This is the draft of a talk delivered at the 8th International Cognitive Linguistics  Conference in University of La Rioja, Logroño, Spain, 4 April 2003. At the Dactyl symposium I will focus on the case of alliteration, looking specifically at how unanticipated patterns of self-produced actions contribute to our classifying a series of events as being "like consciousness."
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The Role of the Somatic Marker in Readers' Responses to Lyric Poetry
Claiborne Rice
University of Louisiana at Lafayette

Abstract:

Can a cognitive poetics provide an account of poetic unity--the magical feeling you have while reading a lyric poem that you are experiencing life from the interior of an alien consciousness? According to Damasio (1994), consciousness is "continuously and consistently reconstructed" moment by moment as the organism registers the changes of state introduced by experiencing an object (238-40). These somatosensory images are used by the organism to aid current decision-making and the evaluation of hypothetical scenarios (219). Object images prompted by language, though "less vivid than those prompted by the exterior" (108), can still trigger the creation of consciousness. A lyric prompts combinations of cognitive and--crucially--somatic responses that are categorized as characteristically consciousness-like, though we can recognize them as not genuinely our own. Because of its unique construction, the lyric poem might be useful for empirically verifying the somatic marker hypothesis.

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As I have been using the term “cognitive poetics” over the last few years, I have taken it to refer to the application of cognitive linguistics to the study of poetry. Lately, though, my version of cognitive poetics has come to resemble Turner's “cognitive rhetoric” (1991), in that it attempts to understand “how the embodied human mind uses its ordinary conceptual capacities to perform acts of language and literature” (6), specifically poetic language and literature. This paper marks an initial attempt to call the term “conceptual” into question: in focusing on poetry as language and discourse, cognitive poetics joins poetry itself in asking where the body ends and concepts begin.

I always knew I had no right to be

eating filling becoming wept

sold by tickets to this trip my self

a fiction as fixed as the crucifixion

or tracks hammered into banked quarters

where logic can carry you to hell

but gives a spatial unity that in essence is emotional.

(Fanny Howe, Forged, 3)

What poetry as a genre of language use seems to know is that words and combinations of words have inescapable emotional associations. I use the word emotional because that is the common term applied to somatic responses to stimuli that cannot be located in a specific sense modality. Literary scholars commonly divide denotation from connotation, or rational from affective meaning, but the encyclopedic semantics of cognitive linguistics suggests that the various schemas and images associated with a particular word on the phonological pole can easily include representations of particular body states. Antonio Damasio's theory of emotion and consciousness provides a coherent framework for understanding how “logic,” as Fanny Howe says, “gives a spatial unity that in essence is emotional.”

Howe's characterization of our emotional response to things that are considered largely or sometimes exclusively rational is interesting because it exemplifies what it describes. Something about the passivity of the verbs in the second stanza, plus the visual image of the banked, parallel, curving tracks with their kinesthetic overtones of hard steel and leaning speed, resonates with the phrase “spatial unity,” such that we assent to the conclusion of the sentence; when it arrives it feels foregone, remembered rather than new. For many theorists, how such disparate elements combine to achieve their “poetic unity” is the single most intractable problem facing any poetics (Cureton 2002, 91).

In focusing on poetic effects, I am reminded of William Carlos Williams's famous definition, that “A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.” For many readers, the experience of poetic unity is described in terms of consciousness. The reading of a poem causes one “to be transformed into the poem’s … speaker,” says Helen Vendler, Harvard-based critic and former poetry editor for the New Yorker (Poems). The poem “ma[kes] us want to enter the lyric script” (Art 18) even to the extent of “losing our own identity” (Odes 246). Anne Williams has said that the poem “induces the reader to know, from within, the virtual experience of a more or less particularized consciousness” (15).¹ The emotional effects that the reader senses are unified in just the way that one habitually notices ones own emotional responses are unified while moving through everyday life. In other words, the experience of consciousness is closely tied to the types of cognitive and somatic responses that one experiences while reading a poem.

To a great degree, the work of this “poetic unity” has been recognized as emotional in nature. Brooks and Warren's influential handbook Understanding Poetry turns to William Butler Yeats, Jr., to elucidate the emotional effect of the following lines from Burns:

“The white moon is setting behind the white wave,

And time is setting with me, O!”

Take from the lines the whiteness of the moon and of the waves, whose relation to the setting of Time is too subtle for the intellect, and you take from them their beauty. But when all are together, moon and wave and whiteness and setting Time and the last melancholy cry, they evoke an emotion which cannot be evoked by any other arrangement of colors and sounds and forms. (19)

It is difficult not to notice Yeats fashioning his own little poem out of the images by ordering them and adding one of his favorite words, “melancholy.” We infer thereby that images alone do not suffice to make a poem. Any poetry handbook will introduce the student to other elements of language that good poetry employs, such as rhyme, alliteration, metrical schemes, repetition (parallelism), phrasing and syntax, perspective, rhetorical figures (like chiasmus), and last, and sometimes least, conventional or transparent meaning.

But listing the ingredients of a poem does not substitute for explaining how a poem works. One solution to the “how” of poetry, famously described by Pope, is that the sound must seem an “echo” to the sense. Consider the following well-wrought exemplar:

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills

When all at once I saw a crowd

A host of golden daffodils

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze

As has been often noted, the irregular rhythm of the stanza's last line suggests the irregular fluttering motion of the flowers. There is a kind of conceptual overlap between what the flowers are described to be doing and one's perception of the rhythm as the words are being pronounced. Linguists will recognize this “echo” effect as “iconicity,” a one-to-one correspondence or similarity between two different concepts, often from different modalities.² This solution is nice because the relationship between a poetic element like rhythm, on the one hand, and any other abstract characterization is not fixed, but varies according to context. For example, Wordsworth's effect consists of departing from the rather mechanical iambic meter of the first five lines by inverting the first foot of the sixth line and adding (at least) one extra unstressed syllable(“flut-tring and”). Yet there is no reason that inversion or addition of syllables should always create a “fluttering” or “dancing” effect. For example, in the following poem, adding an unstressed syllable (in a different place) achieves a markedly different result.

Among the heaps of brick and plaster lies

a girder, still itself among the rubbish.

(Charles Reznikoff 1934)

In this case, the extra unstressed syllable hanging weakly at the end of the second line hints of something cast off, an afterthought, in other words, “rubbish.” Again, the meter mimics the conventional meaning of the words. In doing so, the poem highlights iambic pentameter's historical role as a structural 'girder' for the English poetic line. In both of these poems, the particular somatic effect induced by rhythm variation is categorized with help from the denotative meaning of the words.

Brooks and Warren describe this interweaving of disparate elements in a poem as “organic.” But “consciousness” or “self” does not seem to be something susceptible to iconic representation. Even if iconicity can account for the interactions of discrete elements, it will not explain how many of the various linguistic materials of the poem combine to evoke a response or series of responses, emotional or otherwise, that seem characteristic of our experience of self. Is the problem of poetic unity the same as what is called the binding problem in cognitive science? No, it's closer to what Damasio calls the second problem of consciousness, the problem of how our brain engenders “a sense of self in the act of knowing” (FWH 9). If we knew how a self is created in brains, we might know something about how it is prompted by poetry.

Unfortunately, our understanding of how brains produce selves remains speculative, but neuroscience is starting to work seriously on the problem. Antonio Damasio's theory, as described in Descartes’ Error (1994) and The Feeling of What Happens (1999), suggests that the self as we normally refer to it is largely inferred from predictable body state responses to internal or external stimuli. In simpler terms, “the presence of you is the feeling of what happens when your being is modified by the acts of apprehending something” (FWH 10). His hypothesis about how the brain creates consciousness requires major interaction between our biological systems for self-monitoring body states and our ongoing reactions to perturbing objects that enter an organism's purview either from its interaction with the external world or as recalled or constructed from memory. In Descartes’ Error he describes the Somatic Marker Theory and offers evidence that signals hailing from the neural machinery that underlies emotion affect the delicate mechanism of reasoning. According to Damasio, our full repository of knowledge is stored as what he calls dispositional representations (DRs), which are held in “convergence zones”: neuron ensembles located in higher-order cortices and in some subcortical nuclei, that stimulate the reassembly of neural pattern maps in early sensory cortices, limbic cortices, and some subcortical nuclei. Innate knowledge, for handling metabolic mechanisms, drives, and instincts that are required for survival, is held in dispositional representations in the hypothalamus, brain stem, and limbic system, while acquired knowledge resides in higher-order cortices (104-5).

DRs linked in networks located in premotor cortices, basal ganglia, and limbic cortices can generate movement. These DRs activate movement and internal images of body movement simultaneously. Anticipated movements (memories of the future) join the landscape of current body states represented in multiple somatosensory cortices (right hemisphere dominating). This continuous updating of body images is the basic mechanism for consciousness, sense of self, and feelings.

Damasio identifies three different levels or types of consciousness, each with its own role in the organism's self-regulation and survival, and each reflecting its own type of “self” (see Table 1 for a summary. This table is adapted from Damasio and from Bucci).

State of Consciousness	State of Self
Nonconscious	Proto-Self: interconnected and temporarily coherent collection of neural patterns which represent the state of the organism, moment by moment
Core Consciousness: created in pulses as objects perturb the organism, and the organism generates an account of how the organism's own state is affected by the processing of an object focuses attention on object, increases object salience	Core Self: second order non-verbal account that occurs when an object modifies the proto-self. Can be triggered by any object Because provoking objects are continually available, core self is continuously available, thus it appears continuous in time.
Extended Consciousness Capacity to be aware of a large compass of entities and events: ability to generate a sense of individual perspective, ownership, and agency linked to autobiographical self	Autobiographical Self: Based on autobiographical memory constituted by implicit memories of multiple instances of individual experience of the past and of the anticipated future Does not require language

Table 1: 3 Types of Consciousness and Self

The basic sense of present awareness usually referred to by the term “consciousness” is what Damasio calls “Core Consciousness.” It is "continuously and consistently reconstructed" moment by moment as the organism registers the changes of state introduced by experiencing an object. The pulse-like nature of consciousness, its neural rhythm, accounts for the importance of rhythmic quality in temporal arts (music being the central example). Core consciousness relies for its appearance on an object coming into an organism's awareness. As the organism experiences the object, the object perturbs the current state of the organism. A moment later, "the brain creates a description of the perturbation of the state of the organism,” leading to the generation of "an image of the process of perturbation.” This image of the "self perturbed" can then be nominated as the focus of attention, serving as a perturbing object and starting the cycle again. A central characteristic of his theory as applied to poetic responses states that object images reconstructed from memory or prompted by language are "less vivid than those prompted by the exterior" (DE 108) but they are images nonetheless, and as such can be the basis for the creation of consciousness.

Emotions and feelings are tied to the cycle of consciousness because they are part of the organism's self-monitoring system. Background emotions (closely tied to core consciousness) are indexes of momentary parameters of inner organism states, such as fatigue, energy, wellness, sickness, relaxation, harmony, discord. What we normally recognize as having an emotion is a well orchestrated, observable change in body state in response to a perturbing object, for the purpose of preparing and executing attract/repel behavior.

Damasio also distinguishes between primary and secondary emotions. Primary emotions are “early,” innate, preorganized, and Jamesian, involving the limbic system, amygdala, and anterior cingulate. Secondary emotions are acquired associations between categories of objects/situations and primary emotions; they involve the prefrontal and somatosensory cortices. Finally, a feeling is always a feeling of an emotion: the internal state of an organism is undergoing changes in response to an object, and the ongoing changes are re-represented as associated with the object.

Emotions and feelings are of course central to the aesthetic experience of poetry and the virtual consciousness. Damasio notes that the face and neck are highly sensitive to emotional changes. In regard to victims of spinal cord injuries having emotions, Damasio notes that “the face and skull, as well as the oral cavity, tongue, pharynx, and larynx provide a massive input into the brain.... Since most of the emotions express themselves prominently in changes of the facial musculature, in changes of musculature of the throat, and in autonomic changes of the skin in the face and scalp, the representation of the related changes in the brain does not need the spinal cord ...” (1999, 290). The responsivity of the facial musculature to emotional state accounts for at least a part of how sound play in a poem can prompt the counterfeiting of a particular emotion. The alliteration in the following Millay sonnet demonstrates how this can work.

I shall forget you presently, my dear,

So make the most of this, your little day,

Your little month, your little half a year,

Ere I forget, or die, or move away,

And we are done forever; by and by

I shall forget you, as I said, but now,

If you entreat me with your loveliest lie

I will protest you with my favorite vow.

I would indeed that love were longer-lived,

And oaths were not so brittle as they are,

But so it is, and nature has contrived

To struggle on without a break thus far,—

Whether or not we find what we are seeking

Is idle, biologically speaking.

(Edna St. Vincent Millay)

Assonance on [i] in the first quatrain introduces tenseness in facial muscles, replicating the false smile, which goes nicely with the expressed sentiment.³ The second quatrain reproduces the tense smile on [i], but adds alliteration on rounding (in now, protest, favorite, vow), to the effect that the reader/speaker is mouthing the word “no” while meaning “yes”. Notice that the effect does not depend on conscious awareness of the facial muscles imitating a smile. Three different levels of enaction are offered: one could read the poem out loud, in which case the muscles and the somatosensory map of those muscles are activated; one could read the poem silently, in which case some of the same muscles would be activated along with most of the somatosensory map for those muscles (the extent of activation is an empirical question); and again in listening there is some evidence that the same somatosensory areas are activated. In all three cases the brain's somatic map of the body represents the body engaged in false-smiling, and the internal landscape typically associated with that particular smile is activated as well (DE 148-49).

This interlinking of the organism's collected somatic accommodations is exactly the mechanism behind the Somatic Marker as Damasio describes it. The image of the current organism state can be filed in memory and recalled if necessary. Somatosensory images become attached to particular memories and, his research shows, often serve to aid decision-making. Somatic states mark the outcome of a situation as positive or negative by activating a generally positive or negative body state that accompanies what he calls the “as-if” body loop, the ability of the somatosensory map to model a procedure as if it were happening to the body. Strong negative responses generate explicit imagery related to outcome and raise these images to consciousness, or they could "inhibit regulatory neural circuits located in the brain core, which mediate appetitive, or approach, behaviors,” reducing the chance of a potentially negative decision, the functional equivalent of “intuition.”

To summarize, then, in Damasio's theory emotion, feeling, and consciousness are strongly body-involved. The apparent self emerges as the feeling of a feeling, that is, as a feeling is nominated for focal attention, “the answer to a question never asked.” Self is inferred from the linkages between the images that generate bodily responses and the body that executes the responses (this also defines perspective). One's sense of action is inferred from the fact that certain images are tightly associated with certain options for motor response.

His reliance on our general inferential capabilities is important here, because inference implies categorization, which opens the door for similar but not identical things to be taken as tokens of the same type. For example, alliterative patterns draw attention to the perturbing object (internal in the case of poetry) because they amount to unanticipated patterned feedback from anticipated and executed bodily actions. Because they are sensory, they can function as convergent somatic evidence that gives rise to the inference of self.

Self/Consciousness building	Poetic quality
Core consciousness is created in pulses (176)	Rhythm (meter or parallelism)
a focal object (external or internal): triggers core consciousness; Consciousness increases the attentional energy toward object.	Reference point sequences Framing
anticipated bodily actions “certain images are tightly associated with certain options for motor response” -> sense of action (183)	Linguistic: grammatical: lexical/constructional predictability formal poetic: rhyme, meter, stanza pattern predictability Physical/Emotional/Cognitive plans
executed bodily actions: actual body loop as-if body loop	enunciation Physical/Emotional/Cognitive narration
feedback from executed bodily actions: used to generate second order narrative of proto-self altered by engagement with object unanticipated results attract attention	unpredicted linguistic patterns emerge as somatosensory correlates in “as-if” body loop: alliteration, internal rhyme, also phonesthemic and fictive motion effects (sometimes convergent)
Self-reference: focus on the 'knower' in the second order accounts that link body changes and object = images of knowing	(implied) reference to poetic speaker
Sequences of “images of knowing” + convergent sense data -> perspective (183)	Point-of-view (subjective/objective distinction) Implied narrative

Table 2: Ingredients for Consciousness and their Poetic Correlates

In general, since images are being produced in the as-if body loop in response to words, one can be vaguely aware that the self being inferred is not one's own. Yet the inferential process relies on memories of one's own somatic responses to objects encountered in the past, plus the somatic effects generated by the pronunciation of words and somatosensory responses to those words.

Table 2 provides a summary of the elements and actions that give rise to consciousness and the inference of self, along with the correlative characteristic elements of poetry. Below, the correlates are exemplified in Williams's well-known poem. The opening phrase sets the upcoming focal object within a vague frame of reference that recruits existing knowledge from the speaker and suggests a rhythmic pattern. The focal object is then introduced and described. Alliteration, and perhaps pararhyme, the ordered repetition of the consonantal sounds r, w, and b, provide somatosensory feedback from executed action. This feedback substitutes for some of the sensory feedback one would expect if confronted with an actual wheelbarrow. The preposition “beside” introduces a reference point construction and prepares a perspective, but “chickens” is largely an unexpected item. The image of chickens probably triggers a fairly specific multimodal set of associations for anyone who has been around them, plus the word's phonetic profile breaks the alliterative pattern. The series of images re-represented along with the accompanying bodily responses to those images prompt the familiar inference, that of a self perceiving.

So much depends upon	Framing / Perspective rhythm (iambic: dĕpénds ŭpón)
a red wheel barrow	Focal object (visual)
glazed with rain water	alliteration on [w] (feedback from motor actions) expected-anticipated results
beside the white chickens	continue alliteration (r-w-b); perspective unexpected – new focal object

(Williams, Collected 1:224)

A similar process operates when we engage the Stevens poem “Of Modern Poetry” below, but over a series of successive emotions rather than one. The opening fragment and the absence of an object for the infinitive “to find” in the third line make parsing difficult, slowing the reader down and confounding grammatical expectations. The right-hand column only highlights some of the effects. At work here is the extended conceit of the actor on stage operating as guided imagery with successive reframings that, along with the pronoun references that are so difficult to track, set up a rhythm of self-reference that shifts back and forth between self and an associated reference.

Of Modern Poetry The poem of the mind in the act of finding What will suffice. It has not always had To find: the scene was set; it repeated what Was in the script. Then the theatre was changed To something else. Its past was a souvenir. It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place. It has to face the men of the time and to meet The women of the time. It has to think about war And it has to find what will suffice. It has To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage, And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and With meditation, speak words that in the ear, In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat, Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound Of which, an invisible audience listens, Not to the play, but to itself, expressed In an emotion as of two people, as of two Emotions becoming one. The actor is A metaphysician in the dark, twanging An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend, Beyond which it has no will to rise. It must Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.

Focal object incomplete syntax alliteration on [s] parallelism – balance (somatic) framing refocus framing refocus inhibited parsing self-reference attention deflected from “play” to “itself” a parody of alliteration fictive motion (somatic) alliteration + new focal image + parallelism + rhythm

(Stevens, Collected 239)

Rae Armantrout's poem “The Plot” takes this poetics one step further, updates it. The first stanza follows the Stevensian pattern, setting up an extended conceit that guides the reader using perspective and sound imagery, but the implied author finds the “metaphoric contraption” too obvious, which breaks the spell's effectiveness. The next stanza adopts a different tactic. It starts immediately on a fractured narrative sequence with images seeming to move metonymically rather than narratively. Without punctuation for guidance, grammatical and narrative predictability are inhibited. The narrative effect is of the disjunctive images flitting across consciousness toward sleep. The stanza's final image of the snake swallowing the red bomb is “too subtle for the intellect,” as Yeats might say. The rightness of the image derives from generalized associations of “snake,” “red,” and “bomb” with a vague apocalyptic sense, embedded in the narrative context of falling asleep, which sanctions vague associations, and a modicum of alliteration on s and w. The following stanzas update Stevens's theater to a television sound stage. “The only thing that matters / Is the pace of the substitution.” Metonymic substitution continues to imitate the seemingly unguided flow of images at the edge of sleep. Gradual relaxation of the demand for coherence implies a diminishing of the inferential processes that subtend the normal, waking sense of self, that sense which is continually renewed by  implication as demanded by intensional coherence. This diffusion is figured as the feeling of “escape,” and as it comes into focus as an emotion nominated for attention, the self -- you -- is implied. The poem ends on a strongly alliterated and measured line. The effect of a consciousness perceiving is not diminished by the lack of strongly motivated narrative coherence; the work of the poem-machine is effective because of other integrative structures of consciousness.

The Plot

The secret is
you can't get to sleep
with a quiet mind;
you need to follow a sentence,
inward or downward,
as it becomes circuitous,
path-like, with tenuously credible
foliage on either side of it---
but you're still not sleeping.
You're conscious of the metaphoric
contraption; it's too jerky,
too equivocal to suspend you

And Nature was the girl who could spin
babies out of dustballs
until that little man
who said he had a name showed up
and wanted them
or wanted to be one
of a cast of cartoon
characters assigned to manage
the Garden
so even Adam and Eve discovered
they somehow knew the punchline:
the snake would swallow
the red bomb

Why is sleep's border guarded?
On the monitors
professional false selves
make self-disparaging remarks.
There's a sexy bored housewife,
very Natalie Wood-like,
sighing, “Men should win”---
but the only thing that matters
Is the pace of substitution.
You feel like trying to escape
from her straight-arrow husband
and her biker boyfriend

You can't believe
you're on Penelope's Secret.
A suitor waits
for ages
to be hypnotized
on stage.

 (Armantrout, Veil 106)

“The reason people marvel at works of art and say: How in Christ's name did he do it?---is that they know nothing of the physiology of the nervous system and have never in their experience witnessed the larger processes of the imagination.”

(William Carlos William, Collected 1:209)

1 I should add at this point that there are many poetics, and the one I am presenting here is simply a well-documented, widely accepted view of poetry. It is not for everyone, nor is it even the view that I prefer. But as I see it, a cognitive poetics should be able to account for a variety of conventional poetics, rather than support or recognize only one.

2 Rather than concepts I am tempted to use something like “cepts,” from “ception,” Len Talmy's proposed term for the conjunction of both conscious and unconscious perception and conception, including “the processing of sensory stimulation, mental imagery, and currently experienced thought and affect” (Toward 1: 139).

3 Damasio (DE 141) notes that Geschwind calls this a “pyramidal” smile because the pyramidal tract is used in creating it. “The pyramidal tract is the massive set of axons that arises in the primary motor cortex, area 4 of Brodmann, and descends to innervate the nuclei in the brain stem and spinal cord that control voluntary motion through peripheral nerves.”