Once a man is dead, can he come back to life? - Job, 14.14
The question of immortal possibilities is one that involves more questions than answers. In discussing immortality we are faced with a dilemma, one that makes us question exactly what we are when we are alive, what it is that makes us a person, with identity and continuity, and what our definitions of reality are. To do this we must consider many aspects of our human existence and experience, and subject them to an extensive process of re-evaluation. This re-evaluation is essential if we are to examine a question that asks about an event that is concerned with activity beyond that which we are currently able to completely understand. It is through this re-evaluation that we can more fully speculate upon whether or not physical expiration is equatable with the end of our being, or if there is a chance that survival is possible.
One of the first questions that needs to be addressed in a study of immortal possibilities is that of dualism. The terms for duality, in its strict meaning, are that the mind and body are separable, but there seems to be the implication that the soul has some sort of body (as illustrated in Blake's Soul Hovering Over the Body from Robert Blair's Grave), discarnate but not disembodied. This is not the argument for duality that I mean to express in the least. Rather, I see this "duality" as more of an intertwined existence between mind and body, where the mind is dependent upon the body while the body is capable of sustaining life, dependent upon the biological organs of the body to become itself, to grow, through experiences. This differs from the Platonic idea of the pre-existence of the soul, as well as the Cartesian idea of the homunculus that drives the body. If we do indeed have a mind, some part of us that is immortal, then it is something that does not exist until we are born, it grows with us, and it is formed through our experience and subsequent memories.
The concept behind this sort of "duality" derives from neurobiological information concerning the storage of memories in the brain. Technically speaking, memories are not actually "stored" in the brain, they are causally dependent upon the brain cells for their location as they are created. The memories themselves are electrical impulses that are fired off when they are recalled. This can be observed and examined with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) tests, where a person, whose head is placed within the MRI scanner, is shown pictures, either iconographical or photographs. The MRI scanner follows the electrical activity from the optic nerve, as the picture is seen, to the brain, as the electricity travels along the neural pathways, and to the brain cell/s where the memory is in residence. This can also be done with words, rather than pictures, to see where the electro-neural activity leads to when a word or a song is heard by the subject. In this manner we can accept the fact that memories are electrical impulses, bits of energy, that are "located" in the brain. It is also important to remember the fact that due to the law of conservation of energy, energy can not be created, nor destroyed. We must consider this, and attempt to determine if memories, that are stored as energy, and therefore indestructible, are capable of retaining those memories upon the expiration of the brain. Furthermore, if we are to examine perceptions and experiences, it is crucial to attempt to recognize any relationships between physical effects and mental feelings, which can be examined through physiological response to thoughts, tested by means of galvanometers and pneumographs.1 This study will, however, deal with these neurobiological studies in a comparative manner, in the interpretation of metaphor in the poetry, thus not requiring a solid neurobiological background for reading it.
This study, then, is one that is interdisciplinary. Although concerned with the works of the British Romantic poets, especially Wordsworth and Shelley, we must look to other disciplines, philosophy, neurobiology, psychology, art, and art history, as well as literary criticism, to discover whether or not there are any immortal possibilities inherent in our nature. To do this we undertake a metaphysical examination, and, in this manner, the pages that follow examine these poetical works in what can be seen as what Jean-Paul Sartre termed existentialist psychoanalysis, which "rejects the hypothesis of the unconscious; it makes the psychic act coextensive with consciousness."2 It has "[i]ts point of departure [in] experience." He also says that "[t]he goal of psychoanalysis is to decipher the empirical behaviour patterns of man", and that, "[h]ere as elsewhere, truth is not encountered by chance; it does not belong to a domain where one must seek it without ever having any presentiment of its location ... Its method is comparative."3 Admittedly, a historical background is important if one is to intelligently examine the poets' words, to know what they meant when they used a specific word, to know what was happening in their lives when they wrote the poems. However, the historical background is not paramount to this study since we are concerned with the notion of immortal possibilities in the poems that are being examined. We are looking at examples of perception, examples of experience, that form as memories, memories that create our personal identity and continuity. To consider a historical background might create a study more concerned with the why of what they wrote rather than what they actually wrote. In doing this we are forced to ask a question that is unanswerable, for one might as well ask why the French Revolution occurred in 1789 and not two years earlier, when the circumstances were equally as revolutionary. Or why the poets of the 18th century did not write in the same manner as the Romantic poets did. Or why the poets of the Victorian age did not write in the same manner. Or why the music of the period echoed what was being written by the Romantics, such as Beethoven's Prometheus, Opus 43, or Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture. Or why Napoleon was able to establish his empire with such relative ease. These are all events that are related to the historical background of the time that the Romantic poets were writing, but are events that lead one away from the study of their words and imagery, and towards some un-answerable question. It is undeniable that the historical events unfolding as a backdrop to the lives of the poets examined within had some effect on their thoughts and writings, but, in order to more closely examine the words and imagery of the poems, it proves more efficient to make note of the time during which the poems were written, and any direct influence that was had upon the section examined, than to focus firstly upon the historical background of the piece, and secondly upon the nature of what is being expressed. This does not make for any less of a scholarly effort; the aim of this study is to examine the experiential and sensual descriptions present in the selections chosen, and in doing so attempting to determine what our immortal possibilities are, if any. This examination is necessarily in a modern context as that is the only context available to us, as we are looking at these pieces nearly two hundred years after they were written. The interpretations offered here are ones that are comparative, ones that make notice of certain similarities within the different texts, similarities that, in their recurrence, give models for the consideration of some version of immortality that is linked with our modes of perception.
Certain readers may have difficulty in a study concerned more with experiential analysis rather than historical analysis, and therefore have problems with the use of Wordsworth and Shelley, thinking that they are a) not of the same generation of Romantic poets, and b) opposed to one another, as might be inferred from a precursory thought of Shelley's To Wordsworth (1816), reflecting upon the newer, more radical generation of Romantic poets' view towards Wordsworth's conservative politics. However, the poem expresses more of a feeling of sadness more than anger towards Wordsworth, saying that he has changed, no longer focussing upon "[c]hildhood and youth, friendship and love's first glow" (line 3), memories and past experiences: "Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,/ Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be." (ll. 13-14) Shelley admired Wordsworth, thus his feeling of bereavement in To Wordsworth, as we can see from certain actions in his life, such as when, upon his return to England in on September 13, 1814, he spent the remainder of the £20 that he had borrowed to pay for the coach and boatman on clothes, and a copy of The Excursion.4 However, Shelley's admiration for Wordsworth had already begun to wane, for Mary Shelley tells us of their opinion of The Excursion's author: "He is a slave."5 We shall therefore be examining the poetry of Wordsworth primarily prior to 1814, poetry that relates to similarities in both Shelley and Wordsworth, as we see that in 1812 Shelley was in awe of Wordsworth, wanting to meet him after having read and copied out the whole of A Poet's Epitaph, writing, "[h]ow expressively keen are the first stanzas. I shall see this man soon ... [he] retains the integrity of his independence".6 The two never met, as Wordsworth did not arrive at Greta Hall, where Shelley had been, until September of 1812, a few months after Shelley's departure to Dublin;7 this does not, however, weaken the connection between the two poets and what they wrote. Wordsworth himself said of Shelley: "He is one of the best artists of us all: I mean in workmanship of style."8
In addition to this, that which we are looking at is poetry concerned with memory and perceptual realms, experience. Both of these subjects fall into the category of phenomenology, and, as such, become examinable primarily through speculation. We have, for example, accounts of phenomena seen, as in Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal, where she writes:
William called me into the garden to observe a singular appearance about the moon. A perfect rainbow, within the bow one star, only of colours more vivid. The semi-circle soon became a complete circle, and in the course of three or four minutes the whole faded away.9
On another occasion we read of another phenomena, seen with Coleridge:
A very clear afternoon. We lay sidelong upon the turf, and gazed on the landscape till it melted into more than natural loveliness ... Walked to the top of a high hill to see a fortification. Again sat down to feed upon the prospect; a magnificent scene, curiously spread out for even minute inspection, though so exstensive that the mind is afraid to calculate its bounds.10
Shelley speaks of "feel[ing] the silence of the night tingling in our ears"11, and Mary Shelley relates Shelley's visions of doppelgängers in June of 1822, that "he told me that he had many visions lately; he had seen the figure of himself, which met him as he walked on the terrace and said to him, 'How long do you mean to be content?'"12 And Coleridge, in Constancy to an Ideal Object (1826), makes reference to the occupancy of the phenomena of a spectre-like being appearing when a light source, behind the observer, projects a shadow of the observer into a cloud or fogbank that is in front of the observer (here, the "woodman"):
The viewless snow-mist weaves a glist'ning haze,
Sees full before him, gliding without tread,
An image with a glory round its head;
The enamoured rustic worships its fair hues,
Nor knows he makes the shadow, he pursues! (ll.28-32)13
Although these examples differ from one another in the fact that the first two deal with actual physical seeing and the latter two deal with more spectral forms of seeing, they both deal with phenomenological events, events that are seen as "real" by the viewer. Therefore it does not matter whether it is a rainbow around the moon or a fortification, or a doppelgänger or one's shadow in a fogbank, for both are judged equally as objects, and their reality is not questioned. These types of phenomena are an integral part of the aesthetic experience, a mode of perception that is altered from the ways in which one ordinarily perceives. This definition requires further explanation, due to the etymology of the term "aesthetic", which comes from the Greek, αισθητικοσ, things perceptible by the senses, things material. This notion is opposed by the word nohta, things thinkable or immaterial. A sharp distinction is created between feeling and thought.
By the nineteenth-century the term aesthetic had altered slightly, mutated from its original derivatives, and Kant, in 1781, applied the terminology to mean "the science which treats the conditions of sensuous perception" (Crit. R.V. 21). This is the definition found in the English language in 1800, and is, as we will see, the root of the definition for what the aesthetic experience is.
The middle of the nineteenth-century saw the emergence of the artistic movement known as the "Aesthetic movement", an era of paintings that attempted to manifest these "conditions of sensuous perception", but that by the 1890s had degenerated into "aestheticism", a movement seemingly unconcerned with the etymological origins of the word. The Aesthetic movement itself has its roots in the works of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, such as Millais, Rossetti, and Burne-Jones, where color and light interact in harmony and contrast. Consider Burne-Jones' Golden Stairs (1866-80), Rossetti's How They Met Themselves (1851-60), Millais' Apple Blossoms (1856-58), or Whistler's White Girl (1863). The interplay between light and dark, in the folds of clothes, shadows, and repetition of movement, creating a moment of time removed from time, demonstrated the sensual perception necessary for aesthetic appreciation. But this removal from time adds a new dimension to aesthetic, a nuance that will be further explained as aesthetic experience is defined.
The transition from Aesthetic movement to the late nineteenth-century idea of aestheticism is one that leads away from the pursuit of the aesthetic experience, but an occurrence that requires mentioning to define aesthetic experience. Whistler's White Girl shows us a moment in time, a rose petal in mid-fall, an aesthetic event in the pure form of the word. However, this feeling is lost as the era of aestheticism came to be defined, with a change in Whistler's style of painting (such as his Butterfly drawings from The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1877)) and the emergence, in the 1880s, of Oscar Wilde. Their idea was to have "art for art's sake", which Wilde expounds upon in his Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), in which he states, among other things, that:
The artist is the creator of beautiful things.
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.
The nineteenth-century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.
It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless.
Granted, this does consider the idea of sensory perception, with the allusion to the "spectator...that art really mirrors". But the fact that the aesthetes were trying to "make enemies", to create "art for art's sake", and not "people's sake", seems to detract from the pursuance of sensory perception, bringing the art, the experience, away from "art where 'denotation and connotation cannot be divided' and 'no distinction is felt between what a thing is and what it signifies'."14 By doing this aesthetic does not mean "sharp in the senses", it merely makes the senses intentionally and pretentiously muddled and confused. This leads the "spectator" away from fully sensing and perceiving an event, and therefore away from the aesthetic experience, for it "...proclaim[s] the infinite superiority of art to nature"15, and does not allow for the requisite interaction between art and nature for the aesthetic experience to occur.
In 1966 Professor Arthur Hoener conducted an experiment,16 the explanation of which is used as an explanation for what the term aesthetic experience means (as I will use it). He himself called the results of the experiment an "aesthetic experience" (although it was not he who first called this phenomena by this term). The experiment consisted of having his class of students, on a Friday afternoon, sit in the classroom and watch a selection of slides, which would remain on the screen for approximately thirty seconds or so each, without any discussion of what was being shown. The first of these was one of Monet's impressionistic studies of Rouen Cathedral, followed by a slide of colours and patterns, then a Mondrian, then another slide of colours and patterns. This procedure was repeated for the first few minutes, a definitive painting, followed by a slide of nothing objective beyond colors and patterns, occasionally black and white grids, occasionally pink dots on a white grid. Then the slides seemed to be coming from two projectors, blending into one another rather than cutting from one to another. Approximately twenty minutes into the experiment, the blending the slides was gradually replaced with a film, which continued with the colours and patterns, but now, instead of being inactive pictures, they became animated, with the colors and patterns interacting. This continued for about forty minutes, at which time both the class and the experiment was over. The students went home for the weekend.
Upon their return to the class on Monday, Hoener asked the students what they saw during Friday's class, and the above description is what they unanimously said that they had seen. At this point Hoener told them that although that may have been what they perceived, that was not what had been on the screen. He did begin the experiment with the Monet, the patterns, the Mondrian, the patterns, etc., but after the first twenty minutes he had turned off the slide projector. Even more, he had never used two slide projectors to blend the slides into one another. The blending and the film had been experienced without the outward sense of sight via the physical act of seeing. The interaction between the light and shadow, as in the Monet, and the colours and patterns, in the grids, were used to lower the conscious defences of the students to allow them to appreciate and absorb that which was perceived. By doing this the sensory apparatus is expanded upon, not limited to things material, and still perceptible by the senses. Through this thought becomes a part of feeling, αισθητικοσ, reflexively dependent upon one another. The memory of that experience, when recalled, brings back that intensity, the intensity of the visionary experience, the aesthetic experience. This, it would seem, is the "vivifying virtue" of Wordsworth's "spots of time", through which "our minds/ Are nourished and invisibly repaired".17
This is a study concerned with the metaphors in the language and poetry chosen, which requires an interdisciplinary study in order to look at the interaction between states and events. It is primarily a philosophical examination, supported by literary criticism, backed with the relevant historical background, and considered in a modern context. In this way we can conject upon immortal possibilities that lie, in Blake's words, "beyond the senses five".
Notes for Introduction
1 For a clinical example of these tests, see Jung, C.G., Analytical Psychology, Its Theory and Practice, pp. 27-28, Vintage Books, New York, 1968. 2 Sartre, Jean-Paul, Existentialism and Human Emotions, p. 73, Citadel Press, New York, 1990. 3 Ibid., pp. 68-69. 4 From Mary Shelley's Journal, Tuesday, Sept. 13, 1814. 5 Ibid., Wednesday, Sept. 14, 1814. 6 B.M. Add. MS. 37,496, January 6, 1812, Shelley to Elizabeth Hitchener. 7 Moorman, Mary, William Wordsworth: A Biography; the Later Years, 1803-1850, pp. 221-22,Oxford University Press, London, Oxford, New York, 1965. 8 Ibid., pp. 571-72. 9 Wordsworth, Dorothy, Journal entry from January 30, 1798. 10 Ibid., February 26, 1798. 11 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, from his diary entry from Friday, October 7, 1814. 12 Bigland, Eileen, Mary Shelley, pp. 188-89, Cassell, London, 1959. 13 See The Glory seen by John Haygarth near the Vale of Clwyd, from John Haygarth's article in the Memoirs of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester (1790), Vol. 3, pp. 463-67. For an examination and illustration of this see John Purkis, The World of the English Romantic Poets: A Visual Approach, p. 49, Heinemann, London, 1982. 14 From Aldous Huxley's Heaven and Hell, in discussion of art and "original experience", where he quotes from Dr. A.K. Coomaraswarmy on the subject of mystical art from the Far East; p. 100, Penguin Books, 1972. 15 Cosmopolitan XVII 122, 1894. 16 The information about this experiment is from Mary Welsh, who was a student at the Massachusetts College of Art, in Arthur Hoener's class, and a subject in the experiment described, in a phone conversation on May 12, 1993. Hoener never published the results of his experiment. 17 Wordsworth, William, The Prelude; or, the Growth of a Poet's Mind (1805), Book XI, ll. 258-60, 264-65.