Affective Poetics and Narrative Need, Part 2 [by Leslie Heywood]

Yesterday, in Part I of “Affective Poetics and
Narrative Need,” I introduced the concept of primary process affect derived
from the work of affective neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, and showed how the
beloved poet Maria Mazziotti Gillan pays tribute to and reenacts affective
processes in her poetics.  Here I would
like to explore the structure of affect in more detail, tracing its physiology
and behavioral manifestations through the poetry of Joe Weil, whose work marks
the bidirectionality and ability of affect to shape ontology through the
creation of scene, one of the fundamental building blocks of narrative.

To fully explore affect
and the seven primary affective brain systems that Panksepp has identified, we
need to make a distinction between emotions and feelings, which are usually
conflated.  “Feeling” manifests in
secondary brain processes, while emotion is primary process.  In the words of science journalist Rita
Carter, who has translated the complications of brain mechanics for a wider
audience, “emotions are not feelings at all but a set of body-rooted survival
mechanisms that have evolved to turn us away from danger and propel us forward
to things that may be of benefit” (Mapping the Mind, 83).[i]  As the most recent work in neuroscience has
demonstrated, and as I will discuss through the work of Stephen Porges
tomorrow, emotions happen first, influencing perception and everything else,
and the content of those emotions is rooted in the will to survive, the basic
fight/flight or freeze responses, or what Porges has named the “social
engagement system” that allows for sociality. 
So how do these “body-rooted survival mechanisms” that are our emotions
manifest in our daily lives, and how do they inform poetics?  Here I must turn to Jack Panksepp, who
pioneered the field of Affective Neuroscience, and whose work spans decades of
empirical research on animals which has demonstrated a cross-species continuity
in basic affect:  rats laugh, chickens
respond to Mozart, and humans are not the lesser creatures for sharing these
affects but are rather the greater, ennobled by this potent form of kinship
with other forms of life.[ii]

Panksepp’s affective
neuroscience argues that affective states are primitive consciousness that
emerges from the interaction of brain circuits that control emotional behaviors
(“Mammalian Brain,” 14).[iii]  In this lexicon, affect is the emotion/desire
that influences behavior/ action.  Some
fundamental ideas in affective neuroscience are:

1) Evolutionary
continuity—differences between humans and animals are “differences of degree
rather than kind” (Darwin).

2) We share
neurochemical and neuroanatomical brain features with many animals.

3) Our behaviors are an
interaction between affective, primary processes in the brain and secondary
processes associated with memory and cultural learning.  Animals have secondary processes as well, but
they are based on different memories and cultures and don’t have the same kind
of meta-cognition (thinking about thinking) that nonhuman animals have.

4)“The primal affects
are intrinsic brain value systems that unconditionally and automatically inform
animals how they are faring in survival. They serve an essential function in
emotional learning. The positive affects index “comfort zones” that support
survival, while negative affects inform animals of circumstances that may
impair survival . . .” (“Basic Emotional Circuits,” 1). [iv]

Major findings in
Panksepp’s work include: 

• Affects have profound
  developmental consequences for the emergence of cognitive structures
• The operation of core
  emotions becomes hidden by secondary cognitive processes.  Affective feelings show how we prioritize
  actions and associated cognitive plans (“Mammalian,” 17).

• Raw affects are initially
  objectless in the brain—linkages between affect and object are LEARNED
  (“Mammalian,” 22).
• This means cultural
  learning tells us what to fear, etc.: 
  embeds affect in a network of meanings.
• This concept allows us to
  examine the relationship between nature and culture and how that relationship effects
  our behavior:  “Constructivist theories
  of emotion obviously need some basic tools for anything useful to be
  constructed.  The intrinsic,
  evolutionarily provided emotional abilities revealed by affective neuroscience
  are such tools” (“Mammalian,” 22). 
• ”Through learning, as well
  as through the guiding role of initial genetic variability in emotional
  systems, each person [and animal becomes a unique affective being through their
  individual genetic inheritance and epigenetic experiences of the world” (22).

 

In Panksepp’s words, “such
findings suggest nested-hierarchies of BrainMind affective processing, with
primal emotional functions being foundational for secondary-process learning
and memory mechanisms, which interface with tertiary-process
cognitive-thoughtful functions of the BrainMind” (“Cross-Species Affective
Neuroscience Decoding,” 1).

The implications of
Panksepp’s work for poetics are vast.  Emotions,
basic survival structures, are also the source of much behavioral motivation, running
the gamut from initial reaction to stimuli all the way through the complicated
tertiary processes necessary for aesthetics. 
Emotions are channeled through cultural learning, memory, and epigenetic
expression, informing cognitive processes like aesthetics that in turn serve to
give order and ontology to these motivational impulses.  Poetry that most recognizes and is most
oriented toward primary process affect yields the most comprehensive aesthetic
experience.  The poems we love the most
value affect and activate the affective systems in the reader.

The
primacy of the affective systems can be most clearly seen in contemporary
poetry that participates in the narrative tradition.  A good example is the poet Joe Weil.  The affective emphasis that characterizes
Weil’s work generally is unmistakable in his widely anthologized poem “Painting
the Christmas Trees.”  There, the lines “unless
grief grows a hand/and writes the poem,” which end the poem, are a figure for
the embodiment of affect, the way it motivates and takes the form of creative
expression through its interaction with secondary brain processes like memory
and cultural learning as these are in turn reflected through cognition.  The poem itself works on primary, secondary,
and tertiary levels, utilizing a narrative structure to tell a story—how
workers in experience their lives, how cultural definitions and conventions
work upon them to produced experiences that, though horrible, retain a vestige
of Panksepp’s JOY and PLAY systems, granting them a fundamental dignity that
the rest of the world does not.  The
narrator is himself motivated by the SEEKING system to translate affect into
ontology, to traverse the long chain from primary process experience to
secondary process to cognition and back, so that the poem itself triggers
affective response within the reader.  Weil’s
longer narrative poems in particular demonstrate the mechanics of Panksepp’s
affective systems, as we will see in “Mr. Danish and the Butterflies”:

Mr. Danish and the Butterflies
In my neighborhood, there were no kitchens
done in south west motif,
no Tibetan prayer wheels,
no posters of bleached skulls
by Georgia O’ Keefe.
The best jobs were tool maker,
legal secretary,
cop,
or maybe you lucked out
and got into G.M.,
and worked there the rest of your life
like Mr. Danish,
who traded in his blue Chevy
with white interior
every other year,
for a blue Chevy with white interior.
Mr. Danish admired Vic Damone.
I remember him standing, shirtless, on his backyard patio,
orange shorts and lilac socks,
conducting the violins with a greasy spatula,
dancing the cha-cha with his
own enormous beer belly,
to the tune of “April Love.”
His unhappy wife hissing: Sit down. Fool.
He died when I was seventeen,
his liver turned to mush,
his son Abby, killed in Nam,
his daughter Terry, married
to a black guy from Duluth,
who sold plumbing supplies.
I would like to pretend
Terry was a courageous trail blazer
of racial tolerance,
but she was just this lumpy white girl
who squinted a lot and listened
to the Dave Clark Five.
And I am not middle class enough, or
white liberal enough,
to think the black guy was any
great shakes, either.
He was skinny
and bewildered looking,
and talked with a high lispy voice
that made Mr. Leo up the street
refer to them as the ugly version
of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.”
No one was a hero on my street,
not even Tommy Byrnes, winner
of the silver star,
who’d been Thorazined back into
civilian life
minus the ability to work,
whose wife, Beatrice, was pretty and cheerful
and good with flowers and, who, according
to certain sources, was balling Mr. Danish
for the occasional mortgage payment.
I kept trying to picture Mr. Danish naked
with Mrs. Byrnes,
and it depressed me.
If I was middle class enough,
or white enough,
I could make a hero, or at least,
a victim out of her,
but she was just this pretty lady
who looked like Lee Remick,
and tipped well on the paper route.
And who knows?
Maybe she really liked Mr. Danish.
Maybe she saw something in him
no one else did, some quality
of light, some tenderness
beyond his black hair.
Maybe suffering
drew them together
for nights in cheap motels
out on 1 and 9,
a transistor radio
next to a bucket of ice,
Johnny Mathis singing
“The Twelfth of Never.”
Who knows?
Weirder things have happened.
Maybe Mr. Danish
wasn’t all that bad.
I remember him buying me
a cherry ice once,
when his family was out food shopping,
sitting me down on his front porch,
and him just slightly drunk, the way
all our fathers were, telling me
how he’d come from Pennsy in ‘49,
how he’d watched his father
die of black lung,
a great big oaf of a man whittled down
to 90 pounds,
and how the sheriff came to post their house,
and he drove here
with his brothers to Jersey,
looking for work in the asbestos plant
down in Manville,
but lucked out and got into GM,
where he’d worked ever since.
And, in spite of black lung and sheriffs,
wasn’t this a goddamned beautiful country?
Where else would a guy with an
eighth-grade education,
and no past worth a whore’s spit,
end up with a new Chevy and a gas grill,
and a bungalow down the shore?
And he drank another Pabst,
and told me about Ted Williams’
miraculous eye,
and Lou Gerhig’s final speech,
and the Holy Shroud of Turin,
and this one field in Mexico
where all the monarch butterflies
went to spend the winter.
And, one year, he heard, they were so thick,
they made that field
look like a shield of stained glass.
Someday, he was going there,
he swore, to say a prayer for his father.
And then, he got on the subject
of Eleanor Roosevelt and how
he thought she was a classy broad,
and, if given the choice between her and
Veronica Lake, he’d have taken Eleanor,
because, he said, you go to bed
with a woman’s body but you
wake up with her mind.
And you could tell he thought this
saying was wise,
because he repeated it under his breath
and looked up at the moon
as if it might agree.
And then he shut up and I noticed
he was crying.
So maybe that’s what Mrs. Byrnes
saw in him.
Who knows?
The night they took his corpse out
of the house,
I remember the neighbors staring
and how his belly rose
under the white sheet.
He’s been dead over twenty years now.
The jobs at GM disappeared.
Simmons and Singer went belly up.
Cancer picked off the neighbors one by one.
No one talks about
how cheap the heroin’s become
on the streets of Elizabeth.
Tonight I dream the dead are balloons,
and I hold them by strings
and stand in some park,
trying to sell them to the yuppies
who pelt me with the complete works
of Victor Hugo.
I see Mr. Danish bumping up against
his murdered son,
see his face on a balloon
riffling in the wind,
and I hoist him down
and I tell him:
Listen, Mr. Danish, Johnny Mathis sucks,
but I’m taking you to that field.
And off we float above the frame houses
of my childhood,
Mr. Danish and all the host of the dead
out over the Atlantic seaboard.
And it’s midnight and someone
on a radio says: You are listening
to the voice of the BBC.
And they play an old recording
of Pablo Casals performing
Bach’s cello suites.
And all the neighborhood is there.
We land in the field where
the monarch butterflies go.
And we pray.
We pray for the living and the dead,
and I wake up praying,
and put on my work uniform,
and go to my shift factory job
where I write this poem.

In “Mr.
Danish and the Butterflies,” like “Painting the Christmas Trees” but with
specific attention to characterization and scene, Weil brings an affective
dignity to Mr. Danish that the rest of the world, with its cognitive
preoccupations , its “yuppies who pelt me with the complete works of Victor
Hugo,” do not.  Despite its pretentions,
all of humanity is ultimately reduced to a “belly r[ising] under a white
sheet,” and Weil grants that material humanity its due, laboring, through
poetic narrative, to give it, through the personification of Mr. Danish, the
value that never was granted him as he lived. 
Mr. Danish, who was one of the poet’s childhood neighbors, was not
“wise,” drank “Pabst,” and loved Johnny Mathis, all symbolic indicators of a
particular kind of cultural devaluation.  But neurosymbolic
indicators, those related to life, death, and survival across species, make an
argument for a different kind of value that is normally denied in the symbolic
world of status hierarchies. “Floating off” with Mr. Danish “above the frame
houses/of my childhood/Mr. Danish and all host of the dead/out over the
Atlantic seaboard,” we see both the particularity of Mr. Danish with his
“orange shorts and lilac socks/conducting the violins with a greasy spatula,”
and the universality of our shared affective lives where Weil conducts the dead
to “the field where/the monarch butterflies go/and we pray.” Meaning resides in
the basic ecology of the natural world, that Mr. Danish and all of us in our
affect are part of, intimately linked through the same affective circuits all
mammals and other creatures to varying degrees share.  The return to “this one field in Mexico/where
all the monarch butterflies/went to spend the winter” is a return to our
affective selves, to the basic value a feeling creature is granted against all
odds in a world that normally categorizes through cognitive hierarchies—the
very hierarchies Weil’s work as a whole is aimed against. 

Both Weil and
Maria Mazziotti Gillan, whose work I discussed yesterday, make a case for the
primacy of affect in their work.  Their
poetics is fundamentally narrative in form because narrative, as I will discuss
in future posts, has been a basic part of the evolutionary development of our
brains and irrevocably links us to the primary affective systems that, in
dialogue with secondary and tertiary brain systems, form the bedrock of who we
are.

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