Evolit: Week 10--Exploring the Unconscious?

Walt Whitman's representation of the unconscious through his writing in Leaves of grass is an interesting one. Although I think it is not something that can be understood initially by anyone. When you first start out to read the book, you think that it is crap and not making sense and it is just this old guy rambling about everything and anything and nothing really. Why I think we don't understand it initially is because this representation of the unconscious is being presented to the conscious mind of the reader. The conscious mind understands pattern and organization. It only makes sense it the conscious can fully interpret it, but according to me the conscious does not have the faculty to understand the unconscious and that is why the book fails to make a good first impression.

Reading the poems helped me understand the randomness of the order of thoughts that go through my head. Sometimes thoughts that have no connection to any topic at hand might just pop in my head, some I might discard immediately and some I might relate to quite a bit. But this randomness even though at times unsettling is in my opinion an opening to the unconscious where everything is stored. I still haven't figured how helpful it is in the practical way but reading the book has made me look forward to letting my thoughts come to me without trying to think a certain way.

I don't know if agree with the idea that dreams are processing of information that we encountered during the day, because I have definitely had many dreams that have been completely unrelated to anything that happened to me that day or even that week. I would like to think that dreams are more an expression of the unconscious rather than the brain processing information. It could be the unconscious' reaction to the information of the day or maybe not. I just feel that information processing is a very small part of what happens in the unconscious mind. I could be really off base though since this supposition is really my desire for reality rather than the actual thing.

All of this discussion of the unconcious lead me to a contemplation of some of the dream study that I have been doing this year in my archeology and classics classes. In the ancient world dreams were considered to be a message from the gods to give aide or send retribution. They were significant and unassociated with mere information processing. In many cases dreams were supposed to lead a person to a cure of a terrible ailment that they may be suffering. I just think that it is interesting that we have such different associations with dreams now but they are still no less mysterious in origin.

I've been thinking about the connection between the abstract quality of Whitman and the abstract quality of the visual art we've looked at over the last two weeks, because they don't seem the same to me. Someone (I've forgotten who) suggested in Dalke's Thurday section that writing is less abstract/ less likely to be abstract because it is in words, and words we read are inherently supposed to have meaning. We didn't really pursue the subject. Professor Dalke also brought up, during our reading out loud, that Leaves of Grass doesn't really have a chronological order.

It's true that we can put together fragments of Leaves of Grass in different orders and still have the same impact, but the fact remains that writing, unlike painting, must be read in a chronological order. We read a word, then the next, then the next. We can only really "see" one word at a time, even when skimming, even when trying to let the poem wash over us. I think this is another reason that writing is less abstract than other forms of art, where it easier to step back and gain an overall "impression"

So while we can rearrange Leaves of Grass without disturbing any traditional sense of narrative, it will still change it completely. Because we, as readers, have to go linearly we can only relate each new section to the ones before it, and not the ones that come later-- at least in the first reading. 

We seem to keep coming back to the problem of how to read Whitman’s poem, how much meaning to make.  So I am offering the suggestion that we think of Whitman, not as a writer trying to convey content to us, but rather as a horse trainer.  He has invested years of his life in taming wild words into a well-behaved beast.  Our role as rider is to simply sit on the animal and enjoy the ride.  Anyone who has ridden a horse recognizes that the hardest part is relaxing, allowing the horse freedom of movement, and following the horse.  The very best rides happen when this process becomes unconscious; both horse and rider are of the same mind.  I seem to gain an awareness of where my pony’s feet and what she wants to do with them.  It feels like I have access to her intentions.  So when we do something insane like leave 3 ft early for a 3’6” fence, I, unlike my trainer, am not at all worried.  More generally, the boundaries between the horse and rider dissolve; it is a non-dualist experience for the rider.  (I would love to know what this experience is to the horse…)  When the ride ends, the rider, at least, is in a new place.  I mean this beyond the plain fact that the horse and rider have travelled a physical distance together.  Sometimes it is possible to learn something about oneself only through interaction with another.  This relationship is an important component of the psychotherapy.  When I started jumping my pony, I learned that I could be both bold and brave. 

Where this metaphor breaks down is at the level of directing the horse.  The rider, the not the trainer, is steering, unless the horse is on a lunge line.  To translate out of the metaphor, this implies that the reader provides necessary direction to the writing.  A piece of writing is not completely determined by the writer.  Maybe we are supposed to make our own story of images and ideas Whitman offers us?  

What our classes are beginning to remind me of, more and more, is the Nietzschean Apollonian and Dionysian split: the difference between rational and irrational, chaos and order, conscious and unconscious, mind and body, and maybe "interpretation" vs "against interpretation"? The Apollonian mindset always attempts to ascribe and create order in the manner that Sontag seems to be against.

Whitman seems like a pretty good example of the Dionysian mindset: his poetry is chaotic, frequently jumps from one subject to the next and is written in a free-verse form. He rambles. He declares that he has no problem contradicting himself. He celebrates nature, as well as himself, and he seems to be trying to describe the intuitive. He embraces paradox.

From what I understand, the purpose of our class may be to balance these two mindsets. Our professors seem to be suggesting that the Apollonian mindset is valued too much in academia and the Dionysian, not enough.

I wonder whether the unconscious is really a more primitive force in humans. Perhaps it is our bias that the consciousness is more 'developed' or 'advanced.' Nietzsche writes that "consciousness is our poorest and most erring organ." Given the fact that we are only conscious of 10% of the sensory-perception data that we are receiving at any moment, he certainly seems onto something. The focused, ordering structure of the conscious, rational mind scarcely seems capable of competing with the raw, free-associative power of the unconscious mind. I love having powerful, vivid dreams, where I wake up still attached to that powerful other world that had been crafted either by my mind or some nebulous realm. Waking up from dream worlds is often a huge disappointment; I often feel that nothing in my waking life is worth being woken up for, even on the best of days. There's just something preferable about the unconscious, a comfort to being ensconced in its languid, fluid realm that trumps conscious life. When I am caught in deep sleep, I often feel palpably connected to the primordial source of things, and this connection is rapturous.

I think the unconscious is more of a unity than the conscious, as it seeks to make experience whole and make connections, while the conscious mind dissects and distinguishes between things, drawing difference between yourself and the world. Unfortunately, I think we have created a society that has completely immersed itself in the practical so as that is our only reality, which is depressing and woeful indeed. Science, technology, and pragmatism dominate while art, imagination, and the humanities, which are equally or more vital to life, suffer. Einstein agrees:

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.”
-Albert Einstein

For my Spanish class Surrealism and Magical Realism, we are currently reading One Hundred years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. I highly recommend reading this if you are interested in Magical Realism and Surrealism. Márquez is known for his use of Magical Realism, and within this novel he creates a world in which the supernatural is perceived as reality and the natural (in our minds, the coherent) is thought of as unreal. He writes, “It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise and was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alternation between excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay” (242).  The progression of time in the face of an evolving conscious helps develop the town of Macundo.  My encounter with this novel got me to thinking about how we must face the unreal to notice the real and how we must face the unconscious to realize the conscious.  In reading Whitman and Márquez at the same time, I have come to see the meaning in questioning our own thoughts.  We analyze what is outside our comfort realm in comparison to what we understand as our own reality.  

The other point that resonated with me from our Thursday discussion was what Professor Grobstein said about incoherence: “things that can derive from incoherence are greater than things that can derive from coherence.”  That which we do not understand (both outside of and within our own realm of thoughts) tends to offer the greatest space for contemplation; increased ambiguity allows for increased analysis. Is the reason we consider the ambiguous/the abstract so ideal because it offers a space for a varied analysis? Does the ambiguous unknown have more to offer than the coherent known? If so, then maybe the drunkard does in fact have more to offer than the sober person.

Isn't that the entire idea behind "writer's block"? I generally can't generate new ideas when I am concentrating on answering a prompt with extreme intensity. Some of my best papers and some of my best ideas (ha) are those that have come to me when I was at the dining hall or cleaning my room (another ha). I find that when I just let myself think about whatever topics that may come across my mind or allow whatever to just come over me I expose myself to the newest and most profound of ideas.

In class on Thursday, I finally saw the beauty in Whitman's way of writing. His words and ideas take you to a place that kind of put you in a lull, a place where everything just starts flowing and new ideas can come about. We all wanted to read Whitman outside, among nature, where we thought it was fittng. Why? I think its because nature is free place, there are no doors that close us in. We can just be.

It is that environment and that stream of unconsciousness that allows us to have the most generative ideas, to think of a new story that maybe "less wrong" than the previous one. We are allowed epiphanies in nature because there are no boundaries or confines that we can see- we can imagine and imagination is the one factor that has changed our society in absolutely unfathomable ways.

First of all, I think I understand why a lot of people don’t like Whitman. D.H Lawrence had a point when he said that at some points, Whitman was trying to force himself onto your soul by merging with it. I guess I never took him that seriously and just wanted to take the overall idea of his work: enjoy yourself, your life, and everything around you.

I appreciate the representation of the unconscious.  I have never thought about the unconscious very much, so maybe that’s why I appreciate it when I see a representation of it. I admire people can delve into that part of themselves and extract something from it, whether it has a meaning or not. However, I prefer works of the unconscious where the reader can interpret it however he or she wants. An example of such a work would be Beckett’s Waiting For Godot – as we discussed in class on Thursday, the play is about nothing or whatever you want it to be about. They seem to be more fun to work with.

To me, the consciousness can act as a filter of the unconsciousness. Consciousness is aware of the environment around the person as well as the culture of that environment that it must adhere to. So it can hide certain things from the world that the unconsciousness produces because it may not follow the rules of culture or social norms. This is where some vivid imagination can come from. The consciousness can hide some of the “true” you, a super personal part of you. Sometimes getting in touch with your unconsciousness can help you get to know more about yourself.

Since the emergence of consciousness helped the evolution of culture in significant ways, maybe thapping into our unconsciousness can help cultural evolution as well? I never thought of unconsciousness helping cultural evolution but I guess it can be a possibility.

I haven't fully developed this idea, but I wanted to throw it out there to see what people think. On Thursday, we discussed how reading Whitman as if it were NOT for class made it a bit easier to refrain from analyzing and trying to find meaning that Whitman did not intend. When I started reading The Sorrows of an America, I attempted to do the same thing, I curled up on the couch, put some music on, and read it as I would read a book I might read for pleasure during the summer.

I think that maybe, by tuning out a bit, I was able to let my subconscious take the lead in my reading. My conscious mind occasionally wandered to the music, someone walking through the room, etc., and sometimes I'd find I'd read a paragraph without "really" reading it, but later, details I didn't entirely remember popped up in my thoughts. 

I've noticed this in the past, that when I read a non-school book, I don't necessarily read with the strict attention I give texts for class, but I end up thinking about them later and find I recall things I don't consciously remember reading.

Is this how Whitman wanted us to read and maybe even see the world? 

When Professor Dalke asked us on Tuesday what role our dreams had in evolution, I would say the same role that Whitman had in literary evolution.  Although many people have tried to analyze dreams and their meanings and how they reflect our true nature, many of those theories have either been disregarded or discounted.  They have been discussed and then people have moved on (no universal meanings have been accepted for dreams as a dream is a different experience for every person). 

I am making the comparison between dreams and the process that we are using to discuss The Leaves of Grass because in order to appreciate Whitman, little analysis needs to be made.  However, in order to appreciate Whitman, little analysis should be done and we should let the experience wash over us and then move on. The reason that I am having difficulty in enjoying Whitman is because I am trying to find some universal meaning (or any meaning for that matter) due to the way school teaching has shaped my thought process.  Also, no universal meaning can be made because Whitman does illicit different responses in different people (like dreams).

During this last Thursday class, I was very confused with the fact that the merging led to the divergence.  What I think I understood of it was that it is not Whitman who merges with us, but we as lectors who merge in Whitman’s poetry.  By doing so, we let the poetry affect us and though it we find an idea that the poem reminds us of.  I think then it is from the different memories that divergence emerges and therefore it leads toward the evolution of the human’s ways of thinking.  Indeed, this poem could change our brain in a certain way.  In addition, the first thing that I noticed when I read Whitman was that his poetry seemed to be a representation of his mind in which we see the way he thinks, he jumps from one idea to another, not trying to make any sense.  By doing so, I believe he is giving a good representation of our unconsciousness, which corresponds to a sequence of associations.   

I think there's a really important, if somewhat inchoate, idea bubbling around from our last Tuesday session and earlier ones. The idea, relevant to literature and painting and philosophy and ... life, is that one can find new lines of exploration by deconstructing one's current conscious understandings: that conscious understanding reflect simpler unconscious elements that have been elaborated in various ways, and that one can recombine the simpler elements to yield new directions of exploration that wouldn't have been accessible through the elaborated forms. Hence, against "method" and against "interpretation" not in the sense that we shouldn't try and make sense of things but rather in the sense that we should recongize that existing ways of making sense of things build on unconscious understandings and that if we genuinely want to find new ways to make sense of things it is the unconscious underlying understandings that need to be recognized and altered.

With that idea in mind, what's interesting in the language arena is not only Robert Frost and formal logic but also some transitional forms between them:

Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Everything was different. The weather itself, the head and cold of summer and winter, was, we believe, of another temper altogether. The brilliant amorous day was divided as sheerly from the night as land from water ... The rain fell vehemently, or not at all. The sun blazed or there was darkness ... The moment is brief ... ; the mment is over; one long night is then to be slept by all.

Gertrude Stein, Buttons

There is no gratitude in mercy and in medicine. There can be breakages in Japanese. That is no programme. That is no color chosen. It was chosen yesterday, that showed spitting and perhaps washing and polishing. It certainly showed no obligation and perhaps if borrowing is not natural there is some use in giving.

James Joyce, Ulysses

Proudly walking. Whom were you trying to walk like? Forget: a dispossessed. With mother's money order, eight shillings, the banging door of the post office slammed in your face by the usher. Hunger toothache. _Encore deux minutes_. Look clock. Must get. _Ferme_. Hired dog! Shoot him to bloody bits with a bang shotgun, bits man spattered walls all brass buttons. Bits all khrrrrklak in place clack back. Not hurt? O, that's all right. Shake hands. See what I meant, see? O, that's all right. Shake a shake. O, that's all only all right.

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell and suffers like the divine Miranda with those who for reasons unknown but time will tell are plunged in torment plunged in fire whose fire flames if that continues and who can doubt it will fire the firmament that is to say blast hell to heaven so blue still and calm so calm with a calm which even though intermittent is better than nothing but not so fast and considering what is more that as a result of the labors left unfinished ...