The Poet as Absent-minded Neuroscientist: The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin & Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

Our thoughts go out to the people of Canterbury in the aftermath of Saturday's 7.1 earthquake - especially to our friends and family and fellow Tuesday Poets. With the knowledge that you're all safe, may the spirits of poetry fly to your comfort and carry your minds away from any troubles you face.

Lines from Philip Larkin's "The Whitsun Weddings" and Vladimir Nabokov's "Pale Fire"

Here's Larkin's narrator in "The Whitsun Weddings" (you can listen to the entire poem here):

At first, I didn't notice what a noise

The weddings made

Each station that we stopped at: sun destroys

The interest of what's happening in the shade,

And down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls

I took for porters larking with the mails,

And went on reading. Once we started, though,

We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls

In parodies of fashion, heels and veils,

Here's Nabokov's fictional poet John Shade, from "Pale Fire" (from the novel Pale Fire):

When inspiration and its icy blaze,

The sudden image, the immediate phrase

Over the skin a triple ripple send

Making the little hairs all stand on end...

...And while the safety blade with scrape and screak

Travels across the country of my cheek...

Dressing in all the rooms, I rhyme and roam

Throughout the house with, in my fist, a comb

Or a shoehorn, which turns into the spoon

I eat my egg with. In the afternoon

You drive me to the library. We dine

At half past six. And that odd muse of mine,

My versipel, is with me everywhere,

In carrel and in car, and in my chair.

In previous posts we've discussed the song of poetry, its music, its efforts to capture and preserve unique specimens of perfect beauty. Now we can look at where it lives (in shadows, sidelong glimpses, midge-like sparks of memory) and how it's found, allured, gently caressed, almost never coming when it's called (see my post on poets and their cats). In the above excerpts, notice how both narrators -- composing some of the most beautiful lines in English -- present themselves as engaged in the mundane activities of ordinary life: Reading, in the case of Larkin's narrator. Shaving, in the case of John Shade.

The sort of shaving commercial which appeared around the time Nabokov was writing Pale Fire.

Marvelous illusions. Joyce's nail-paring. In fact, these poems were more likely constructed out of intense, agonizing, jackhammering desk-work (or podium-work, in Nabokov's case), but the special effect is one of detachment, absent-mindedness. A uniquely artistic pairing: blind-spots to the outside world coupled with a most vivid spotlight on the musings of our brain.

We've already heard Jonah Lehrer's take on Proust (see his book, Proust was a Neuroscientist), how the greatest of French novelists discovered the importance of smell, taste and our present mood upon our recollections (we can add madeleines-and-tea to reading, shaving, the bowel movement of Leopold Bloom, etc) -- but Larkin and Nabokov, as shown above, deserve honorary chairs amongst the emerging bio-poetic panel of brain scientists: mainly for their insights into the idea that the most unexpected and brilliant poetic sprites of fancy often come to us when we're occupied with the most familiar, the most routine.

Obligation touches genius "like a scourge of scorpions," writes Coleridge; and yet in my view, meditation, in the monkish sense (obligatory musing, you might say), is just as unlikely to produce a great poem. Reading, shaving, showering, smoking, driving a car -- the auto-pilot activities of the everyday, according to scientists such as Rebecca Saxe of MIT and Randy Buckner of Harvard, may be the true handmaids of our genius. At such times, they've noted, certain regions of the brain, including, for example, the right temporal parietal juncture (responsible for our imagining what other people are thinking) kick into action, indeed, appear to take on a life of their own, rummaging through the past like kids in a costume-trunk and performing for us fanciful skits about the future.

Traveling through time, designing and preparing for imaginary futures -- a human survival trait, no doubt. Don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting that, in moments of mind-block, you turn to a Gillette Mach3 Turbo or a Silk-Effects for Women to find your muse -- although who knows? I'm simply suggesting that the narrator of a poem or novel will often appear more alive to us, more real to us, if his or her mind wanders (like ours, like everyone's) during moments of daily habit; and that this quality of an absent-minded exterior combined with a radiant, boundless interior is what makes poems like "The Whitsun Weddings" and "Pale Fire" such extraordinary works of art.

Zireaux is an Auckland-based novelist, poet and playwright. For Zireaux' other Tuesday Poems please visit ImmortalMuse.com, and in the live blog roll in the sidebar there are more Tuesday Poems.