'Godcheez' in the brain

SPEAKING VOLUMES

The man who gave us phantoms in the brain, Prof Vilayanur Ramachandran, is a neuroscientist, not a poet; but one of his analogies comes closer to explaining the great mystery of what makes a classic work of art than any of the literary theorists I've read.

In one of the Reith lectures he delivered last year, Prof Ramachandran cited Niko Tinbergen's experiments on seagull chicks. Tinbergen discovered that herring-gull chicks responded to the sight of the mother's beak""long, yellow and marked by a red spot.

Chicks will beg for food if offered a mock beak, and when Tinbergen created an ultrabeak from a long yellow stick marked with three red stripes, the chicks went berserk. They pecked at the stick more than at a real beak.

Ramachandran speculated that there are specialised beak-detecting "neural circuits in the visual pathways of the chick's brain" that fire when seeing a beak.

"What I'm suggesting," he continued, "is if those seagulls had an art gallery, they would hang this long stick with the three red stripes on the wall, they would worship it, pay millions of dollars for it, call it a Picasso, but not understand why""why am I mesmerized by this damn thing even though it doesn't resemble anything? That's what all of you are doing when you are buying contemporary art. You are behaving exactly like those gull chicks."

"In other words human artists through trial and error, through intuition, through genius have discovered the figural primitives of our perceptual grammar. They are tapping into these and creating for your brain the equivalent of the long stick with the three stripes for the chick's brain. And what you end up with is a Henry Moore or a Picasso."

Ramachandran has also helped uncover what researchers have dubbed "the God Spot": the temporal area of the brain, which appears to be the area most stimulated by religious experiences. We are more wired than we think; Ramachandran, for one, is a pioneering "materialist".

He believes the foundations of abstract thought, language, creativity and art can be mapped in the brain and do not emanate from some other mysterious source. If there is such a thing as the soul, it has its foundations in the billions of synapses, millions of axons and hundreds of thousands of synapses that "talk" to each other incessantly in the brain.

If you apply Ramachandran's argument to literary creativity, what might emerge? He was careful to underline that his theories are speculative, but what he suggested was that language evolved upwards from grunts to concepts to metaphors""and metaphors, he believes, might be the foundation of abstract thought itself.

Go back to that red dot, because I believe it might explain one of the more baffling aspects of literary criticism: the issue of subjectivity. This has been encapsulated by finer thinkers than me as the precept that we know what makes for good writing, even if we can't explain why it is good.

We know, in other words, that Danielle Steele is inferior to Gabriel Garcia Marquez""even if the best critic in the world might struggle to make a watertight case for this judgement, which cannot be tested in the same way you can determine whether a BMW engine is superior to an autorickshaw engine.

But what if our brains have a literary neural pathway? Ramachandran explained that there are cells in the brain that fire when exposed to a certain kind of painting of a face; cells higher or lower up fire if a different face is shown instead.

He didn't say this, but this might also explain the universal appeal of the Mona Lisa: perhaps, through a combination of art, practice and dumb luck, Leonardo stumbled across a face that would make more cells fire up in more brains than most other paintings!

Ever since I got past the rhymey-dimey Highwayman kind of poetry to the good stuff, I've wondered why certain poems stick in the mind or become universally loved or identified with a poet, and others don't.

T S Eliot, who is, for reasons I have never worked out, imprinted on the brain cells of a hundred thousand Indians, is identified usually with "The Waste Land" or with "Prufrock"; Rudyard Kipling's banal "If" is immortalised on a thousand coffee cups; think W B Yeats, and most people recall three poems, "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death" and "When I Am Old And Grey And Full of Sleep."

Just last week, Arun Kolatkar broke the self-imposed silence of years and released his first volume of poetry since Jejuri. Kolatkar is a legend: acknowledged as one of the great poets, reclusive to the point where even the telephone doesn't interrupt his peace since he refuses to have one in his home.

And his two collections""Kala Ghoda Poems and Sarpa Satra""were worth the long wait. One of the Kala Ghoda poems picks out faces from the Bombay crowds: "The little vamp, the grandma, the blind man, /the ogress, /the rat-poison man, /the pinwheel boy, /the hipster queen of the crossroads, /the Demosthenes of Kala Ghoda, /the pregnant queen of tarts, /the laughing Buddha, /the knucklebones champ."

And Sarpa Satra, ostensibly the tale of a mythological and ecological holocaust aimed at snakes, has a resonance after the Gujarat riots that no one will miss.

This is good, even great, work; and these poems will be read for generations. But reading them I was aware that while some of them are brilliant, and while Sarpa Satra outstrips Jejuri in terms of ambition, the poems that will inextricably be linked with Kolatkar will be the ones from and about Jejuri.

Other critics, better versed in these subjects than I, will explain that the spirit of the truly wild muse is stronger in Jejuri while the hallmarks of a hardworked and fiery talent are evident in the Kala Ghoda poems.

But I think Ramachandran has the last word here: the reason why the Jejuri poems will continue to be read, in old editions, in tattered photostatted sheets (which is how I read them first), in spanking new foreign editions like the one that's coming out soon, in dry and dull textbooks where they manage to leap off the page, is simple.

They have by accident or design, more of what the writer Ruchir Joshi calls "Godcheez": the stuff that makes all the right cells in your brain fire, all of the time.

nilanjanasroy@gmail.com