana nothing
lasts/for long” except the bathroom lock that “still sticks,” the “possum-blur”
that is that creature’s dissolving flesh.
The narrator is a neuroceptual bundle of affective impression,
appropriating those neuroceptions and transmuting them through cognitive
process to neurosymbolic figures that carry a much larger, still embodied
meaning. The bidirectionality of affect
is a powerful part of Snider’s poetics, informing cognition even as it is
transformed by it. But the affective
level is the level to which all others return, and it forms a fundamental
bedrock for both perception (neuroception) and experience.
While
my last three posts have focused on some of the basic assumptions that
characterize affective neuroscience and how these might be used to inform an
affective poetics, in my next post I will turn to the secondary and tertiary
process memory as these are informed by affect in the work of poets Vivian
Shipley, Jim Reese, and Jack Bedell, in order to begin to articulate the ways
memory is structured by the brain as a narrative, and the implications this has
for poetics.
[1]Stephen Porges, The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. (New York: Norton, 2011).