Have you ever noticed that a small detail triggers a memory or seemingly unrelated subject? Memories appear roughly 400 milliseconds after the triggering exposure, according to research reported on the Cognitive Neuroscience Society’s blog. This research aims to shed light on the workings of our brain’s neural networks and memories, in order to help those suffering from PTSD or similar trauma-induced conditions. We still have a lot to learn about how the brain’s neural networks function.
It makes me feel better to realize how little we understand the brain, because I’ve noticed some repetitive memory triggering of my own, though not traumatic. At work, I regularly think of a poet friend I haven’t seen in years, though we have some connection on-line.
Now, my day job has nothing to do with poetry. Several times a day, I go into a room with others and we conduct sensory evaluation of raw materials. Sounds too fanciful? Ok. Try this: we taste coffee and tea samples; we slurp and spit. It isn’t all that pretty, but the syncopated slurping sounds cool. As we make our evaluations, we note who was present by circling each person’s initials from a list on our note page. The set of initials that throw me? MM. MM stands for Mary M., a member of our team.
Every day, circling MM, I hear a little voice in my head whisper Mary-Marcia. As in, Mary-Marcia Casoly, the poet. Recalling Mary-Marcia is not bad in itself. What unnerves me is the idea I will one day hear myself calling my teammate Mary-Marcia instead of Mary. If When that happens, I hope Mary isn’t offended.
I wonder if my brain will begin to branch out on the MM theme. When I see little candy-coated chocolates, will I think Mary-Marcia instead of “melts in your mouth, not in your hand”? Will I begin to think distance can be measured in Mary-Marcia’s instead of millimeters?
I thought my brain might be trying to talk to itself about something MM related, so I pulled out Casoly’s 2003 book, Run to Tenderness. I’d been trying to recall a few lines, but I couldn’t remember the words. I only recalled the memory of the feel of the words. That is like remembering that a shadow has passed across clouds. It took a while, but I finally found the lines in “Friend”:
… You hear bells and I’m astounded
by silence. Only birds know we both need our wings.
You and I have struggled with this, what’s gone and what comes
That sums it up right there, though the summing is too complicated for standard arithmetic. What’s gone plus what comes. Bells plus silence. Mary plus Mary-Marcia. All simultaneously. MM appears to be a summing operator.
Jack Foley says, in the introduction to Run to Tenderness, that the book’s effect is of “language attempting to understand a mystery which is made more mysterious by the attempt to understand it.” I think the effect is rather more like the effect of yoga — stretching the practitioner comfortably and uncomfortably, insistently, precisely, and honestly. Making a new and graceful edge, reaching for it.
Casoly puts tattoos, obsidian, lilacs into the same poem — same line even — and it all feels natural. Pigeons, peppers, ruins, dreams. So much specificity, the poems are richer individually and even more so taken together. The “foggy salt breeze” acts as portal to another time and place. Put that in your neural network and let me know what happens.