Proust Was a Neuroscientist. Jonah Lehrer
of everything, even the low things, ultimately led Whitman to dispute the facts of science. When the materialists of his time announced that the body was nothing but an evolved machine — there was no soul inside — Whitman reacted with characteristic skepticism. He believed that no matter how much we knew about our physical anatomy, the ineffable would always remain. This is why he wrote poetry. “Hurray for positive science,” Whitman wrote. “Gentlemen, to you the first honors always! / Your facts are useful, and yet they are not my dwelling, / I but enter them to an area of my dwelling.”
What Emerson said of Montaigne is true of Whitman too: if you cut his words, they will bleed, “for they are vascular and alive.” Whitman’s poetry describes our anatomical reality. In the mirror of his art, we see the stark fact of our own improbability. Feeling from flesh? Soul from body? Body from soul? Our existence makes no sense. We live inside a contradiction. Whitman exposes this truth, and then, in the very next sentence, accepts it. His only answer is that there is no answer. “I and this mystery, here we stand,” Whitman once said, and that pretty much says it all.
A photograph of Walt Whitman in 1891, just a few months before he died. The photograph was taken by the painter Thomas Eakins.
Yet the acceptance of contradiction has its own consequences. As Randall Jarrell wrote in an essay on Whitman, “When you organize one of the contradictory elements out of your work of art, you are getting rid not just of it, but of the contradiction of which it was a part; and it is the contradictions in works of art which make them able to represent us — as logical and methodical generalizations cannot — our world and our selves, which are also full of contradictions.” By trusting his experience, no matter how paradoxical it might seem, Whitman discovered our anatomical reality. Despite the constant calls for his censure, he never doubted the wisdom of his art. “Now I see it is true, what I guess’d at,” Whitman wrote in “Song of Myself.” What he guessed at, of course, is that the soul is made of flesh.
For a self-described poet of the body, Whitman’s own body was in dreadful shape. Although he often bragged about “the exquisite realization of his health,” by the time Whitman died, in the early spring of 1892, his health had been damaged by years of neglect and disease. The doctors who performed his autopsy — they began cutting as soon as Thomas Eakins finished making Whitman’s death mask — were startled at the state of his insides. His left lung had collapsed, and only an eighth of his right lung seemed to be in workable condition. Tuberculosis, which he had gotten while serving as a nurse during the Civil War, had chronically inflamed his stomach, liver, and kidneys. He had pneumonia. His heart was swollen. In fact, the only organ which still seemed to be functional was Whitman’s brain. Just two months earlier, he had finished compiling his final edition of Leaves of Grass, which became the “Death-Bed” edition. As usual, he had revised his old poems and continued to write new ones.
What could Whitman have been thinking as he felt his flesh — his trusted muse — slowly abandon him? He began this last Leaves of Grass with a new epigraph, written in death’s shadow:
Come, said my soul,
Such verses for my Body let us write, (for we are one).
These two poignant lines, the first lines in the last version of his only book of poetry, represent the distilled essence of Whitman’s philosophy. We are the poem, his poem says, that emerges from the unity of the body and the mind. That fragile unity — this brief parenthesis of being — is all we have. Celebrate it.
* The single biggest failing of phrenology was its inability to assimilate data that didn’t conform to its predictions. For example, when phrenologists measured Descartes’s skull, they found an extremely small forehead, which implied “limited logical and rational faculties.” But instead of doubting their original hypothesis, the phrenologists lampooned Descartes and declared “that he was not so great a thinker as he was held to be.”
† Although Whitman loved learning about science, he never accepted its findings uncritically. In his notebook, Whitman reminded himself to always question the veracity of its experiment: “Remember in scientific and similar allusions that the theories of Geology, History, Language, &c., &c., are continually changing. Be careful to put in only what must be appropriate centuries hence.”
* Whitman was not alone; everyone from Mark Twain to Edgar Allan Poe underwent phrenological exams. George Eliot shaved her head so that her phrenologist could make a more accurate diagnosis of her cranial bumps.
* One of the reasons that Whitman seems to have moderated his views on phrenology was that he had a very favorable skull. He scored nearly perfect on virtually every possible phrenological trait. Oddly enough, two of his lowest scores were for the traits of tune and language.
* “The lung sponges, the stomach-sac, the bowels sweet and clean, The brain in its folds inside the skull frame, Sympathies, heart-valves, palate valves, sexuality, maternity …” [129]
* Later on in his life, Weir Mitchell would abandon medicine entirely and devote himself to writing novels and poetry. His novel Hugh Wynne (1897) — about the experiences of a Quaker during the American Revolution — was particularly popular.
* Sadly, it would take another thirty years — and another brutal war — before sensory ghosts were rediscovered. In 1917, confronted by the maimed soldiers of WWI, the neurologist J. Babinski described his own version of sensory ghosts. He makes no mention of Herman Melville, William James, or Weir Mitchell.
* As a pragmatist, James also believed that feelings — and not some sort of pure Cartesian reason — were the motivation behind most of our beliefs. In “The Will to Believe,” James remarked that “these feelings of our duty about either truth or error are in any case only expressions of our passional life … Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?” Although James’s essay sparked a firestorm of controversy, he was really just taking David Hume’s claim that “reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions” to its logical conclusion.
* A year after James’s article was published, the Danish psychologist Carl Lange published a similar theory about body and emotion, leading scientists to refer to the theory as the James-Lange hypothesis.
* At the time of Whitman’s writing, there was very little evidence that the body pulsated with charged ions. Luigi Galvani’s discovery in the 1780s that frogs’ legs twitched when shocked remained hotly disputed. In fact, it was not until 1875, twenty years after Whitman first sang of electric bodies, that Richard Caton, a Liverpool physician, discovered that Whitman was right, the nervous system actually conveys electric current. Caton demonstrated this improbable fact by probing directly on the exposed brains of animals with a reflecting galvanometer (a newly invented device that was able to sense the low voltages of neurons).