From TRACE III/IV 1966-67
James Boyer May's "early" little magazine
Formatted as a perfect-bound book.
BRAIN WASHING
HYPNOGOGIC RECALL
& An Approach to Poetics
by Gene Fowler
That we had moved into an era in which communication would mean something quite new first became apparent to the average citizen when Americans taken prisoner during the Korean War began making strange confessions. Since that time, 'brain washing,' 'personality reconstruction,' and other such terms have become, if not household words, concepts among which every reader of paperbacks is at home.
About fifteen years having passed since the first such confessions, we might begin to anticipate the appearance of poets who, having reached adulthood and taken to the making of poems, are 'products' of the age of 'influenced people.' We might speculate as to what sort of poetry will come out of this age.
Brain washers, psychiatrists, and advertising men of the Fifties and Sixties talk quite comfortably about entering a man's mind, rearranging what they find there, removing from or adding to the collection. When we get over our initial shudder, we think of another sort of man able to do such things. Or a demi-god. Orpheus could make the trees and stones dance. With language, his lyre, he could set the objects of men's perceptions into a dance, leaving them in a form which showed the dance had taken place. In short, he rearranged the contents of men's minds.
Anthropologists tell us primitive peoples believe in what we, in our usually-unthinking mental shorthand, call 'word magic.' That is, poems and songs do not merely bring some watered-down aesthetic pleasure, but effect serious changes in the reality and psyche of the singer and listener. The primitive singer utters a Name, and a personage, a presence, or an object is evoked in the perception of himself and his listener. A group of entities may be evoked and led in a dance, a drama that is witnessed and expected, then, to recur at other levels of experience. Here, in fact, is the birth of all magic. This is of interest to us because poetry is, in essence, a magical technique.
There is one well-known practice today which is very much like the effects ascribed to ancient song. There is a man who, like Orpheus, uses words to make trees and stones and ghosts dance in men's minds. You're less likely to find him in the pages of POETRY than, appropriately, in the Orpheum Theatre. He is the hypnotist.
The hypnotist uses mainly words, those levers of which poets regard themselves as masters. Or, more correctly, he uses the substratum of reality which makes language work, getting at it through words. Most poets, on the other hand, simply put together scrabble pieces and wonder why no one displays any special or great interest in their constructs. The hypnotist gets all the attention he wants; and his words produce results.
The substratum of reality which underlies language is sensory and behavioral recall - an autonomous response-system that keeps the universe apparently solid and right side up for the individual and enables him to ascribe meaning to events. Some of those events are phrases, made up of phonemes, morphemes, and words accumulating into lines or sentences.
Polygraph operators, personnel managers, psycho-linguists, and some police officers know that every word evokes a tiny autonomous set of reactions. The hypnotist will cultivate stronger responses by calling for, encouraging, and feeding back into the system these autonomous responses. Finally, through what is known in the trade as a 'conviction spiral,' he will be able to direct the perceptual processes in his 'listener.'
It is possible for someone with a bit of patience and perhaps a bit of masochism to think back to a toothache, nurse the memory, and - suddenly and unpleasantly - 'feel again' the original toothache. This is sensory recall, from which we are, fortunately, usually protected by a well-trained 'forgetter.' A man suddenly exposed to his whole past with full immediacy would lose all sense of space-time orientation - then, all ordering systems. He would finally become insane or, if reticular controls went, die. The experiments with sensory deprivation have uncovered some aspects of this particular sort of fate.
For the most part, we are overprotected. We usually call it being 'insensitive.' Some few poets and fewer readers will cultivate a heightened sensitivity - more often than not in an undisciplined way and with rather saccharine results.
The writers of advertising copy have tried to use words in a manner somewhat between that of the poet and that of the hypnotist. They assume an audience of near-zero sensitivity, then try to pry loose what there might be. Any sensitivity in the viewer of an advertisement will be a slight capacity for erotic response or for reacting with fear to a threatened loss of security. So, most ads have to do with sex or security. Key phrases of the cruder sort, like 'be loved,' or even a picture of one's erotic fantasies as she or he actually occurs in some divine individual (with the help of a crew of technicians), will be thrown at one.
When some emotionally-realized (made real) images are evoked in the viewer's mind (assuming there is one), they are made to dance. The dance is usually very simple. There is metamorphosis. The mythic guide, be it bestower of security or beautiful girl, tends to 'become' the product. They merge, exchange properties, become one.
The hypnotist, of course, does much more. He can people his listener's world with snakes, girls, Martians, or what have you, and bring him to believe particular things about snakes, girls, and Martians. The poet, as Master-of-Names, should wish to do no less.
There is some indication that, in this era of hypnotists, psychiatrists, and brain washers, poetic souls do want to hold this old Orphic power again. We hear radio shows called You are There and This is Your Life, see movies with Robert Montgomery in which the camera behaves as a set of eyes in the head of someone present - and other such entertainments. Critics of poetry begin looking enthusiastically for 'immediacy' and 'inevitability,' without being able to define just what it is they are seeking. And so forth.
It seems that poets are beginning to feel the inarticulate stirring of a desire to reach in and modulate the listener-reader's consciousness. Even the recent shouting about 'honesty' and 'truth' ('truth' comes from the past participle of trauen: to believe strongly) is evidence of such a desire; for 'truth' is popularly thought to be that which convinces absolutely.
The younger poets, the poets to appear in the last ten years or so - and I include myself in this group - have, indeed, been trying to get back to a word magic. We feel frustrated by the usual insensitivity to words in the reader or listener. We gravitate toward the public reading of poetry - where we can get the timbre of our voices behind the poem, where we can get closer to the listener. We tend toward spare lean poems, getting rid of rhetoric and syntactic words which remind the reader-listener it is poetry and not actuality by which he is confronted. We tend toward a kind of filmic imagism, toward nouns and verbs, the names of things and actions, toward the cuts and turns that are like the movements of living minds.
All this is a conscious or unconscious effort to work word magic through our poems. I find myself writing passages like
i find pebbles
in the wet sand
dark agates
veined in white
dull bloodstones
blue-green bits
of fossilized sea
so solid you can almost feel the sand and the pebbles. Yet, when it is done, I feel suspicious of it - the word order being an echo of language, of a speaker, of the secondhand nature of the experience. I want, finally, to be a hypnotist, leaning over my listener, tearing each phrase loose from the poem, placing it into the setting of the listener's consciousness, working him to fit and accommodate it ... then, the next one - until he has lived my poem.
I want my poem to be more real than usual reality. And, of course, as my listeners do not accept or open themselves to word magic, my every poem is a failure.
Robert Duncan recently (in PASSAGES) and Pound earlier (in CANTOS) tried to get to the singular power of the ideogram by presenting lattices of words. It doesn't seem to work very well. Phrases, which actually correspond more closely than words to ideograms, might work better - but then, we get the word-order echoing language and are back where we started.
Sensory and behavioral recall. A cold hand when I speak of ice in the hand. A tensing and tiring of the running muscles as I take the reader through a poem in which I am running. A theory of poetics for our age, where men do alter the minds of other men, must discuss techniques for inducing and making use of such recall. The techniques cannot be those of the hypnotist, as they would tend to ruin poems and, in any case, demand the immediate presence of the person to be affected. There are things, however, for the poet to do; and those of us more or less newly arrived do them almost instinctively. A movement away from what is called density helps, a movement away from baroque and distracting imagery, away from syntactic and rhetorical padding or bracing, a movement toward simpler and more pervasive rhythms, a movement toward words that stay close to the senses, close to the familiar in detail if not in the main construct.
Those things I've listed as characteristic of the newest poetry may be said to be characteristic of all fine poetry - not new at all. I think skilled readers have always tried to let word magic work in them, and the best poets have always aimed their work at this level of receptivity. If there is a real difference between the older and the newer poet, it is that the newer poet is becoming aware of his need to enter into a reader-listener and change him. And the newer poet has many additional tools to work with. Chief among these is the demonstration-strengthened conviction that it is possible to work such change. Secondly, are formal bodies of knowledge: several psychologies, hypnogogics and mnemonics, linguistics, psycholinguistics, and others. A most interesting resource is the huge backlog of periodic failed or partially-successful translations, baring the anatomies of some poems as 'chunks of encapsulated consciousness' and evidence about the transferability of such chunks.
Most poets today are milling around wondering what hasn't been done, what there is to do. My feeling is that virtually nothing is yet done; it is all to do, or almost all. Poetry, I think, will prove the major tool in exploring the functioning and possibility of transference of Being. So far, even the best have done little more than play some of the possibilities by ear.
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