On Emily Dickinson and the Girl from Ipanema (also, cats)

Listening obsessively to a new (to me) band called Cotton Jones, which is something of note because over the last several months, most of my reading and writing has been happening while listening to Meklit Hadero’s On a Day Like This and Charlotte Gainsbourg’s Master’s Hand.

I’ve listened to these albums so often that they’ve taken up residence in the deep limbic structure of my brain, to the point that I find that I can sing fluently (albeit atonally) in languages in which I am merely “proficient” (French) and in languages that I know not at all (Amharic and Portuguese). How to explain this? Iain McGilchrist writes:

“Poetry engraves itself in the brain: it doesn’t just slip smoothly over the cortex and language normally does. It has all the graininess of life, as it rips into being from deep within the limbic system, the ancient seat of awareness and affective meaning. Sometimes this is most obvious in a foreign language, because there the smooth, familiar words recede, and the sheer awesomeness of what is meant comes refreshed by the new encounter. As a child, I was bewitched by the poem of Heine that my father would recite to me while shaving. Im Abendsonnenschien…I remember thinking then that the real word for sunshine was Sonnenschein. So, too, something seemed missing when things disappeared: they only truly disappeared when they were verschwunden. This is odd because my father was a Scot and my mother English. It seems like a sort of latent knowledge.”

McGilchrist shares this reflection in the most recent issue of Poetry, the same one that has the most excellent essay by Lynda Barry, who gives a most fabulous interview that is on the Poetry Foundation’s website. She talks about how she used to lie about understanding Emily Dickinson then discovered that when she memorized Dickinson's work “the thing just unfolds….it’s like food coloring, when you just need a little drop.” She notes that Dickinson’s cadence works not only with “The Yellow Rose of Texas” but also with “Rhapsody in Blue” and “The Girl From Ipanema,” and begins to sing “I felt a cleaving in my mind” a la Gershwin, then a la Jobim, illustrating her point that poetry opens up in radically different ways in different contexts, or as you bring new experiences to bear.

McGilchrist writes that “Although I have favorite periods for music and painting, I do not for poetry. Poetry can occur anywhere there are words, even in daily life. After twenty years I still remember the response of a psychotic patient of mine when asked to distinguish between a river and a canal. Without hesitation he responded: ‘A River is Peace, a Canal is Torment,’ a line worthy of Blake. The forging of unusual links – metaphor – in which poetry resides depends on the right hemisphere of the brain, where the overall meaning of language, rather than mere syntax and semantics, is appreciated. It is here, too, in the right hemisphere, that experience is fresh, truly present, not pre-digested into re-presentation.”

Or as Cotton Jones sings of everyday miracles of transformation and regeneration:

There came yesterday a cat
I had no love for cats
I had no words for cats
But I love the cat
And now I’m a grandpa