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Bruce
Beasely's book deserves to become a classic; fusing as it does the
fascinating, the arcane, the quirky and the universal, and using throughout
the conceptual/metaphorical gold mine of neuroscience and allied schools of
thought. Do not flinch from this extremely well-researched volume: all is as
accessible as the literary case histories of Oliver Sachs in his The Man
Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and other volumes. What is most
strange in our human condition - the surreal, the fantastic, the bizarrely
misaligned perceptions of the afflicted mind - takes us into extreme territory,
but also allows us to reflect on the core elements of our basic assumptions
and beliefs. The title of the collection honours the (bizarrely but aptly
named) Walter Russell Brain, a leading British neuroscientist.
Beasely explores these big issues obliquely, with respect as well as
curiosity, and sometimes also with the
poignancy of narrative involvement. I was hooked by the many intricate
yet accessible poems intercalating quotations ('brain slices') of erudite
thinkers of the past - Aristotle, Newton - with instances of pure personal
grief. These poems have a momentum which drives the reader through the maze
of references, rather like the rats running through doors which Beasely uses
as an image of our thought processes. Some poems are just intrinsically
fascinating: presenting the painful linguistic lack of aphasia ('Aphasic
Echolalia'); the weird phenomena of the phantom limb ('Unbehold'). But other
poems deal purely with intensely felt anguish, the 'Melancholia Oracles'
which recur within the collection, as does the intermittent agony of
chronically recurring depression. Here the 'pleasure receptors' are
redirected, as they so often are in the depressive state, to the 'business of
self-blame'
electric
linkup,
signalling
mea culpa,
mea culpa, mea
maxima culpa
spiking in
every crevice of the brain
('Melancholia Oracles: VII')
The quotation nicely illustrates some main concerns of these oracles and the
other poems here: scientific language, the spiking chart of medical
terminology echoed in the uneven line length of the stanza; and the
penitential religious language of remorse and obsessive repetition. Religion
and neuroscience might seem unlikely bedfellows, but in face Beasely charts
an interesting and hallowed path - not just in the proposition that temporal
lobe reception may be the cause of religious experience, but also that the
pineal gland, the only unique part of the otherwise perfectly symmetrical
brain, was once thought the seat of the soul, residing in the cruciform
background of the optic nerves:
chiasma
bearing
chiasma, crucifix
Or x)
('Little gland which the spirits surround')
Spirituality has a real presence in this collection; not at all as a
doctrinal certainty, but as an elusive, sometimes ludic presence running
through the interstices of poetic awareness. Christianity is referenced,
certainly, as an incarnational, eucharistic expression of belief. But ancient
science, Pythagorean myth, bears almost as intriguing a weight, and sometimes
a tenderness, too, as in the sequence 'Counterearth and Lux'; which evokes
the ancient cosmological concept of a tenth planet, hidden because so closely
allied to the earth: 'the innermost sphere / harmonizing the music of its
celestial passage / we can't hear only because we've always heard it, /
inaudible in a deep accustoming'; a beautiful metaphor for long lasting love;
primarily human love in this poem, but powerful enough in symbolism to embrace
the presence of the divine.
Beasely can write in a number of different styles: the dislocated and
experimental as well as the simply lyrical - I like those poems which strike
a middle ground. 'Lord Brain' is in no way a technical manual, but I had a satisfactory
sense of learning a lot (footnotes - user friendly ones - are appended), as
well as being taken on a poetic journey which made my thoughts, on occasion,
soar.
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I
took a liking, too, to Kenneth Field's Classic Rough News;
although any thematic or stylistic connection between these volumes is rather
tenuous. If there is a similar interest it is in the disordered, even
multiple, states of mind which can trouble those on the margins of society;
the troubled, the drunk or addicted, the merely melancholic, and (embracing
within their perceptions all of the above) the poet. Fields is essentially a
formalist, the sonnet his basic precept, and its sturdy iambic pentameters
serve him well as he seeks to explore the fragmented elements of poetic self-examination:
'a whole life latent in a little line' ('In the Place of Stories').
The poems employ in turns a clutch of personae: The quirky Burton, searching
for meaning (echoing Robert Burton, author of the Anatomy of Melancholy, but
perhaps also Richard Burton, the 19th century explorer and man of letters);
Billy and Billie, male and female alcoholics, struggling with the hard game
of life. 'most lamentably inclined to melancholy/ Though also to hilare
delirium'
('On the Bus'): these personae are tragic-comic, semi-autonomous, implicitly
autobiographical: Berryman's Henry comes to mind. Sometimes the mask slips -
deliberately, I assume, as in 'In another country' when third-person memories
of Billy's abusive childhood are suddenly assumed by the narrative 'I'.
Fields (or his narrator) confesses all towards the end of the volume: 'The
Billies, Burtons, secret, schizophrenic, / These fearful subjects of my
dormancy, / The black stars doubling everything I saw' (The Hinge). But of
course quasi-identification with a narrator or other character is what hooks
us as readers, too: like Billie in 'Powerhouse': 'A tiny sun / In a universe
of mirrors, she was sure / That everything said to her was about her'. As a
reader, I hesitated on the edge of amusement, identification, some puzzlement
at the quixotic, shifting scenarios Fields deploys. 'Why are we taken by
these brief encounters / These glimpses of a life?' ('Into the World of
Light'). Because they are marginal lives embedded in the universal; eccentric
extremes of everybody's story.
© Sarah
Law 2005
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