Incarnated language

Here are a couple more quotes from the Boston Change Study Group paper I recently mentioned in this post:

...mirror neurons may provide a different neural pathway for linking word and motor experience with different implications. In these senses words are not disincarnated symbols but are also pathways into direct embodied experience that function implicitly, and vice versa. This may help to explain the power of words and stories. We live them virtually.

...although the actual form/sound of the word may be arbitrary (as a symbolic system requires), the embodied concepts that entwine experience with words are not at all arbitrary. They are determined by our morphology, our innate movement patterns, and the real external world of people and things.

This incarnated sense of language vivifies psychotherapeutic enquiry. And, tangentially, here is a quote from a recent post in Science Daily that relates to this "world of people and things":

Studies have shown that infants learn language faster when what they see is synchronized to the sound that they hear.

(The post refers to the importance of babies having a quiet environment in which to learn verbal skills - another subtle and important aspect of incarnating language.)

Meanings are reborn in poems

Here's a great review by Ron Silliman of Joseph Lease's recent poetic work Broken World. And from an interview with Joseph Lease:

We all know—in a sort of abstract way—that being born is meaningful and dying is meaningful—but the meanings get lost in our worst moments—and they are reborn in poems.

Lease is a fan of poetry as incantation, of poetry as spell. This is where power lies, as it potentially does in the voiced language of psychotherapy. And in psychotherapy, meanings too can become reborn.

Emily Pwerle's "overrunning"

Emily Pwerle paints Awleye Atnwengerrp (women's ceremony) dreaming at Utopia, Northern Territory. (See this article on her.)

Here's a lovely work of hers, and I'm struck by the connection with it and Merleau-Ponty's "the whole landscape is overrun with words" (see previous post).

Emily Pwerle - Awelye (UGEP4552) (around 1930 - )
Acrylic on linen, 122 cm x 90 cm

Of course, the language (set of symbols) she uses is somewhat different to Western languages, consisting of the breast painting and bush tomato yam of women's business. But the symbols crowd, positively overrun the "land" in a joyful energetic way that I find pleasing. Emily and her sisters (and of course many other Aboriginal artists) paint on the ground, and this "earthing" of the process is very different from how Western artists usually work (creating the work in the vertical rather than the horizontal). And when we purchase these works we can hang them any way we like - and they are still very effective. In fact, some galleries sell Aboriginal works with four sets of D-clips on the back (one for each side) - underlining the fact that no one way is considered "up".

Here's an article on the Pwerle sisters and their approach to painting.

The whole landscape is overrun with words

The following are some threads on landscape and poetry which have recently intersected for me.

First, an image from upcoming show German Expressionist Prints at the Rex Irwin Gallery.

Erich Heckel (1883 - 1970)
Two men by the sea
Woodcut, 46.2 cm x 32.7 cm (image Rex Irwin Art Dealer)

And here is Daniel Siegel (The Mindful Brain, Norton 2007, p54) on poetry:

But then think of poetry ... which inhibits the strictly hierarchical, top-down left-brain processes organizing our raw experience into a preconceived grid. Poetry, like silence, creates a new balance of memory and moment. We see with fresh eyes through the poet's artistry, which illuminates with words a new landscape that before was hidden beneath the veil of everyday language. (italics mine)

In Heckel's work I have a fantasy of words arising from a landscape, and these words also enabling that landscape to be experienced in a different way - it goes both ways. And this is implied too in the quote from Siegel.

The Boston Change Study Group have been doing work on the interplay of what they term the Implicit and the Reflective-Verbal Domains, and here is a beautiful quotation they cite from Merleau-Ponty (in their paper Forms of Relational meaning: Issues in the Relations Between the Implicit and Reflective-Verbal Domains), supporting the idea of an embodied mind (i.e one that doesn't ascribe to the Cartesion split):

The meaning is not on the phrase like the butter on the bread, like a second layer of "psychic reality" spread over the sound; it is the totality of what is said, the integral of all the differentiations of the verbal chain; it is given with the words for those who have ears to hear. And conversely, the whole landscape is overrun with words. (The Visible and the Invisible, p155)

And a final thread of my own - here is a poem (from a dream) that I wrote last year:

glyphs

last black night
they shuffled silently again in the field
intent upon their ruminations

until one took flame
bright tendrils licking at the seriphs
and then another –

till they all blazed yellow
each now clear in its form
proclaiming some kind of slogan
indeterminate