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الجزء الثاني

That is, metrical variations are not significant in themselves, like sememes: but rather they form, together, a picture-like Gestalt which is a distinct representation of something that we can recognize; and thus, like pictorial representations, or music, they are much less culture-bound than linguistic codes. But here, excitingly, we encounter a paradox stemming from the gross structure of the human brain. Poetry, being an art of language, is presumably processed by the left temporal lobe of the brain. But meter, we are suggesting, carries meaning in a fashion much more like that of a picture of a melody, in which the meaning inheres more in the whole than in the parts. There is no "lexicon" of metrical forms: they are not signs but elements of an analogical structure. And this kind of understanding is known to take place on the right side of the brain. If this hypothesis is accurate, meter is, in part, a way of introducing right-brain processes into the left-brain activity of understanding language; and in another sense, it is a way of connecting our much more culture-bound (and perhaps evolutionarily later) linguistic capacities with the relatively more "hardwired" spatial pattern-recognition faculties we share with the higher mammals.
It is in the context of this hypothesis that we wish to introduce the major finding of this essay, which explains, we believe, the extra-ordinary prevalence of the 3-second LINE in human poetry.
If we ask the question "what does the ear hear?" the obvious answer is "sound." What is sound? Mechanical waves in the air or other medium. But this answer is not very illuminating. We can, for instance, perceive mechanical waves by the sense of touch: it would be as inaccurate to say that a deaf man "heard" a vibrating handrail with his fingers, as it would be to say a blind man "saw" a fire with the skin of his face. What characterizes hearing as such is not that it senses mechanical waves but that it senses the distinctions between mechanical waves; just as what characterizes sight is not the perception of electromagnetic waves but the perception of distinctions between electromagnetic waves.
For the sense of sight those distinctions (except for color) are spatial ones; but for the sense of hearing they are mainly temporal. To put it directly: what the sense of hearing hears is essentially time. The recognition of differences of pitch involves a very pure (and highly accurate) comparative measurement of different frequencies into which time is divided. The perception of timbre, tone, sound texture, and so on consists in the recognition of combinations of frequencies: and the sense of rhythm and tempo carries the recognition of frequency into the realm of longer periods of time.
The sense of hearing is not only a marvelously accurate instrument for detecting differences between temporal periods; it is also an active organizer, arranging those different periods within a hierarchy as definite as that of the seconds, minutes, and hours of a clock, but one in which the different periodicities are also uniquely valorized. In the realm of pitch the structure of that hierarchy is embodied in the laws of harmony, and is well known (though it has not often been recognized that "sound" and "time" are virtually the same thing). New discoveries by Ernst Pöppel's group in Munich have begun to open up the role of the auditory time-hierarchy in the structure and function of the brain. Out of this investigation is coming a comprehensive understanding of the general scheduling-organization of the human sensory-motor system, and a fresh approach to the production and understanding of language. We shall first briefly outline the auditory hierarchy.
Events separated by periods of time shorter than about three thousandths of a second are classified by the hearing system as simultaneous. If a brief sound of one pitch is played to one ear, and another of a different pitch is played to the other less than .003 sec. later, the subject will experience only one sound. If the sounds are a little more than .003 sec. apart, the subject will experience two sounds. However, he will not be able to tell which of the two sounds came first, nor will he until the gap between them is increased ten times. Thus the lowest category in the hierarchy of auditory time is simultaneity, and the second lowest is mere temporal separation, without a preferred order of time. The most primary temporal experience is timeless unity; next comes a spacelike recognition of difference-spacelike because, unlike temporal positions, spatial positions can be exchanged. One can go from New York to Berlin or from Berlin to New York; but one can only go from 1980 to 1983, not from 1983 to 1980. Likewise, the realm of "separation" is a non-deterministic, acausal one: events happen in it, perhaps in patterns or perhaps not, but they cannot be said to cause one another, because we cannot say which came first.
When two sounds are about three hundredths of a second apart, a subject can experience their sequence, accurately reporting which came first. This is the third category in the hierarchy of auditory time, subsuming separations and simultaneities and organizing them rationally with respect to each other. But at this stage the organism is still a passive recipient of stimuli; we can hear a sequence of two sounds one-tenth of a second apart, but there is nothing we can do in response to the first sound before the second sound comes along: we are helpless to alter what will befall us, if the interval between the alert and its sequel falls within this range. Unlike the world of temporal separation, which is in a sense a realm of chance and pattern, the world of sequence is a realm of fate and cause. Events follow each other, and their temporal connections can be recognized as necessary, if indeed they are; but there is nothing we can do about it.
Once the temporal interval is above about three-tenths of a second, however, we have entered a new temporal category, which we might call response. For three-tenths of a second (.3 sec.) is enough time for a human subject to react to an acoustic stimulus. If we play two sounds to our subject a second apart, the subject could in theory prepare to deal with the second sound in the time given him after hearing the first. The perceiver is no longer passive, and events can be treated by him as actions in response to which he can perform actions of his own and which he can modify before they happen if he understands their cause. For response to exist there must be simultaneities, a separation, and a further element which might be characterized as function or, in a primitive sense, purpose. The response to a given stimulus will differ according to the function of the responding organ and the purpose of the organism as a whole.
At several places in this analysis it has been pointed out that a given familiar temporal relation-chance, pattern, fate, cause, action, function, purpose-only becomes possible when there is enough time for it to exist in. The idea that an entity needs time to exist in has become commonplace recently: an electron, for instance, requires at least 10-20 seconds of time (its spin period) to exist in, just as surely as it requires 10-10 centimeters of space (its Compton wavelength). The corollary to this observation is that entities which consist only in spatio-temporal relations are not necessarily less real for that than material objects, for spatio-temporal relations are exactly what material objects consist of too. But though a given period of time may be sufficient for an example of given relation-chance, cause, function-to be recognized in, it is not enough for the concept of the relation to be formulated in. It takes much less time to recognize or speak a word once learned than it takes to learn the word in the first place. Many examples of the sequence or response relation between events must be compared before a causal or purposive order can be formulated and thus recognized in individual cases. But comparisons requires discrete parcels of experience between which the comparison may be made, and since the entities being compared are themselves temporal in nature, these parcels of experience must consist in equal periods of time. In like fashion, the analysis of a picture (for transmission, reproduction, or identification of its details) might begin by dividing the picture up into "pixels" by means of a series of grids of various frequency; the highest-frequency grid representing the limit of the eye's activity, the lower ones increasingly concerned with complex relations between details. The next lowest time-division beyond the .3 second response-frequency must be sufficiently long to avoid falling into the range of the characteristic time-quanta required for the completion and recognition of the temporal relations to be compared. The comparison of experience takes more time than experience itself; the recognition of a melody takes more time than the hearing of the single notes.
This fundamental "parcel of experience" turns out to be about three seconds. The three-second period, roughly speaking, is the length of the human present moment. (At least it is for the auditory system, which possesses the sharpest temporal acuity of all the senses. The eye, for instance, is twice as slow as the ear in distinguishing temporal separation from simultaneity.) The philosophical notion of the "specious present" finds here its experimental embodiment.
A human speaker will pause for a few milliseconds every three seconds or so, and in that period decide on the precise syntax and lexicon of the next three seconds. A listener will absorb about three seconds of heard speech without pause or reflection, then stop listening briefly in order to integrate and make sense of what he has heard. (Speaker and hearer, however, are not necessarily "in phase" for this activity; this observation will be seen to be of importance later.)
To use a cybernetic metaphor, we possess an auditory information "buffer" whose capacity is three seconds' worth of information; at the end of three seconds the "buffer" is full, and it passes on its entire accumulated stock of information to the higher processing centers. In theory this stock could consist of about 1,000 simultaneities, 100 discrete temporal separations, and ten consecutive responses to stimuli. In practice the "buffer" has rather smaller capacity than this (about 60 separations); it seems to need a certain amount of "down-time."
It appears likely that another mechanism is involved here, too. Different types of information take different amounts of time to be processed by the cortex. For instance, fine detail in the visual field takes more time to be identified by the cortex than coarse detail. (Indeed, the time taken to process detail seems to be used by the brain as a tag to label its visual frequency.)18 Some sort of pulse is necessary so that all the information of different kinds will arrive at the higher processing centers as a bundle, correctly labeled as belonging together, and at the same time; the sensory cortex "waits" for the "slowest" information to catch up with the "fastest" so that it can all be sent off at once. And this 3-second period constitutes a "pulse."
Beyond the two horizons of this present moment exist the two periods which together constitute duration, which is the highest or "longest-frequency" integrative level of the human perception of time. Those two periods, the past and the future, memory and planning, are the widest arena of human thought (unless the religious or metaphysical category of "eternity" constitutes an even wider one). It is within the realm of duration, that what we call freedom can exist, for it is within that realm that purposes and functions, the governors of response, can themselves be compared and selected. The differences between past and future, and the differences between possible futures, constitute the field of value, and the relations between low-frequency objects and the more primitive high-frequency objects of which they are composed constitute the field of quality.
It is tempting to relate this foregoing hierarchical taxonomy of temporal periodicities to the structure and evolution of the physical universe itself. The temporal category of simultaneity nicely corresponds to the atemporal Umwelt of the photon, which reigned supreme in the first microsecond of the Big Bang. The category of separation resembles the weak, acausal, stochastic, spacelike temporality of quantum physics, within which there is no preferred direction of time: a condition which must have prevailed shortly after the origin of the universe, and of which the quantum-mechanical organization of subatomic particles is a living fossil. The category of sequence matches the causal, deterministic, and entropic realm of classical hard science, whose subject came into being some time after the origin of the universe, once the primal explosion had cooled sufficiently to permit the existence if organized, discrete, and enduring matter. With the category of response we are clearly within the Umwelt of living matter, with its functions, purposes, and even its primitive and temporary teleology, which began about ten billion years after the Big Bang. Once we cross the horizon of the present we leave the world of animals and enter the realm of duration, which first came into being perhaps a million years ago (if it was roughly coeval with speech and with that development of the left brain which gave us the tenses of language). The evolution and hierarchical structure of the human hearing mechanism thus could be said to recapitulate the history and organization of the cosmos. The history of science has been the retracing of that path backwards by means of clocks of greater and greater acuity.
Cosmological speculation aside, it should already be obvious that a remarkable and suggestive correlation exists between the temporal organization of poetic meter and the temporal function of the human hearing mechanism. Of general linguistic significance is the fact that the length of a syllable-about 1/3 second-corresponds to the minimum period within which a response to an auditory stimulus can take place: this is commonsense, really, as speech must, to be efficient, be as fast as it can be, while, to be controllable, it must be slow enough for a speaker or hearer to react to a syllable before the next one comes along.
Of more specific significance for our subject is the very exact correlation between the three-second LINE and the three-second "auditory present." The average number of syllables per LINE in human poetry seems to be about ten; so human poetic meter embodies the two lowest-frequency rhythms in the human auditory system.
The independence of poetic meter from the mechanism of breathing, which we have already noted, is thus explained by the fact that the master-rhythm of human meter is not pulmonary but neural: we must seek the origins of poetry not among the lower regions of the human organism, but among the higher. The frequent practice in reading "free verse" aloud, of breathing at the end of the line-even when the line is highly variable in length and often broken quite without regard to syntax-is therefore not only grammatically confusing but deeply unnatural: for it forces a pause where neural processing would not normally put it.
But at least there was a clear, if erroneous, rationale for the doctrine of meter as made up of "breath-units." Without this rationale, how do we explain the cultural universality of meter? Why does verse embody the three-second neural "present"? What functions could be served by this artificial and external mimicry of an endogenous brain rhythm? Given the fact, already stated, that poetry fulfills many of the superficial conditions demanded of a brain-efficiency reward control system, how might the three-second rhythm serve that function? And what is the role of the other components of meter-the rhythmic parallelism between the LINES, and the information-bearing variations upon that parallelism?
One further batch of data will help guide our hypothesizing: the subjective reports of poets and readers of poetry about the effects and powers of poetic meter. Although these reports would be inadequate and ambiguous as the sole support of an argument, they may point us in the right direction and confirm conclusions arrived at by other means.
A brief and incomplete summary of these reports, with a few citations, should suggest to a reader educated in literature the scope of their general agreement. Robert Graves speaks of the shiver and the coldness in the spine, the hair rising on the head and body, as does Emily Dickinson. A profound muscular relaxation yet an intense alertness and concentration is also recorded. The heart feels squeezed and the stomach cramped. There is a tendency toward laughter or tears, or both; the taking of deep breaths; and a slightly intoxicated feeling (Samuel Taylor Coleridge compared it to the effects of a moderate amount of strong spirits upon a conversation). At the same time there is a cataract or avalanche of vigorous thought, in which new connections are made; Shakespeare's Prospero describes the sensation as a "beating mind" (the phrase is repeated three times in different places in the play). There is a sense of being on the edge of a precipice of insight-almost a vertigo-and the awareness of entirely new combinations of ideas taking concrete shape, together with feelings of strangeness and even terror. Some writers (Arnold, for instance) speak of an inner light or flame. Outside stimuli are often blanked out, so strong is the concentration. The imagery of the poem becomes so intense that it is almost like real sensory experience. Personal memories pleasant and unpleasant (and sometimes previously inaccessible) are strongly evoked; there is often an emotional re-experience of close personal ties, with family, friends, lovers, the dead. There is an intense valorization of the world and of human life, together with a strong sense of the reconciliation of opposites-joy and sorrow, life and death, good and evil, divine and human, reality and illusion, whole and part, comic and tragic, time and timelessness. The sensation is not a timeless one as such, but an experience of time so full of significance that stillness and sweeping motion are the same thing. There is a sense of power combined with effortlessness. The poet or reader rises above the world, as it were, on the "viewless wings of poetry," and sees it all in its fullness and completeness, but without loss of the quiddity and clarity of its details. There is an awareness of one's own physical nature, of one's birth and death, and of a curious transcendence of them; and, often, a strong feeling of universal and particular love, and communal solidarity.
Of course, not all these subjective sensations necessarily occur together in the experience of poetry, nor do they usually take their most intense form; but a poet or frequent reader of poetry will probably recognize most of them.
To this list, moreover, should be added a further property of metered poetry, which goes beyond the immediate experience of it: that is, its memorability. Part of this property is undoubtedly a merely technical convenience: the knowledge of the number of syllables in a line and the rhyme, for instance, limits the number of words and phrases which are possible in a forgotten line and helps us to logically reconstruct it. But introspection will reveal a deeper quality to this memorability: somehow the rhythm of the words is remembered even when the words themselves are lost to us; but the rhythm helps us to recover the mental state in which we first heard or read the poem, and then the gates of memory are opened and the words come to us at once.
Equipped with the general contemporary conception of brain-processing with which this essay began, with the temporal analysis of meter and its correlation to the hearing-system, and with the subjective reports of participants in the art, we may now begin to construct a plausible hypothesis of what goes on in the brain during the experience of poetry.
Here we can draw upon a relatively new and speculative field of scientific inquiry, which has been variously termed "neurophysiology," "biocybernetics," and "biopsychology," and is associated with the names of such researchers as E. Bourguignon, E. D. Chapple, E. Gellhorn, A. Neher, and R. Ornstein. Barbara Lex's essay "The Neurobiology of Ritual Trance,"19 in which she summarizes and synthesizes much of their work, provides many of the materials by which we may build an explanatory bridge between the observed characteristics of human verse and the new findings of the Munich group about the hearing mechanism. Although Lex is concerned with the whole spectrum of methods by which altered states of consciousness may be attained-alcohol, hypnotic suggestion, breathing techniques, smoking music, dancing, drugs, fasting, meditation, sensory deprivation, photic driving, and auditory driving-and her focus is on ritual rather than the art of poetry, her general argument fits in well with our own findings.
Essentially her position is that the various techniques listed above, and generalized as "driving behaviors," are designed to add the linear, analytic, and verbal resources of the left brain the more intuitive and holistic understanding of the right brain; to tune the central nervous system and alleviate accumulated stress; and to invoke to the aid of social solidarity and cultural values the powerful somatic and emotional forces mediated by the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, and the ergotropic and trophotropic responses they control.20
It has been known for many years that rhythmic photic and auditory stimulation can evoke epileptic symptoms in seizure-prone individuals, and can produce powerful involuntary reactions even in normal persons. The rhythmic stimulus entrains and then amplifies natural brain rhythms, especially if it is tuned to an important frequency such as the ten cycle-per-second alpha wave. It seems plausible to us that the three-second poetic LINE is similarly tuned to the three-second cycle of the auditory (and subjective-temporal) present. The metrical and assonantal devices of verse such as rhyme and stress, which create similarities between the LINES, emphasize the repetition. The curious subjective effects of metered verse-relaxation, a holistic sense of the world and so on-are no doubt attributable to a very mild pseudotrance state induced by the auditory driving effect of this repetition.
Auditory driving is known to affect the right brain much more powerfully than the left: thus, where ordinary unmetered prose comes to us in a "mono" mode, so to speak, affecting the left brain predominantly, metered language comes to us in a "stereo" mode, simultaneously calling on the verbal resources of the left and the rhythmic potentials of the right.21
Of course, the matter is not as simple as this, even at this level of discussion. The accurate scansion of poetry involves a complex analysis of grammatical and lexical stress, which must be continually integrated with a non-verbal right-brain understanding of metrical stress. The delightful way in which the rhythm of the sentence, as a semantic unit, counterpoints the rhythm of the meter in poetry, is thus explained as the result of a co-operation between left and right brain functions. The "stereo" effect of verse is not merely one of simultaneous stimulation of two different brain areas, but also the result of a necessary integrative collaboration and feedback between them. The linguistic capacities of the left brain, which, as Levy says, provide a temporal order for spatial information, are forced into a conversation with the rhythmic and musical capacities of the right, which provide a spatial order for temporal information.
But the driving rhythm of the three-second LINE is not just any rhythm. It is, as we have seen, tuned to the largest limited unit of auditory time, its specious present, within which causal sequences can be compared, and free decisions taken. A complete poem-which can be any length-is a duration, a realm of values, systematically divided into presents, which are the realm of action. It therefore summarizes our most sophisticated and most uniquely human integrations of time.
There is, perhaps, still another effect at work on the cortical level. The various divinatory practices of humankind (another cultural universal, perhaps) all involve a common element: a process of very complex calculation which seems quite irrelevant to the kind of information sought by the diviner. A reader of the Tarot will analyze elaborate combinations of cards, an I Ching reader will arrive at his hexagram through a difficult process of mathematical figuring, a reader of the horoscope will resort to remarkable computations of astronomical position and time. (The common use of the word "reader" in these contexts is suggestive.) The work of scanning metered verse, especially when combined with the activity of recognizing allusions and symbolisms, and the combination of them into the correct patterns, seems analogous to these divinatory practices. The function of this demanding process of calculation may be to occupy the linear and rational faculties of the brain with a task which entirely distracts them from the matter to be decided-a diagnosis, a marriage, the future of an individual. Once the "loud voice" of the reductive logical intelligence is thus stilled by distance, the quieter whispering of a holistic intuition, which can integrate much larger quantities of much poorer-quality information in more multifarious ways-though with a probability of accuracy which is correspondingly much lower-can then be heard. The technique is something like that of the experienced stargazer, who can sometimes make out a very faint star by focusing a little to one side of it, thereby bringing to bear on it an area of the retina which, though inferior in acuity, is more sensitive to light. The vatic, prophetic, or divinatory powers traditionally attributes to poetry may be partly explained by the use of this technique. If the analogy is slightly unflattering to the work of some professional analytic critics of poetry-reducing their work, as it does, to the status of an elaborate decoy for the more literalistic proclivities of the brain-there is the compensation that it is after all a very necessary activity, indeed indispensable precisely because of its irrelevance.
On the cortical level, then, poetic meter serves a number of functions generally aimed at tuning up and enhancing the performance of the brain, by bringing to bear other faculties than the linguistic, which we can relate to the summary of healthy brain characteristics at the beginning of this paper. By ruling out certain rhythmic possibilities, meter satisfies the brain's procrustean demand for unambiguity and clear distinctions. By combining elements of repetition and isochrony on one hand with variation on the other, it nicely fulfills the brain's habituative need for controlled novelty. By giving the brain a system of rhythmic organization as well as a circumscribed set of semantic and syntactical possibilities, it encourages the brain in its synthetic and predictive activity of hypothesis-construction, and raises expectations which are pleasingly satisfied at once. In its content, poetry has often had a strongly prophetic character, an obvious indication of its predictive function; and the mythic elements of poetry afford more subtle models of the future by providing guides to conduct. Poetry presents to the brain a system which is temporally and rhythmically hierarchical, as well as linguistically so, and therefore matched to the hierarchical organization of the brain itself. It does much of the work that the brain must usually do for itself, in organizing information into rhythmic pulses, integrating different types of information-rhythmic, grammatical, lexical, acoustic-into easily assimilable parcels and labeling their contents as belonging together. Like intravenous nourishment, the information enters our system instantly, without a lengthy process of digestion. The pleasure of metered verse evidently comes from its ability to stimulate the brain's capacities of self-reward, and the traditional concern of verse with the deepest human values-truth, goodness, and beauty-is clearly associated with its involvement with the brain's own motivational system. Poetry seems to be a device the brain can use in reflexively calibrating itself, turning its software into hardware and its hardware into software: and accordingly poetry is traditionally concerned, on its semantic level, with consciousness and conscience. As a quintessentially cultural activity, poetry has been central to social learning and the synchronization of social activities (the sea-shanty or work-song is only the crudest and most obvious example). Poetry, as we have seen, enforces cooperation between left-brain temporal organization and right-brain spatial organization and helps to bring about that integrated stereoscopic view that we call true understanding. And poetry is, par excellence, "kalogenetic"-productive of beauty, of elegant, coherent, and predictively powerful models of the world.
It might be argued-and this is a traditional charge against poetry-that in doing all these things poetry deceives us, presenting to us an experience which, because it is so perfectly designed for the human brain, gives us a false impression of reality and separates us from the rough world in which we must survive. Much modern esthetic theory is in fact devoted to reversing this situation, and making poetry-and art in general-so disharmonious with our natural proclivities that it shocks us into awareness of the stark realities. Clearly a poetry which was too merely harmonious would be insipid-for it would disappoint the brain's habituative desire for novelty. But mere random change and the continuous disappointment of expectations is itself insipid; we are as capable of becoming habituated to meaningless flux as to mindless regularity.
Modernist esthetic theory may be ignoring the following possibility: that our species' special adaptation may in fact be to expect more order and meaning in the world than it can deliver; and that those expectations may constitute, paradoxically, an excellent survival strategy. We are strongly motivated to restore the equilibrium between reality and our expectations by altering reality so as to validate our models of it-to "make the world a better place," as we put it. The modernist attack on beauty in art would therefore constitute an attack on our very nature itself; and the modernist and post-modernist criticism of moral and philosophical idealism likewise flies in the face of the apparent facts about human neural organization. What William James called "the will to believe" is written in our genes; teleology is the best policy; and paradoxically, it is utopian to attempt to do battle against our natural idealism. Much more sensible to adjust reality to the ideal.
But our discussion of the effects of metered verse on the human brain has ignored, so far, the subcortical levels of brain activity. Let us substitute, as pars pro toto, "metered verse" for "rituals" in the following summary by Barbara Lex:
The raison d'etre of rituals is the readjustment of dysphasic biological and social rhythms by manipulation of neurophysiological structures under controlled conditions. Rituals properly executed promote a feeling of well-being and relief, not only because prolonged or intense stresses are alleviated, but also because the driving techniques employed in rituals are designed to sensitize and "tune" the nervous system and thereby lessen inhibition of the right hemisphere and permit temporary right-hemisphere dominance, as well as mixed trophotropic-ergotropic excitation, to achieve synchronization of cortical rhythms in both hemispheres and evoke trophotropic rebound.22
Lex maintains that the "driving" techniques of rhythmic dances, chants, and so on can produce a simultaneous stimulation of both the ergotropic (arousal) and the trophotropic (rest) systems of the lower nervous system, producing subjective effects which she characterizes as follows: trance; ecstasy; meditative and dreamlike states; possession; the "exhilaration accompanying risk taking"; a sense of community; sacredness; a "process of reviving the memory of a repressed unpleasant experience and expressing in speech and actions the emotions related to it, thereby relieving the personality of its influence"; alternate laughing and crying; mystical experience and religious conversion; experiences of unity, holism, and solidarity. Laughlin and d'Aquili add to these effects a sense of union with a greater power, an awareness that death is not to be feared, a feeling of harmony with the universe, and a mystical "conjunctio oppositorum" or unity of opposites. This list closely resembles our earlier enumeration of the experience of good metered verse as described by literary people.
If Lex is right, we can add to the more specifically cortical effects of metered verse the more generalized functions of a major ritual driving technique: the promotion of biophysiological stress-reduction (peace) and social solidarity (love). Meter clearly synchronizes not only speaker with hearer, but hearers with each other, so that each person's three-second "present" is in phase with the others and a rhythmic community, which can become a perfomative community, is generated.
Laughlin and d'Aquili connect the mythical mode of narrative with the driving techniques of ritual, pointing out that mythical thought expresses the "cognitive imperative," as they call it, or the desire for an elegant and meaningful explanation of the world;23 and McManus argues that such practices are essential in the full development and education of children.24 (Again we might point out that the modernist praise of mythical thought is misplaced; for it values the irrational element it discerns in myth, whereas true mythical thought, as Levi-Strauss has shown, is deeply rational and has much in common with scientific hypothesis.)
The theory of the state-boundedness of memory might also explain the remarkable memorability of poetry. If meter evokes a peculiar brain state, and if each meter and each use of meter with its unique variations carries its own mood or brain-state signature, then it is not surprising that we can recall poetry so readily. The meter itself can evoke the brain-state in which we first heard the poem, and therefore make the verbal details immediately accessible to recall. Homer said that the muses were the daughters of memory, and this may be what he meant. By contrast, the modernist critic Chatman sneeringly dismisses the mnemonic function of metered poetry as being in common with that of advertising jingles. But if advertising jingles are left holding the field of human emotional persuasion, poetry has surely lost the battle-or the advertising jingles have become the only true poetry.
To sum up the general argument of this essay: metered poetry is a cultural universal, and its salient feature, the three-second LINE, is tuned to the three-second present moment of the auditory information-processing system. By means of metrical variation, the musical and pictorial powers of the right brain are enlisted by meter to cooperate with the linguistic powers of the left; and by auditory driving effects, the lower levels of the nervous system are stimulated in such a way as to reinforce the cognitive functions of the poem, to improve the memory, and to promote physiological and social harmony. Metered poetry may play an important part in developing our more subtle understandings of time, and may thus act as a technique to concentrate and reinforce our uniquely human tendency to make sense of the world in terms of values like truth, beauty, and goodness. Meter breaks the confinement of linguistic expression and appreciation within two small regions of the left temporal lobe and brings to bear the energies of the whole brain.25
The consequences of this new understanding of poetic meter are very wide-ranging. This understanding would endorse the classical conception of poetry, as designed to "instruct by delighting," as Sir Philip Sidney put it.26 It would suggest strongly that "free verse," when uncoupled from any kind of metrical regularity, is likely to forgo the benefits of bringing the whole brain to bear. It would also predict that free verse would tend to become associated with views of the world on which the tense-structure has become very rudimentary and the more complex values, being time-dependent, have disappeared. A bureaucratic social system, requiring specialists rather than generalists, would tend to discourage11 reinforcement techniques such as metered verse, because such techniques put the whole brain to use and encourage world-views that might transcend the limited values of the bureaucratic system; and by the same token it would encourage activities like free verse, which are highly specialized both neurologically and culturally. Prose, both because of its own syntactical rhythms and because of its traditional liberty of topic and vocabulary, is less highly specialized; though it is significant that bureaucratic prose tends toward being arrhythmic and toward specialized vocabulary. The effect of free verse is to break down the syntactical rhythms of prose without replacing them by meter, and the tendency of free verse has been toward a narrow range of vocabulary, topic, and genre-mostly lyric descriptions of private and personal impressions. Thus free verse, like existentialist philosophy, is nicely adapted to the needs of the bureaucratic and even the totalitarian state, because of its confinement of human concern within narrow specialized limits where it will not be politically threatening.
The implications for education are very important. If we wish to develop the full powers of the minds of the young, early and continuous exposure to the best metered verse would be essential; for the higher human values, the cognitive abilities of generalization and pattern-recognition, the positive emotions such as love and peacefulness, and even a sophisticated sense of time and timing, are all developed by poetry. Furthermore, our ethnocentric bias may be partly overcome by the study of poetry in other languages, and the recognition if the underlying universals in poetic meter. Indeed, the pernicious custom of translating foreign metered verse originals into free verse may already have done some harm; it involves an essentially arrogant assumption of western modernist superiority over the general "vulgar" human love of regular verse.
It may well be that the rise of utilitarian education for the working and middle classes, together with a loss of traditional folk poetry, had a lot to do with the success of political and economic tyranny in our times. The masses, starved of the beautiful and complex rhythms of poetry, were only too susceptible to the brutal and simplistic rhythms of the totalitarian slogan or advertising jingle. An education in verse will tend to produce citizens capable of using their full brains coherently, able to unite rational thought and calculation with values and commitment.
Footnotes
1 This body of theory is developed in J. T. Fraser, Of Time, Passion and Knowledge (Braziller, 1975), and in J. T. Fraser et al., eds.. The Study of Time, vols. I, II, and III (Springer-Verlag, 1972, 1975, 1978).
2 The following summary of characteristic human information processing strategies owes much to these sources of information: The proceedings of the Werner Reimers Stiftung Biological Aspects of Esthetics Group. C. D. Laughlin, Jr., and E. G. d'Aquili, Biogenetic Structuralism (Columbia University Press, 1974). E. G. d'Aquili, C. D. Laughlin, Jr., and J. McManus, eds., The Spectrum of Ritual: A Biogenetic Structural Analysis (Columbia University, 1979). D. E. Berlyne and K. B. Madsen, eds., Pleasure, Reward, Preference: Their Nature, Determinants, and Role in Behavior (Academic Press, 1973). A. Routtenberg, ed., Biology of Reinforcement: Facets of Brain Stimulation Reward (Academic Press, 1980). J. Olds, Drives and Reinforcements: Behavioral Studies of Hypothalamic Functions (Raven Press, 1977). C. Blakemore, Mechanics of the Mind, Cambridge University Press, 1977.
3 E. Pöppel, "Erlebte Zeit--und die Zeit uberhaupt," paper given at the Werner Reimers Stiftung "Biological Aspects of Esthetics" conference, January, 1982.
4 Private communications, I. Rentschler, 1981 and 1982.
5 "Biological Aspects of Esthetics" meeting, January, 1982.
6 F. Turner, "Verbal Creativity and the Meter of Love-Poetry," paper given at the "Biological Aspects of Esthetics" meeting, September, 1980.
7 On cultural universals, see I. Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Ethology (Holt, Rinehart, 1970).
8 J. Rothenberg, Technicians of the Sacred (Doubleday Anchor, 1968).
9 W. K. Wimsatt, Versification: Major Language Types, New York University Press, 1972.
10 Presented at the "Biological Aspects of Esthetics" meeting, April, 1981.
11 For instance, in Yanomami contract-chants and Western advertising jingles.
12 W. K. Wimsatt, Ibid.
13 This is a narrative meter, whose actual pauses do not necessarily fall upon the line-endings. In Aeschylus' Agamemnon, for example, an 11-line sample contained 15 pauses, and lasted 48 seconds. Thus in practice the LINE-length is about 3 seconds.
14 Probably reflects the statistical effect of lines with a strong caesura.
15 Charles Olson's Projective Verse (New York: Totem Press, 1959) is a good example of such free-verse theories.
16 Wimsatt, Ibid.
17 There is an interesting account of various critical theories of meter in the introductory chapter of C. Chatman's A Theory of Meter (Mouton, 1965), but it is flawed by a bias against the possibility of biological foundations for metrical usage.
18 Private communication, I. Rentschler, 1981.
19 D'Aquili et al., The Spectrum of Ritual, Ch. 4. pp. 117-51
20 "Ergotropic" refers to the whole pattern of connected behaviors and states that characterize the aroused state of the body, including an increased heart rate and blood flow to the skeletal muscles, wakefulness, alertness, and a hormone balance consistent with "fight or flight" activities.
"Trophotropic" refers to the corresponding system of rest, body maintenance, and relaxation: decreased heart rate, a flow of blood to the internal organs, an increase in the activity of the digestive process, drowsiness, and a hormone balance consistent with sleep, inactivity, or trance.
21 John Frederick Nims makes exactly this point in his Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry (Random House, 1983), p. 258
22 D'Aquili et al., p. 144.
23 Ibid., Ch. 5, pp. 152-82.
24 Ibid., Ch. 6, pp. 183-215.
25 Charles O. Hartman, in his Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody