My body shouted at me as if to prove Julian Jaynes was right.
THE BODY IS THE SOUL, ENTRY #1. Also, some announcements for the new year.
Dear readers,
First some housekeeping. Then today’s entry [which begins at about 4:46 in the voiceover above].
This blog began life in the fall of 2021 as a place to put my music fan newsletters. The ongoing pandemic and significant life changes had stymied my plans to tour and do more recording, so my creative energies found a new home in those missives, as I began riffing on various personal+political topics at essay length. I’d done something like this on a biweekly basis as a columnist for Baltimore CityPaper back in the late 1990s and early 2000s before music had taken over my life. Now it seemed my inner scribe wanted another turn at center stage.
One year ago I committed myself to posting something here every Tuesday no matter what. Consistency worked! Not only did many of you find your way toward me with almost no promotional effort on my part, but several also took it upon yourselves to pay me for my efforts. (If I haven’t said thank you enough, consider this another iteration.)
Last year I hadn’t yet come up with any special paid subscriber benefits, and truth be told, I hadn’t even considered what price I’d ask for a subscription: I let the $7/month Substack default simply be there and was both surprised and flattered when some of you took up the cause without my pleading.
Things start changing today! In 2023 it’s my intention to post twice a week, as many weeks as I can. Tuesdays and Fridays will offer two different flavors.
Tuesdays will be devoted to new inquiries under the catchall title “THE BODY IS THE SOUL—a premise and a provocation.” Here’s where I’ll share my growing interest in the connection between neuroscience and psychology—between our somatic selves and our emotional lives. I intend to go wide and broad, reading and learning whatever I can. The nature of consciousness and subjectivity, the ubiquity of trauma, the electrochemistry of our feelings, choices, and behaviors, the inescapable force of generational family dysfunction…all these and more shall be interrogated. Personal stories may be the entryway but my goal is to map out a very specific intellectual beat. It’s one I’ve been toying with since I was young, but now I’m giving myself the chance to test, collate, and complicate or crystallize some thoughts. This much is clear to me: Descartes was dead wrong, and the entire notion of Cogito ergo sum has fucked us up royally as individuals and as entire societies. As meditators are taught to understand, there’s so much more to ourselves than our interior chatter.
Fridays will be a bit more personal—or on occasion more directly political, but only when I’ve got something to say. There are so many great writers offering smart takes on current events, but even the cleverest can get caught in an echo chamber and find themselves commenting simply because something happened and it’s their job to comment. Meanwhile, when the news cycle churns up something inescapable, I’ll try to limit myself to saying only the kinds of things I don’t see anywhere else.
Audio supplement! Very soon (probably by the end of this week), paid subscribers will get the option to listen to me reading aloud each entry. Yes, this is a bit ambitious on my part but I do so love a challenge.
Also, in case it’s not obvious, Tuesdays and Fridays are interrelated efforts, but I will allow the thematic unities to arrive without any forcing on my part.
Future benefits for paid subscribers: MUSIC! In my ongoing effort to create unique piano/voice versions of cover songs, I intend to start posting fresh new ones in February. You’ll see them here first before I put them out on YouTube or anywhere else. Also, KIBITZING! It’s my intention to instigate some kind of collective fun, either a topical discussion group or a book club via asynchronous chat, scheduled video conferences, or both. Give me until April to work this out, although it may happen sooner. But for now, and without further delay, I relaunch this vessel with a little story called….
My body shouted at me as if to prove Julian Jaynes was right. [TBITS#1, January 2, 2023]
It was my own voice but coming from a point directly above my left ear and a few feet away from me as if I were outside of my own body. On these details, I am absolutely clear. I was self-smothered in blankets and curled up embryo-style at the top corner of the twin bed, with my head crunched up slightly beneath a wooden headboard-style drawer unit that was hung on the wall above me. My voice yelled at me from a point outside myself. My voice was loud, firm, and strident. The voice I might use to shout at a young child to keep her from wandering into oncoming traffic. My voice outside of me shouted,
You have to WAKE UP!
And so I did, and in the same instant, gasped, taking in a huge breath. Oh. I understood immediately. I had not been breathing very deeply. I had to wake up so as not to die of hypoxia. This incident took place in a ski cabin upslope from the town of Breckenridge, Colorado, part way up to the summit. I’d been asleep, very fitfully, at more than 10,000 feet above sea level. My body’s normal environment is South Baltimore, a fat polygonal peninsula 90 percent surrounded by the middle branch of the Patapsco River, which leads out to the Chesapeake Bay. At the time of this incident, I lived with my family in a rowhouse on relatively high ground but no more than 100 feet above the water. (I’ve just checked an interactive online topographic map and learned that this apartment from which I now write is a mere 30 feet above the Inner Harbor.) My coastal-acclimated body, starving for air, had sent my voice outward to do its bidding with an imaginary bullhorn. To put it more plainly, I’d hallucinated.
No longer in immediate danger of acute mountain sickness, I was delighted to realize what had just happened. Somehow I had externalized an absolute authority—godlike, albeit in my own voice—to command me to act in an urgent, self-preserving manner. I had heard a voice and obeyed it, the way a schizophrenic might. But I wasn’t going mad. Quite the contrary.
It’s been thirty years since I first read the psychological theorist Julian Jaynes’ startling 1976 masterwork, a book with the almost self-parodying title THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND. (In today’s publishing industry, he’d have been forced to call it BREAKDOWN and relegate any additional explanatory verbiage to the subtitle.) Jaynes’ work, whether you ultimately buy his theory or not, is an insightful and beautifully wrought piece of philosophical science writing. It’s well worth a read for the clarity of its prose alone, although my advice is to take it slowly. It’s pretty tough intellectual territory—a challenging and disruptive argument, alongside a fairly thorough recitation of potential objections—and yet the author metes it out in elegant sentences and paragraphs. Jaynes researched and taught psychology at Princeton for 25 years, but also knew a hell of a lot about archeology, linguistics, religion, ancient history, literature, and clinical neuroscience—and spent some youthful years as a playwright and actor. He has a popularizer’s gift for making complex ideas orderly and legible.
Using a close examination of The Iliad (~4th century BCE) to launch his multi-part explanation, Jaynes notes that Homer’s language never describes a character speaking “internally” to themselves.
The characters of the Iliad do not sit down and think out what to do. They have no conscious minds such as we say we have, and certainly no introspections. It is impossible for us with our subjectivity to appreciate what it was like. When Agamemnon, king of men, robs Achilles of his mistress, it is a god that grasps Achilles by his yellow hair and warns him not to strike Agamemnon. It is a god who then rises out of the gray sea and consoles him in his tears of wrath on the beach by his black ships, a god who whispers low to Helen to sweep her heart with homesick longing, a god who hides Paris in a mist in front of the attacking Menelaus… The beginnings of action are not in conscious plans, reasons, and motives; they are in the actions and speeches of gods. To another, a man seems to be the cause of his own behavior. But not to the man himself.1
Jaynes believed this was no mere rhetorical or poetic trick. He believed this was how humans of that era actually experienced reality. To understand how this could be possible, Jaynes takes great pains to demonstrate the fact that although we modern folk like to believe we have an “I” that’s also our “mind” and happens be located inside our heads alongside or inside or floating above our gray matter in some fashion, this is, of course, absurd—there’s no empty space in there. We also harbor all sorts of other metaphors for consciousness, including those informed by computer science, and yet we still can’t point to the thing at all. His is a book-length argument and I won’t try to summarize it here because every part of it is important to understand. Also—I’ve only just begun to reread the book, to delve into some of the arguments for and against his theory, and to see what his fans at the Julian Jaynes Society have to say, as well. This will be just one of several lines of thought I’ll be pursuing in 2023 in this spot.
Although I am calling this inquiry THE BODY IS THE SOUL, it’s a somewhat puckish title, not meant to be taken too seriously or literally just yet—because we haven’t even defined our terms. And besides, we may find a lot of complications along the way, and I want to feel free to toss out all sorts of ideas without locking them down into any definite synthesis or conclusion yet. So where Jaynes is concerned, consciousness—which secularists like me tend to use interchangeably, and sloppily, with the ideas of self-awareness, of introspective personality, and of soul—is a matter of brain activity but is also a cultural invention.
Jaynes would say that Joan of Arc really did hear voices guiding her to action, just as certain epileptic and schizophrenic patients hear external-sounding voices urging them to behave in this way or that, and just as I—who’s got some issues but is pretty damn grounded—momentarily heard an externalized “self” tell me what to do in order to stay alive. For me, it was a one-time experience yet to be repeated. For the ancients, before what Jaynes calls the breakdown of a “bicameral”—two-chambered or divided—mind at a certain point in evolutionary history, it was (he argues) daily life. For those who still claim to hear the voice of god or gods…it may in fact be a vestigial function that most of us have lost.
I will note one other small thing that always intrigued me. When my son was in his preschool and early elementary years, he’d sometimes express what you might call a bicameral orientation toward himself. He might say something like, Mom, my brain is telling me I’m sleepy but I want to stay up. It only stands to reason that he would locate an inner voice inside his brain; it’s what our culture teaches him to do. The fact that he thought to identify an “I’ and a “brain” separate from it fascinated me, even as it felt intuitively correct. The kid was onto something, but I’m not sure exactly what.
I’ve offered up my own inner/outer voice anecdote as a clue to where I’m heading this year—although that makes it sound as if I know how the mystery will end, and I certainly don’t. I’ll be figuring things out as I go, or else, not figuring out a damn thing but doing a lot of reading and thinking and sharing along the way. I welcome your comments and questions! Please note that you do not have to be a paid subscriber to post comments.
To recap the past six weeks and how we’ve arrived here:
My recent experience of “shouting away” certain built-up rage, anxiety, and depression—the story I’ve called “An atheist gins up some Grace,” part 3 of which I’ll present on Friday—has me hooked on a quest to understand the connection between brain chemistry and trauma recovery. With a slight bit of snark but ultimately a great deal of seriousness, I also suggested that what I experienced as a committed secularist—with zero interest in metaphysical or supernatural imagineering—was exactly the same thing as what a person of religious nature and conviction would have labeled a conversion experience or a moment of grace. They might say they’ve been redeemed, or have been granted peace by an external loving force. I, in contrast, think I made my own breakthrough happen by dint of will and a bit of good luck. So the perennial god question is a part of all this.
Whether we are mentally well or unwell, whether we maintain functional relationships or struggle with dysfunctional ones, whether we avow a religious/spiritual concept or not…I am curious about what it means for any of us to have an “I” in the first place. Aren’t you?
In being conscious of consciousness, we feel it is the most self-evident thing imaginable. We feel it is the defining attribute of all our waking states, our moods and affections, our memories, our thoughts, attentions, and volitions. We feel comfortably certain that consciousness is the basis of concepts, of learning and reasoning, of thought and judgment, and that it is so because it records and stores our experiences as they happen, allowing us to introspect upon them and learn from them at will. We are also quite conscious that all of this wonderful set of operations and contents we call consciousness is located somewhere in the head.
On critical examination, all of these statements are false.2
Oooh, them’s is fighting words, Julian Jaynes.
Let’s take some time and see what’s what.
THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND by Julian Jaynes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976, 1990. Page 72.
Ibid, Page 21.
Okay now I / my little brain is(?) are(?) am(?) oy! exhausted and it's only 7:02 am. But I am fully entertained too! Another cup of coffee and a shower are calling my name.
You left me smiling. Again!