Blindsight

Mary Lupin — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 08:19:20 +0000

One would think the primary visual cortex is needed to see, but apparently not. Despite being blind because of damage to the primary visual cortex, a person is still able to perceive light well enough through other areas of the brain, that when prompted to “guess” where an unseen object is, patients (human and monkey) are able to grasp the object, shaping their hand to the appropriate contours prior to touching the object or knowing what it is. This is called blindsight.

Blindsight: “a medical condition in which the sufferer responds to visual stimuli without consciously perceiving them.”

There is so much that we perceive and respond to that is not conscious. In this case the patient didn’t know where the object was, but his hand did. It was the prompting, the “just guess” that allowed the patient to find the object. As far as I can tell from my reading the monkeys didn’t need the prompting. Perhaps a lot of what we call intuition is no more incorporeal than blindsight. Perhaps all the tools that are available to “develop you intuition” are actually working like the prompts from the doctor. Perhaps that is also what art does. Reading poetry, especially poetry that operates with a different set of “rules of evidence” than your own is just such a prompt. Just guess, it seems to say. You don’t have to know what it means to find it, just guess.

Myung Mi Kim’s poetry strikes me that way.

Here is what Mi Kim wrote	Here is what I “heard” from my body
First assembled fire. Far off estimation the sun offers.	chest warmth and arms stretching out from the body high, elbows unlocked
Operate machinery and the line. Bark branch phrase interrupted.	sore knees driving too long exhaustion the back curling down at shoulder sleep eyes want to close
Distended beyond assembly and parts.	hands sore, scarred from scraping hides pry open fingers from the scraper
Describe the success of the random bomb. Black rain had its neck.	on an empty tea cup the top of my head blows off I swallow the empty
Withstood ropes and burns	wrists remember fending off and ankles break from the memory of running
Bulbous plants gone soft.	a womb used and now at 50 soft holding only the future
Moving from twelve to counting on the ten fingers.	scar on the back of my hand not visible
That long combat maintained.	where the ruler came down the muscles under the first joint of my fingers contract wanting to make a fist

I don’t understand the poetry, not in a conscious way. Yet I read it and sometimes when I hold the words on a page in my eyes, let them settle down into my body, then close my eyes and feel the words move around, clittering and tapping in my body, I can feel what they mean. My left knee and other body parts sometimes know more than I do, but to utilize bodily knowledge of this sort takes a conscious effort of attention.

Tailfeather » blindsight

Blindsight