How Does a Wound Respond? On J.H. Prynne's Scientific Images

The moment an artist realizes that the system of communication at his disposal is extraneous to the historical situation he wants to depict, he must also understand that the only way he will be able to solve his problem is through the invention of new formal structures that will embody that situation and becomes its model.¹

Introduction

In his lecture, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man” (1962), the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars develops a way to explain a fundamental division in worldview that occurs in the wake of the scientific enlightenment: that between the manifest image of the human as a rational agent governed by conceptual norms within society; and the scientific image of the human as a complex system of physical matter.² Imagine a type of poetic writing that took this division seriously. Imagine a kind of writing whose openness to multiple, discordant perspectives contracts the two images by positing a direct and immediate relation between the postulation of imperceptible entities and manifest, common-sense thinking. Such a style might reveal agency to be the outer surface of opaque forces out of sight, it might evoke a harsh, near-schizophrenic naturalism focused on disembodiment.

Consider the former “manifest image” of ourselves as analogous to a lyric “I”: a rough, constitutive agency cohesive enough to be considered a speaker hovering in and around the text. And consider the latter “scientific image” of ourselves as highly contingent, heteronomous and involuntarily agentic, inclusive of diagnostic and statistical analyses, chemical equations, technical vocabularies, and other vestiges of laboratory life. This tension is particularly active in writing in which no intellectual holds are barred, a writing that seeks to demonstrate its interest in a subject matter by formal means. Works of literature interpose ordinary and scientific terms at will, without the conventional context-markers necessary to the coherence of discourse or even the sequential logic of narrative. Indeed, the non-discursive status of poetry provides an elastic and contextually fluid domain where the stereoscopic vision of everyday objects and invisible particles is at once blurry and sharp. Because such exploration at the limits of intelligibility is speculative, lapidary, and undoubtedly corrupted by the recursivity of its medium, the aesthetic dimension of the scientific image becomes poetic when it overwhelms its value as a stable component within a discursive practice. Prynne’s deliberate appropriation of the language of scientific theory and practice is both mischievous and serious: mischievous because it violates the perceived neutrality of information, and serious because realist: scientific terms become indices of micro and macro-physical realities the reader works their way through.

The use of scientific terminology in poetic texts gives them an aura of epistemological authority, so that we have to bear with the shifting orientation of the word in a line or phrase amidst suspicion about the sincerity of the knowledge that may or may not have informed its usage. Is this the outcome of the poet’s ulterior research? Is it grafted onto the text to produce an epistemic bricolage: a jagged condensation of perspectives on a target object of study? We take specialists at their word, but a poet?

The poet using the scientific image also puts our ordinary ways of contextual sense-making in peril. For as soon as we identify the “scientific” status of such terms, in order to remove them for further study, we substitute a stable unit of textbook-level positivism for the caustic and non-idiomatic usage within the poem, dappled as the latter terrain is with strange juxtapositions and sounds. While poems such as Prynne’s are speculative laboratories for the reader to consider and reconsider the nature of knowing, the normative epistemic frameworks signaled by scientific terms are also subject to aleatoric disruption. Such poetic work trespasses into the hard sciences, disrupting the separation of the “Two Cultures,” infamously touted by C.P. Snow. Discontinuous poetic texture dislodges the scientific term from its internal coherence within a specialized context, which at once galvanizes readerly attention and problematizes the term’s epistemological status. The poetic context does not abide by what Thomas Kuhn called the “paradigm” that makes normal science possible, nor the “episteme” Michel Foucault thought necessary to discursive practice.³

Indeed, poetic language makes context into a problem because context is notably absent. We are asked to create context in order to become an instrument of the poem’s performance. We attempt to interrogate specialized definitions so that we have support beacons to trailblaze through the sequence of the poem, and we experiment with recursive and radial forms of reading that such poetic texture asks of us. We are asked to be flexible and pliable readers, to contradict what we just saw or heard, to be suspicious of certainty, and to be uncertain about what to be suspicious about. We are asked to move with and against the poem, and we are asked to give up forms of communicative transparency that bind us to other parts of our administered lives. We are asked to forge unlikely and surprising connections across disciplinary boundaries, and to conflate knowledges that are often kept apart. Prynne’s peculiar use of specialized scientific terminology drawn from the fields of biology, chemistry, botany, and physics invites the uncertainty of the glossographer, whose context-dependent speculations give us a map of word choices that comprise the fabric of the poem itself; rather than the lexicographer, who brings terms out of compartmentalized storage units for display.⁴ The sharp opacity of specialized words to non-specialist readers is often further exacerbated by their uncertain grammatical status; they are suspended within a word order of devastating ambiguity, one that does not delight in the wit of its tension, but hypostatizes its inhabitants while drifting into various conceptual domains.

J.H. Prynne (b. 1936) is a poet who has carefully inserted scientific vocabularies within his poems since the middle of the 1960s.⁵ He has long been considered a maker of “difficult” poems, and Wound Response (1974) and High Pink on Chrome (1975) are exemplars of his interest in scientific terms and the worldview such terms represent, and exemplary of his writing’s rebarbativeness.⁶ However unusual and strange Prynne’s use of scientific materials may be, Sellars’ dichotomy offers a useful model for understanding how Prynne’s poetry performs the diremption between these two images.

Although it may be an ‘interim text’, as Prynne himself suggested to Douglas Oliver just before its publication, Wound Response remains an experimental peak in late twentieth-century English poetry for its mediation of scientific discourses, which move laterally through cosmology, botany and biochemistry.⁷ High Pink on Chrome is a much different work, though its use of toxicological discourse is no less significant. It takes leave of the irregular and jagged lineation of the ode-like design that makes Wound Response a successor to Brass, and instead adopts a compact prosodic profile in a serial sequence, with short lines of alternating marginal indentation, arranged in conventional stanza format, with few exceptions. In a sense, High Pink on Chrome merges the economical shape of Into the Day (1972) with the deflationary epithets of Down Where Changed (1979), but, thematically, the book continues the project of Wound Response from another perspective. Instead of the blurring of plant and human discourses, and the matrix of circulating body-image parts, High Pink on Chrome focuses on the scientific image of toxicity: the contact between metal and skin, the post-industrial counter-pastoral of agricultural pesticides, land mismanagement, and the self-inflicted damage of human consumption. The epigraph of Wound Response appears to foreground the skin-metal contact of High Pink on Chrome, making the relation between the two books into a kind of meta-allegory in reverse: toxicity causes wound response. Cited from an essay entitled, ‘Transfer Functions of the Skin and Muscle Senses’ that was published as part of a symposium on Touch, Heat and Pain, Prynne’s excerpt pertains to the ‘electrophonic effect’:

“Of particular interest in the present context are the observations made on patients whose middle ear had been opened in such a way that a cotton electrode soaked in normal saline solution could be placed near the cochlea. A total of 20 surgically operated ears were studied. Eleven patients heard pure tones whose pitch corresponded to the frequency of the sinusoidal voltage applied to the electrode. . . . One patient reported gustatory sensations.”

Touch, Heat and Pain (1966), p. 11 (215).

The dramatic ellipsis used by Prynne narrows in on the body of experimental exception—the auditory nerve of ‘“one patient”’ was stimulated in such a way as to result in an apparently synaesthetic leap from hearing to tasting. As Stevens notes, ‘an increase in the stimulating current affects more than a single attribute of the sensation’.⁸ The bridging of such inter-sensory gaps is extended thematically in the various forms of pain and wounding, but also in terms of the recursivity between thinking and language. Indeed, apparently incommensurable frames of reference become problematic indications of loss: of consciousness, memory, attention, body-image, location. Thus, the scientific image here is not purely declarative. It exhibits not only the pathology that the experimental scientist seeks to study, but also the pathology produced by experimentation itself. It freezes knowledge at a stage of culpable uncertainty by describing the traumatic manipulation of the body in vivo.

“As grazing the earth”

Let’s begin with a picture. Recall the original broadsheet publication of “As grazing the earth,” a short poem later included in Wound Response (1974):

The poem intercalates a short lyric poem between two informationally saturated sections of M.A.A. Klyne and B.A. Thrush’s article, “Kinetics of the Reactions of Active Nitrogen with Oxygen and with Nitric Oxide.” By centralizing its song, itself informed by “Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard” from Frances James Child’s Ballads, the broadsheet forces the continuous aesthetic experience of statistical description and poetic song.⁹ The phrase “night | rick ox-eye’d” translates the chemical compound “nitric oxide” into a pastoral nocturne comprising a twilit heap of straw splayed open like an ox-eye in blossom. Despite that phonetic bridge, or perhaps because of it, the visual artefact expresses the irony of mutual incomprehensibility: what information does this song communicate? What aesthetic experience does this information deliver?

If, at times, Prynne’s poetry appears like a “wide-ranging polymathic approach to existence,” incorporating several disciplines into a single line, poem or book, it is no coincidence that Prynne’s formative intellectual environment at Cambridge reveals a correspondingly diverse history.¹⁰ His undergraduate tutor at Jesus College in the 1950s was Laurence Picken, the biologist-turned-Oriental-musicologist who acknowledges Prynne in his study of the twelfth-century secular Chinese songs; presumably, this assistance was related to literary translation.¹¹ Joseph Needham, distinguished author and editor of the multi-volume Science and Civilization in China, was another biologist-turned-Orientalist, who was sometime Master of Gonville & Caius, where Prynne became a fellow in the early 1960s.¹² Prynne was also friendly with Francis Crick, who, in addition to developing a successful DNA model, was also a fan of the American poet Michael McClure.¹³ Prynne’s collaboration with the American poet Edward Dorn on the magazine Bean News (1972-1975) involved what Dorn later called “linguistic forgeries in biology”; several such theoretical reports were collected together as “The Plant Time Manifold Transcripts.”¹⁴ His correspondence with the British poet Douglas Oliver during the period of writing Wound Response responds in advanced scientific jargon to contemporary developments in biotopology and relativistic cosmology. His correspondence with the plant scientist Rupert Sheldrake, whose important paper on plant hormones informs the title of Wound Response, includes a lengthy annotated commentary on the book manuscript of Sheldrake’s A New Science of Life (1981). These friendly and institutional relations offer some historical context concerning the scientific information which radiates in the background of Wound Response. Although we may state unequivocally that Prynne’s interest in natural sciences is both an attested biographical fact and a resonating feature in his poetic work, it is by no means obvious what the status of the scientific image is in such poetic work. Does it corroborate scientific theory? Does it engage the reader phenomenologically at the level of perspectival attention to the laboratory as well as to the logical imagination of a theoretical framework? What kinds of counter-pressure does it assert with regard to the apparent—but often deceptive—homology of ordinary and scientific terms?

Sellars’ Two Images

Sellars’ conceptualizes the contrast between the manifest and scientific images as the fundamental problem for modern philosophy, an inheritance of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth-century, and of the Enlightenment, more generally. The “Two Images Problem,” to use Robert Hanna’s phrase, is arguably the predominant topic in Anglo-American philosophy after 1950, one that Sellars powerfully consolidated.¹⁵ Sellars’ dichotomy is “designed to illuminate the inner dynamics of the development of philosophical ideas,” and commentators such as Jay F. Rosenberg, Willem A. deVries, James R. O’Shea, and Ray Brassier have shown how this image-distinction informs much of the expansive range of Sellarsian philosophy.¹⁶

Sellars defines the manifest image as a refinement of an “original image” of being-in-the-world, itself akin to a mythological way of thinking that treated “all kinds of objects as ways of being persons”.¹⁷ The manifest image exacts a refinement on this original image by various types of correlational induction; that is to say, by inferring correlations between perceptible objects and generating principles in accordance with such inferences. The manifest image is one’s framework of self-encounter and therefore produces one’s self-conception. The scientific revolution, convinced “that all events are predictable from relevant information about the context in which they occur”, Sellars writes, puts pressure on the manifest image, and makes the category of the person—by which the manifest image views the world—into a problem. As Jay F. Rosenberg comments, the “beings” of the manifest image are those who “reflectively conceive of themselves as being-in-the-world both as thinkers and doers, as sentient perceivers and cognitive knowers of the world, and as agents capable of affecting it through deliberate and rational elective conducts.”¹⁸

If the manifest image functions primarily according to a correlational framework, the scientific image, by contrast, is postulational. The latter hypothesizes “imperceptible entities, and principles pertaining to them, to explain the behavior of perceptible things”.¹⁹ Sellars summarizes the contrast between the images as “between that conception which limits itself to what correlational techniques can tell us about perceptible and introspectible events [manifest image] and that which postulates imperceptible objects and events for the purpose of explaining correlations among perceptibles [scientific image]” (19). The scientific image thus places an epistemological pressure on the manifest image, which, by contrast, seems to rely on relatively commonsensical ways of explaining “ordinary,” persisting objects. If the manifest image relies implicitly on the physiology of our perceptual apparati, the scientific image allows itself recourse to a host of mathematical and technological equipment.

How can the two images be brought together? How do we match manifest perceptibles to complex systems of particles? Sensations, thoughts, and feelings to neurophysiological states? As Ray Brassier points out, Sellars’ work “represents one of the most sustained attempts to think through the implications of a fundamental diremption which extends into our very conception of what we are. This is the diremption between our self-understanding as rational subjects and our scientific understanding of ourselves as physical objects.”²⁰ This diremption, of course, remains an open question, and Sellars dissuades any foreclosure. He seeks neither to substitute the manifest for the scientific image, nor to let the manifest absorb the scientific; he wants to conjoin them, to hold them in a stereoscopic vision. In a sense, Sellars seeks to humanize the scientific image “with the language of community and individual intentions, so that by construing the actions we intend to do and circumstances in which we intend to do them in scientific terms, we directly relate the world as conceived by scientific theory to our purposes, and make it our world and no longer an alien appendage to the world in which we do our living” (40). Sellars wants to avoid a dualism of the manifest image—the way in which we think of ourselves as rational agents capable of revising our opinions, stating our intentions and engaging in purposive activity—and the scientific image—the way in which we are evolutionary arrangements of physical matter susceptible to physical and biological laws.²¹ Sellars goes on to say that we “can realize this direct incorporation of the scientific image into our life only in imagination” (40).

Scientific Representation, Perspectivism, Transubstantiation

The Sellarsian approach views the postulation of imperceptible objects in a profound, but perhaps simple way. What such particle swarms and biochemical micro-activity actually are is not part of Sellars’ essay, nor is an understanding of how these things come to be postulated, studied and known by scientific communities; in other words, Sellars does not address how scientific representation works. How do we ‘see’ this complex system? It is not obvious how models, instruments, mathematical and statistical data gathering collude to produce the scientific image. In short, what we are looking for is the measure of things.²² Because Prynne’s writing seeks to simulate the experience of the scientific image, we need to briefly touch upon scientific representation.

The scientific image produces representations that are impossible without the mediation of models, instruments, and mathematical languages. But it is important to qualify this production of representation as a constructive activity; as Bas C. van Fraassen suggests: ‘the scientific image itself harbors vagueness and ambiguity’.²³ Against the enthusiastic tradition of scientific realism which maintains that science represents real entities immediately, van Frassen’s sober ‘constructive empiricism’—which defines a scientific theory by its empirical adequacy—seeks to show how measurement is a kind of representation: ‘measuring locates the target in a theoretically constructed logical space’.²⁴ The electron microscope does not solve the problem of the thing in itself by penetrating to the hard core of matter. Measurement measures what the measurement set-up asks for. In this sense, van Fraassen argues that ‘scientific activity is one of construction rather than discovery: construction of models that must be adequate to the phenomena, and not discovery of truth concerning the unobservable’.²⁵ Scientific measurement is itself a theory-laden process, and we cannot, therefore, separate ‘what is measured?’ from ‘what is a measurement?’.²⁶ If successful, van Fraassen argues, measurement describes a physical interaction between the measurement apparatus and the object, and the result is a ‘temporarily stable representation’.²⁷

We might think of the clash between the scientific and manifest images as a difference in “perspective,” what the philosopher of science, Ronald Giere calls “scientific perspectivism”. The instrument that enables the scientific image, such as the electroencephalogram or the electron microscope, is itself perspectival: it is ‘sensitive only to a particular kind of input’ and its output is a ‘function of both the input and the internal constitution of the instrument’; in other words, there is no calibration of the instrument that produces transparency and would thus eliminate the instrument and let the sense datum be immediately perceived.²⁸33 Moreover, the scientific image, to use Sellars’ term (not Giere’s), exploits ‘possible similarities between a model and that aspect of the world it is being used to represent’.²⁹

Both van Fraassen and Giere suggest ways in which to understand scientific methods as forms of aesthetic experience, yet neither takes up the way in which language produces and transmits representations. In Pandora’s Hope, Bruno Latour develops a theory of ‘circulating reference’ useful to the task of understanding how the scientific image is mediated by language. Latour largely avoids (or evades) the epistemological and linguistic problems of referring in the modern analytic tradition by disregarding the relation between the individual mind and the external world. Instead, Latour argues for the ‘thick layering of transverse paths through which masses of transformations circulate’.³⁰ He describes the problem and solution as follows: ‘It seems that reference is not simply the act of pointing or a way of keeping, on the outside, some material guarantee for the truth of a statement; rather it is our way of keeping something constant through a series of transformations’.³¹ In his example of the French scientist travelling long distances with a trunk of pedological specimens (soils divided by the ‘pedocomparator’), Latour shows how the instrument functions like a ‘constant’, from fieldwork to peer-reviewed article. Terms can also function like constants. A term, like an instrument, ‘replaces a thing while conserving a trait that defines it’. This is neither metaphor nor metonymy; Latour calls it a kind of ‘transubstantiation’:

There is nothing privileged about the passage to words, and all stages can serve equally to allow us to grasp the nesting of reference. In none of the stages is it ever a question of copying the preceding stage. Rather, it is a matter of aligning each stage with the ones that precede and follow it, so that, beginning with the last stage, one will be able to return [from L. referre ‘to bring back’] to the first.³²

Latour adds an elastic and sufficiently open-ended modification to our development of the Sellarsian scientific image. By viewing reference not as a metaphysical problem of how language ‘penetrates’ or identifies objects of the world, but as a panoramic and cascading series of compatible transformations, he creates new possibilities for situating the scientific image within the difficult context of Prynne’s poetry. Latour informs my aim of glossing various scientific terms in order to generate a rich description of how they pertain to certain perspectives of scientists, patients, interlocutors, and other anonymous agents embedded in Prynne’s poetic work of this period.

The dappled and blotchy experience of knowledge within the poem seeks to exacerbate the Sellarsian tension inherent to our mixed perceptions of the material world. The manifest image enacts a counter-pressure on the apparent lucidity and precision of the scientific image, and problematizes its isolation as an autonomous view from nowhere. Indeed, the incomplete horizon of the manifest image nevertheless provides an empirical token against which theories must be found adequate or inadequate. Prynne’s deployment of the scientific image is inherently destructive, aimed at excoriating the capacity for stable conscious experience, as well as the accompanying projections and receptions of meaning and knowledge. What Brassier states about Sellars’ scientific image is perhaps also true of Prynne’s: whereas the manifest image proposes a “normative valence as the framework which allows us to make sense of ourselves as rational agents engaged in pursuing various purposes in the world,” the scientific image promotes a recognition of being-in-the-world where we do not even “recognize ourselves as human.”³³

It is tempting to view Prynne’s manipulation of the scientific image as a cosmological desire to rehang the doors of perception. Would it be too bold to imagine a kind of writing whose economy and openness to multiple perspectives may be a way of contracting the two images towards each other, of making them join together, by positing a direct and immediate relation between the postulation of imperceptible entities and manifest, common-sense thinking? Suffice to say, that a style such as this might appear catachrestic, a distortion of both the scientific and the manifest; to most observers, it would appear to violate balanced metaphor and analogical induction by abrupt, inventive, and coercive combinations. I adopt a more sober approach here, in part to stave off literary enthusiasm for the apparent truthfulness of exotic scientific discourse, and in part because I find that Prynne’s deployment of the scientific image is inherently destructive, aimed at excoriating the capacity for stable conscious experience.

Excursus on Prynne and Oliver

Prynne’s correspondence of this period often adopts the rhetoric of the scholarly interlocutor conducting current debate and argument, rather than arguing from a definite ideological position.³⁴ In a letter written to Douglas Oliver on 18 January 1972, Prynne emphasizes his interest in textbooks over ‘the potentially dissociative effects of theoria thus free-rangingly pursued’.³⁵ He continues:

We do not need that! Wisdom is good because it is functionally interfused with what we do: but “as such” of course it is a boring white noise, we don’t want cohesive power on those empty terms.* Give me a straight text book any day, I am currently competing with Edelen and Wilson’s Relativity and the Question of Discretization in Astronomy (Springer-Verlag, 1970) and any use that occurs will certainly not be mere extrapolated figuration. What we say is what it is; that’s a level of adequation we must be vigilant about, nothing to do with nineteenth-century naturalism etc, but what Celan calls “eine Art Heimkehr”.³⁶

Prynne’s use of Celan’s phrase (‘a kind of homecoming’) speaks to the auto-circulation (or tautologous structure) of ‘What we say is what it is’. In this section of ‘Der Meridian’, Celan remembers the missed encounter with Theodor Adorno in the Engadine valley and the prose work Gespräch im Gebirg (‘Conversation in the Mountains’) he wrote after. This leads him to consider the date of the 20th of January, which doubles as the date of Georg Büchner’s character Lenz walks into the mountains in Lenz, and also the date of the Berlin Wannsee Conference of 1942 during which plans for the ‘Final Solution’ were developed by Eichmann and others. Celan’s mention of this date brings him round to the vantage of self-encounter. He writes: ‘Is it on such paths that poems taken us when we think of them? And are these paths only detours, detours from you to you? But they are, among how many others, the paths on which language becomes voice. They are encounters, paths from a voice to a listening You, natural paths, outlines for existence perhaps, for projecting ourselves into the search for ourselves. . . A kind of homecoming.’³⁷ The ‘level of adequation’ is not an ontological or linguistic level, but an ethical one. Prynne’s vigilance contrasts with the view of poetic writing as fiction or imitation. If we take this as a rigid prescription, Prynne appears as a hardened nominal realist, insisting that words on the page are not merely signs for physical action somewhere else but are themselves constitutive of ‘what there is’ by saying ‘what there is’.³⁸ The ‘level of adequation’ has a similar tautologous or intensive construction vis-à-vis its etymology (L. ad – aequare ‘make level’), and so what becomes contextually salient here is ‘homecoming’—the return to itself, the cognitive recursion. But, perhaps it is not so much a prescription as an aspiration seeking to produce a level that ‘holds’ both poetic utterance and the scientific image in view. Perhaps, Prynne finds the theoria of bio-topology unconvincing not only because it is divorced from the putative realism of the textbook, but also because such speculation trespasses into the domain of poetry, which is an inversion of the negative, hermeneutical claim that investigation into ‘the difficult | matter’ is productive because of its obscurity.³⁹

But, despite its apparent learnedness, the educative potential of Prynne’s scientific image always exceeds or violates the ‘context of scholarly justification’.⁴⁰ Prynne’s use of scientific imagery imports an informational transparency that is then blocked by severing its context of recognition. If a scientific language aspires to fast recognition and efficiency, provided one knows the rules and conventions comprising the function of a given word in a system, such aspirations are invalidated by the ‘new’ poetic context. The apparent power of the scientific image to adjudicate a significant and phenomenally adequate correspondence between the model and physical reality is deflated by its eccentric juxtaposition to other discursive modes and tones.

The opacity of difficult passages in these texts does not dissolve under the floodlights of information. Just as the command, ‘Run at 45º to the light cones’ (‘Again in the Black Cloud’, l.51, 231) places its reader within the geometry of the Minkowski space-time manifold, so does the minimization of ‘meaning’ make language the active site of experimentation. Unearthing unmarked citations and establishing an interpretive connection to its original context, as we have seen, has an instrumental purpose. Once unearthed, the ‘source’ hardly unlocks or decodes, so much as internally complicates the poetic text. Its reticent or recessive quality beckons increasingly active attention to the cognitive experience of thinking through and imaginatively handling a logical space untethered to its knowledge base. The lack of propositionality, which corresponds to non-linear connections of rhythm and sense, and the lack of authorial agency correlative to a psychological frame of reference (i.e., a putative ‘intentionality’) both reveal an intensive search for a writing style that holds sense-making in a kind of probationary state.

Such scientific images challenge the boundaries of the manifest image. The scientific image seeks to enlarge the observable world by its contingent representations of otherwise imperceptible entities. Prynne’s interest in such entities therefore coincides with the adoption of a perspective that can only be tracked with significant difficulty. Both the lack of a manifest perspective of enunciation and the difficulty of tracing the outlines of an imagined speech-like presentation contribute to the scientific image’s impersonal and calculating diagnostic. And yet, as various philosophers of science have pointed out, the configuration of the scientific image is not without a certain perspective from which and through which it views its entities. While Prynne’s recontextualisation of the scientific image may sever the connection to an originary discourse, this does not delete the problem of contextual relevance, so much as injure relevance’s desire for completeness.

Wound Response

At first glance, the notion of a “wound response” seems fairly self-explanatory: something like the capacity of the body’s immunological system to produce antibodies in order to repel or absorb toxic materials. The response is a defence mechanism which supports a homeostatic balance of cellular productivity and systematic ‘hygiene’. But ‘wound response’ is not typically used to identify the immunological response of the human body. It is used primarily as a term in botany to signify the plant’s response to stem or leaf damage, whether by cut, abrasion, and fungal or parasitic invasion. Simon Perril argues that the title refers to Rupert Sheldrake’s article on hormonal production in higher plants, published in 1973.⁴¹ This is probably accurate, given Sheldrake’s association with Prynne, although it should be emphasized that ‘wound response’ is a prevalent term in botany at least since the turn of the twentieth-century, and its apparent sense-context is, as we have seen in the epigraph to Wound Response, an intentional conflation.⁴² Sheldrake’s lengthy overview of the scholarship on auxin production, a hormone which in low concentrations supports—but in high concentrations inhibits—longitudinal growth in plants, also argues that such hormone production necessary for growth ‘takes place as a consequence of cell death’.⁴³51 Sheldrake writes that auxin is thought to be indol-3yl-acetic acid (IAA), also found in the saliva and urine of humans.⁴⁴ Wound response is controlled by such hormone production.

The wound response begins with a protective layer produced by cells adjacent to the wounded or necrotic area. The response depends on a variety of factors, such as tissue, humidity and osmotic pressure. Cell division occurs parallel to the plane of the wound, and stops after a few days; the ‘wound response is self-limiting’. Sheldrake argues that this auto-inhibition of cell division—i.e., the plant’s defence mechanism—‘shows that the dividing cells do not themselves produce the necessary stimulus for cell division, but that cell division depends on the wound stimulus’.⁴⁵ Hence, cell death stimulates hormonal production, and therefore plant growth. As Sheldrake explains, the ‘idea that cell differentiation and cell death are controlled by hormones which are themselves produced in dying, differentiating cells may appear paradoxical’ is not at all surprising because ‘[p]lant development is an autocatalytic process; the control of growth and differentiation depends on the production of plant hormones; hormone production must in turn be a consequence of growth and differentiation’.⁴⁶ The principle of wound response is that cell death encourages tissue growth vis-à-vis hormonal production. The title, Wound Response, therefore performs a bait-and-switch tactic. By its juxtaposition to an epigraph from a Ciba symposium on Touch, Heat and Pain, it suggests human ‘wound response’, while referring to plant wound response.

“Cool as a Mountain Stream”

This analogy between plants and humans is one clash of images that becomes clearer as we move through the collection. The only appearance of ‘wound’ in the book appears in the poem ‘Cool As A Mountain Stream’, whose title parodies the tag line from a Consulate menthol-flavoured cigarette advertisement.⁴⁷ As this commercial image suggests, the mise-en-scène of the poem deals with the spinning of ‘erotic doubt’ between lovers ‘sprawled in the sun on the grassy hillside’ (l.2, 219). The commercial becomes fodder for mutilation: the sweet descriptions appear to be overheard symptoms (‘“vigorous and moderately upright”, | that noise again, “soft juicy flesh”’ (ll.21-22)), the curvature of the lover’s rear-end understood anatomically as the ‘soft | haemal arch’ (ll.3-4). The putative narration refers consistently to ‘you’ and ‘we’ without disclosing its position as a participant, and it may be that the ‘we’ has partially absorbed the perspective of plant-life.

Throughout this poem, there is an uncanny interplay between plant and human wounding. The surrounding human ecology appears toxic to plant life (‘the roots start to sicken’ (l.5); ‘Water rots in the stem’ (l.15)) and ‘“Perfect | conservation”/slow rot in the fibrils, the sun | mounts in greed and its soft fingers’ (ll.31-33); but also suggests the sub-dermal image of ‘haemal arch’ (l.4), referring to the blood vessels along the tail vertebrate of animals, and ‘He must | be eaten slowly, by autolysis of face’ (ll.11-12), which, as we shall see, confounds the human/plant interface. The mention of ‘wound’ occurs in the second stanza of the poem:

from “Cool as a Mountain Stream” (ll.16-33, 219)

Esther Leslie comments that the mention of wounding here indicates ‘the hurt that smiles, conjures the iced delights of the future promise of consumption’. By showing how consumption operates as the ‘switching point between the social and the natural worlds’, Prynne signals his intransigence to the commodity form.⁴⁸ But the menacing simile is cumbersome and its catachrestic treatment of wound, smile, and freezer botches up the connective tissue of the simile. That said, the conceptual basis of the analogy can be brought to bear not merely on the appearance of the human smile, but on the sympathetic or on the coercive presumption of affectionate response that the commodity of the freezer implores us to take in, not unlike the pastoral advertisement of the title.

The wound appears in the shirt by way of a ‘haploid cyclone of insect lust’ that produces heart spasms and convulsions. There are several layers to this phrase that may be briefly glossed in order to get a sense of the lateral and sub-textual connectivity, without which we do not gain a sense of the poem’s compositional texture, much less its wit. A ‘haploid’ is a single set of unpaired chromosomes within a gametes cell (e.g. human sperm or ovum), whose meiotic division from a diploid for purposes of genetic replication is the basic process of sexual reproduction and therefore genetic heredity. ‘haploid cyclone’ refers, I think, to the winding and unwinding process of the double-helix strands of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) which must be unfurled in order to replicate. The two polynucleotide chains of the double-helix are wound about each other every 34 Å (1 Å (Ångström) = one billionth of a metre), which makes for an extremely intricate and dense sequence of twists and connections. To get a sense of the scale of Prynne’s figure, the chromosome of the bacterium E. Coli is about 1100 µ long (1 µ (micron) = one millionth of a metre) and therefore contains approximately 300,000 twists. This unwinding process takes about 30 minutes, implying an untwisting rate that operates continuously at 10,000 RPM. Spinning around its long axis and assisted by the fact that ‘frictionless swivel points’ exist at each carbon-oxygen bond, the parental double helix unwinds as the daughter helices rewind in recombination.⁴⁹ The ‘haploid cyclone’ (recall the different aim, but similar structure of ‘ketchup insult’) is a figure that compares the unwinding helix of nucleic acids to a meteorological phenomenon of low-pressure, vortical winds accompanied by heavy precipitation. The copula compacts the micro-processes of morphogenesis and genetic replication, and the macro-scale pressure systems of the atmosphere which sustain such human reproduction. The ‘haploid cyclone’ functions at the perspective of micro-processes only glimpsed, and still quite unsatisfactorily, with electron microscopy, well beyond instrumentation based on the visible light spectrum, several ways removed from the physiological potential of the human eye.

But the figure is not quite contained there. The combinatorial genitive ‘of’ which links ‘haploid cyclone’ to ‘insect lust’ is a loaded preposition. The ‘of’ makes ‘insect lust’ the source or agent of ‘haploid cyclone’; and ‘insect lust’ makes an inter-phylogenetic comparison to sexual excitation, relating the insect’s desire to eat the plant with the plant’s hormonal wound response. Both lock in appetite and damage as primarily sexual affairs, previously intimated by the ‘faint hopes’ of the lovers’ bucolic sprawl; and these involuntary biological processes lead us back through to the spasms of lust and coronary and respiratory blockage brought about by the menthol cigarette. While the usages seems quite precise considered as stand-alone units, the cross-matching into metaphorical compounds exhibits the complications of the stereoscopic view of the two images. It brings us to the heart of the question surrounding metaphor: not whether metaphor is or is not, whether it is the basis for conceptual thought or not, but where is it? and what does it disclose? Mixing metaphors in this way, not unlike the catachrestic suicide of the simile above, destroys the necessary distance between source and target domains.⁵⁰ The contraction of distance between these domains, furthermore, polarizes the referential framework of a given term or phrase from its instance within the text. In short, it disables the spatial metaphor of metaphor. Consequently, it becomes difficult to separate the scientific image from its transformative appearance in this poetic garb. I could say that the insect’s ‘lust’ is an anthropomorphization, a tropological translation of a basic instinct that this beetle or this ant possesses due to its built-in disposition for self-preservation and species propagation. But how might human lust be different, when deprived of food, or during sex? The framework of Wound Response, with its occasional equivocation between the human, animal and plant worlds, defers the rhetorical compartmentalization of explanation. The descriptive options of ‘“vigorous and moderately upright”’ and ‘“soft, juicy flesh”’ satisfy categorical distinctions as well as equivalences.

In the first stanza of ‘Cool As A Mountain Stream’, there is a similar overlap, but here dictated by the ‘you’ and ‘he’ of uncertain classification. The object of address ‘spin[s] with erotic doubt’ and the speaker asks whether ‘this’ is ‘the mount of our youth | or his body?’ (ll.10-11, 219). The noun ‘mount’ is not only a supreme vantage (i.e., ‘mountain’) but also the erotic ascent or summit. But what is the relation between this ‘mount’ and ‘his body’? Why is this question asked thus? Is the body not the ‘grassy hillside’ (also ‘mount’) on which the unclassified lovers lay their picnic, just as the cigarette advertisement says they do, during which the spasmodic heart becomes a dark irony of this commercial spectacle? The poem continues:

from “Cool as a Mountain Stream”(ll.11-14, 219)

‘Autolysis’ is the capacity of a cell to destroy itself by enzymatic activity, usually prompted by some kind of metamorphosis.⁵¹ It is closely related to Sheldrake’s discussion of wound response. Central to Sheldrake’s hypothesis that hormonal (auxin) production occurs as a result of cell death is the premise that the tryptophan released by autolysis (self-inflicted cell death) is used for auxin production by adjacent cells.⁵²60 Hence, the production of auxin (as a consequence of cell death) is recognized by the surge in tryptophan levels. The connection between sexual appetite and nutrition is once again posed here. Tryptophan is an essential amino acid for humans; it is not produced by the body, but must be taken in as part of the diet. What is strange about ‘He must | be eaten slowly, by autolysis of face’ is not the mention of autolysis so much as the sentence predication that reveals an intention, an agency, for who controls the suggestion of eating (‘he must be eaten’) also seems to control the enzymatic activity of self-destructing cells (‘by autolysis’). Munching on watercress is not autolysis, so the concept of ‘eaten’ becomes adjusted within the context to include the interior recognition of cellular death. This propositionality stems from a voice recognizable not as mental intelligence per se but as the bodily ‘intelligence’ of involuntary micro-decisions, operative within the obscure ‘world’ of animal and plant immune response systems, here brought into the open as fodder for a parodic, malevolent psychological framework.

‘Wound’ similarly appears in High Pink on Chrome as a token of confusion between presence and absence, growth and death: ‘

from *High Pink on Chrome*, (poem six, ll.4-7, 250)

A wound is not ‘lost’ because the adjacent cellular ledges release tryptophan, and thereby contribute to the production of auxin. Growth by virtue of partial cytolysis is done ‘without pollen’, without, in other words, the sex dust comprised of male gametes produced by the anther part of the flower. We can begin to see how elaborating upon these scientific images reveals a style whose connections are foremostly subtle; that is, sub–tilis ‘sub-textual’. The imbrication of the human and plant worlds brings us to the heart of the problem of biological continuity between consciousness and body, but also to the tension between the manifest and scientific images wrought by Prynne’s recontextualisation of ‘haploid’, ‘autolysis’ and ‘wound response’. Moments of privation, altered states, toxicity and wounding are at the heart of this image-conflict.

“Chromatin”

In their book, Literary Voice, Donald Wesling and Tadeusz Slawek draw attention to the use of first and second person pronouns in ‘Chromatin’ to claim that Prynne’s poetics does not entail a postmodern elimination of the person, but rather, they write, ‘the habitual use of the trappings of scholarship and the abstractness of lexicon in Prynne has the same role as the preference for dramatic monologue in Browning—a place to hide an abundance of person, whose other more revealing emergence is in Prynne’s fascination with physical and psychological wounding, everywhere in evidence’.⁵³ Although, the notion of ‘wounding’ points to the representation of human and plant tissue damage, and therefore, in a sense, to the orientation of personhood, their account remains unconvincing. In their brief reading of ‘Chromatin’, they merely offer a descriptive account of word-play and take note of the various discursive levels through which the poem resonates, but seem to miss the irony—specifically, a sarcasm directed against the referential appropriateness of the pronoun enclosed within inverted quotation marks. These marks imply a kind of scientific perspective on subject formation, of the interpersonal identification of the ‘you’ and ‘I’ by grammatical opposition, here inscribed within the logical space of a self-consciousness who seems unable to control his intentional states, whether by mentally orienting himself or by the linguistic denotation in a given space. The entirety of ‘Chromatin’ reads:

Wesling and Slawek suggest that in this poem ‘A minor narrative of a possibly botched encounter of persons gains the precision of denotative science in the chromatin story’, implying that the scientific image of chromatin here merely lent an air of epistemological accountability.⁵⁴ Furthermore, they seem to view ‘chromatin’ as the capacity of tissues to ‘change color on contact’.⁵⁵ They do not say where they received this definition, but an accurate and detailed definition of what chromatin is and what it does may go a long way towards revealing some concerns of the poem, which are part of the same ambient discursive field as ‘haploid’.⁵⁶

Chromatin is the fibrous complex of DNA, histone and nonhistone proteins that organize and package DNA, and small amounts of RNA found in the cell nuclei of plants, animals and many protozoa (e.g., amoebas). Its role in gene replication is typically expressed in terms of its diffuse and densely-packed phases, named euchromatin and heterochromatin, respectively. The density of chromatin functions as both an activator and repressor of gene transcription, by controlling the density of DNA molecules.⁵⁷ A brief word about the relation of DNA to RNA may help us understand this mechanism, and thus gloss the title of the poem.

Since the seminal work of François Jacob and Jacques Monod in the early 1960s, ribonucleic acid (RNA) has been viewed as a ‘messenger’. The ribosomes of the cell contain long ‘tapes’ of RNA that contain information in the form of a four letter ‘alphabet’ (in monomers) whose specific syntax encodes instructions for the production of an enzyme protein necessary for the most basic metabolic processes of the cellular microcosm. But what is known as the coding problem is how a twenty letter amino acid ‘alphabet’ is represented by a four letter alphabet, a principle explained concisely by the molecular biologist James Bonner:

The DNA sits in the cell in double-stranded, base-paired structure, A [adenine] holding hands with T [thymine], G [guanine] holding hands with C [cytosine], and it prints off single-stranded copies of itself, copies made of the RNA monomeric units. These are the messenger RNA molecules which then go forth to cause, with the cooperation of the ribosomes, the assembly of enzyme molecules. The enzyme molecules transform whatever materials are available into building blocks for making more enzyme molecules and more messenger RNA molecules.⁵⁸

Because the genomal DNA contains information that remains unused, there must be some kind of mechanism that controls genetic replication, that decides which gene produces what RNA, and which gene is repressed.⁵⁹ This brings us back to chromatin.

The mixing of discursive levels is consistent with the initial image-set of this poem. The ‘prism crystal’ not only creates ‘dichroic’ diffraction patterns (i.e. light split into two colours or polarized), later picked up in ‘Again in the Black Cloud’ (see ‘dichroic in gratitude’ (l.22, 230)), but also, like all crystals, is notable for its direct reflective symmetry between its microscopic structure (at the angstrom level) and macroscopic structure (at the centimeter level).⁶⁰ Thus, the symmetry of a crystal’s ‘internal’ structure, perceivable only by technological visualization, is part of its ‘external’ structure visible to the human eye by careful observation. The diction of the opening lines seems to describe the refractive and non-linear physiology of ‘episodic desire’, as though to make a diagnosis. The science fiction of these lines occurs in the placement of the pronoun subject, capable of having a ‘wish’ within the micro-environment of ‘neural space’ (‘Of Movement Towards A Natural Place’, l.5, 223).⁶¹

The ‘prism crystal’ gives this ‘episodic desire’ a geometrical shape and axial symmetry through which light diffracts, splitting the I and you. There is now a kind of partition between the agents, so that ‘lethargy and depression’ may ‘cross’. There is pressure on both sides. The first indication of intracellular process appears at the term ‘receptor site blockade’. It is keeping in mind that despite the apparent precision of the title, many of these terms operate at such a general, ‘ordinary’ level, even the lay reader can—knowing what ‘receptor’, ‘site’ and ‘blockade’ are—make a decent guess that it means something like: ‘an inhibition of transmission’, be it within the neural space of the chemical signal between synapses, or in any cell describing the specific susceptibility of that cell to a toxic antigen.⁶² After the full stop prompted by ‘blockade’, there is a kind of stacking effect, where sliced portions of events are cut out and respliced, in mock laboratory talk: ‘Stable mosaic at | adrenal print “you” are in white’. The ‘at’ specifies a kind of perceptible location, levelling both ‘mosaic’ and ‘print’ on a shared mental surface, concatenating them like experimental subjects. And, in fact, ‘mosaic’ here continues the genetic thread, in this case also indicating ‘compounds consisting of two (or, rarely, more) genetically different tissues’,⁶³ or possibly uneven growth of different parts of a given organism. Such hybridity brings these two agents back into view. The syntactical cuts within these concatenated lines promote a rapid intake of each word, here densely packed like heterochromatin. The succeeding ‘I surmount’ is an erotic climax to a repressed transcription process. I do not know what an ‘adrenal print’ is, but I take it here to modify ‘“you”’. I take it to mean the ‘print’ secreted by the kidneys; the gist being that writing is hormonal. Or, to reverse the metaphor within the context of chromatin, the genetic replication of DNA is caused by hormonal surges, which increase protein synthesis.⁶⁴

As mentioned before, the quotation marks around the ‘I’ and ‘you’ emphasize that the agency here is pronominal, but not merely so. The marks are also scare quotes that suggest liminal states of consciousness that may exist prior to subject formation or after subject deformation, as in aphasia, poisoning, cardiac arrest or any number of other pathologies. Indeed, the parenthetical list of symptoms “(mental confusion, | tremors, anxiety)” (ll.8-9) is a recurring feature of another poem from Wound Response, ‘Again in the Black Cloud’. Recall the four lettered options signalled by air and blood:

from “Again in the Black Cloud” (ll.13-19, 230)

The diagnosis of the experimental subject is at the heart of the collection as a whole. In the first example above, there is a kind of graphic/auditory play between ‘sound’ and the list of options. The quotation marks suggest voicing distinct from the lettered order, so that the levels of presumed voicing and their record as script form a complicit whole. The list proceeds in progressive stages of well-being, from remaining in one place to smiling to not only feeling but seeming ‘happier’. It is perhaps hard not to read this as the survey in a psychiatric ward, or at a laboratory for testing pharmaceutical drugs, perhaps anti-depressants. But sweeping elemental gestures like ‘Air to blood’ (l.13) frustrate a locative denotation, drawn as they are from the depths of the English poetical record, here equivocated into clinical survey items.

The poem, ‘Chromatin’ is unique in this collection for its self-description. We read ‘Visual sonar | arrhythmia’, which is a kind of synaesthetic destabilization of the mosaic pattern, a lack of sensory coordination; and it seems to perform as though the writing itself caused it: ‘blocks fading brocade made’. Note the mitotic metathesis here between the earlier ‘blockade’ and ‘blocks fading’ and the assonant leakage of ‘brocade made’. But the ‘breaking’ of ‘the induced | blockade’ is highly controlled, the connection between the you and I a fitness. There is even excitement at the prospect of this transcription: ‘you and the flowers in | pliant flicker real time!’. A more consummate and enigmatic metathesis occurs in the final lines: ‘the homeric icefields unfold’. Nowhere in Homer is there ice, so it is difficult to see what a ‘homeric icefield’ would be. Nevertheless, if we transpose the ‘ice’ back and place it at the front of ‘homeric’, then we might read ‘isomeric fields’.74 An isomer (from iso ‘equal’ + mer ‘part, share’) is a molecule with the same molecular composition (i.e. same number of protons and neutrons), but different structure.75 ‘Chromatin’ extends the concept of the binary across several discourses while remaining uncommitted to any single image, metaphor or field, but the title provides a provocation of the question of genetic disposition and its correlative index of involuntary bodily response, especially with regard to the relation between our physical location and our mental location. These features are significantly foreshadowed in an earlier poem, ‘Acquisition of Love’ from The White Stones. It is worth quoting at length from this poem to expose the similar thematic undercurrent and the major stylistic differences:

from “Acquisition of Love” (ll.1-25, 111)

The scene of ‘Acquisition of Love’ is domestic and suburban: the observer repairs the lawn mower on the rock slab in front of the house, watching children play, watching them watch him, the low coronal horizon behind them make the edges of their bodies orange and white. But it also considers the problem of the developmental function of the genetic code, of how to distinguish ‘learning’ from predisposition. Is there a mechanism or systematic force which arranges and ‘defines these | lively feelings’? Is there a genetic predisposition to behaviour patterns and consciousness? Such questions inform the unwritten background, but the poem itself suggests a deterministic system of the human body. The concept of heredity is played with as a kind of telekinetic transmission, as though the gaze of the observer predisposed the children into specific behaviour. As he cleans the rust off the ratchets of the mower, he considers the irrelevance of their action, as though to deflect the sentiments of care and wonder by insisting on the material determinism of their watching:

from “Acquisition of Love” (ll.28-36, 111)

There is a conflict here between the fascination of the observer’s consideration of the children watching him, and the observer’s impulse to insist on the meaninglessness of the children watching. The irrelevance of having nothing to do with anything seems like the negation of their sensory perception in favour of the importance of their blood and ‘neuro-chemical entail’. This exemplifies the tension between the manifest and scientific images. Interestingly, these two images find resolve in the children whose genetic ‘courses’ are ‘set towards | fear and collapse’, a concept repositioned in the final two and a half lines: ‘the fear of | collapse is pumped round by each linked | system & the borrowed warmth of the heart’. The lack of meaning is coincident with the recognition of the inherited biological pattern in as much as the ‘fear of collapse’ is intimately related to the existential downwardness of the earth’s gravitational field.

Toxicity in High Pink on Chrome

The title High Pink on Chrome presents a topological relation in contrast to Wound Response’s denotative function. It has to do with the contact between human skin and metal, and the chemical reaction of this contact. It may be harmless or virulently toxic, but the conceptual frame is abstracted by metonymic obliquity: ‘pink’ to ‘skin’, ‘chrome’ to ‘metal’. The sequence also begins in ‘Pink’: ‘Pink star of the languid’ (poem 1, l.1, 248), emblematizing leisure with the common name of the shrub Erica tetralix. But the ‘high’ modifies the pink in such a way as to suggest a heightened state, perhaps a higher, lighter pink on the colour spectrum. In terms of the toxicity of metal on skin, the ‘high pink’ evokes a hallucinogenic, or biochemical ‘high’, an altered state of perception: when the arm touches the chrome it gets high. But ‘pink’ does not signify only ‘light red colour’, but also the verbal action: ‘to prick or pierce with a sharp object’ (CDE, p. 796). The placement of the skin on metal punctures the chrome, as though the ‘pink’ itself possessed a kind physical toxicity. This is frequently compounded by wounding, as in poem eighteen:

from poem 18 in High Pink on Chrome (ll.6-10, 261)

The arch of the ‘faded hill’ (l.2) leads as though by natural implication into ‘bone’. The phrase ‘patience in bone’ permits a reading of ‘patience’ not as endurance, but as the suffering implicit to viewing the skeleton. As the melancholic observer drifts past this recognition, there is the dramatic lineation of ‘somatic metal | shifting’, which is inexplicable, but nevertheless ‘in it’. The next poem compares the advance of ‘toxic action’ to voluntary ignorance:

from poem 19 in High Pink on Chrome (ll.1-8, 262)

These opening five lines are emblematic of the entire sequence. The soil that ‘seeps under the nail’ leads to the toxic action. Prynne’s gloss of Thomas Aquinas’ discussion of the morality of inner acts from Summa Theologiæ—where Aquinas explains the kind of ignorance chosen in order to pursue a specific aim—implies that what ‘seeps under the nail’ might have been prevented, or at least, we might say, was not an inevitable consequence of a set of events in necessary order. Aquinas discusses the type of indirect voluntary ignorance ‘when from negligence a person does not will to know what he ought to know’ (indirecte autem propter negligentiam, ex eo quod aliquis, non vult illud scire quod scire tenetur), or as Prynne glosses the last three words, ‘what ought to be known’.⁶⁵ Interestingly, this combination of scholastic moral philosophy and wounding also recurs in ‘Of Movement Towards A Natural Place’,⁶⁶ from Wound Response:

“Of Movement Towards a Natural Place” (ll.21-24, 223)

Not yet epiphanic recognition, that is to say, but ‘starry’, as per the idiomatic phrase describing a dizzy spell: ‘seeing stars’. Prynne’s third-person description of ‘moral trace’ (l.1) involves a patient acting out the aftermath of a head injury, interfused with passages about ‘neural space’ (l.5) from Touch, Heat and Pain, the emergence of the ‘counter-self’ (l.29)—the wound response as the internal ‘other’ of consciousness, and the former analogue for the experience of split-consciousness in St. Anselm’s Proslogion: ‘For, if the soul were not as a whole in the separate members of the body, it would not feel as a whole in the separate members’ (Si enim non esset anima tota in singulis membris sui corporis, non sentiret tota in singulis).⁶⁷ Prynne transposes the feeling of disembodiment within the experience of wounding into the totality of the soul’s absolute saturation of the body, as though each part, head and hand, bruised skin and ‘starry’ vision were comprised of separate, autonomous, but nevertheless homogeneous anima.⁶⁸

Douglas Oliver on Prynne

Prynne’s use of scientific imagery, models, and language has not gone unnoticed. Douglas Oliver’s important essay on Prynne’s ‘Of Movement Towards A Natural Place’ from Wound Response aims to risk the ‘fourth-form’ danger of actually reading and talking about the poem, instead of pathologizing its difficulty into a theory of hermeticism, or subjecting the poem to ‘blind attack’ as the reflex of ressentiment.⁶⁹ It refers to the cooperative project shared by Prynne and Dorn of reframing the mind’s position in the world by invoking the most extreme limits of observability, both macro (astronomy and meteorology) and micro (particle physics, intercellular movements). How we are in the world, if we are to be critical and historical, must be open to what is not humanly visible; but the uncertainty of observation at each of these polarities generates problems of representation and understanding, whether in the central nervous system or in the Milky Way. Prynne and Dorn, Oliver writes, imbue such cosmological extensions with a poetic need for demonstrable reference to sites of invisibility, a need that becomes important for all three writers in the 1970s. Such writing operates at a particularly delicate level of susceptibility to functional loss when naturalised into prose. Oliver writes that Prynne’s poetic work on the ‘birth of the mind’ will strain the analogy between external events and emotional states, or between the body and the mind. In short, such writing endorses the notion of a ‘sublime-literal’.16 Part of the project of J.H. Prynne’s Wound Response, as Oliver notes, concerns the representation of the neurological time of wounding, that instant before the mind’s logic responds to the much quicker, perhaps even anticipatory, neurobiological response system. In other words, the time of wounding alerts us to the separation of conscious experience from bodily experience. The representation of this delay concerns how the terms of description attend to the drama of subconscious perception, of those moments when it seems that a disembodied mind is looking down upon its body, or when limbs of the body become desensitized or neurophysiologically dislocated. But also the time of actively attending to the recursive medium of language, which seems to recognize that the text itself is an instrument of consciousness.

In an article mostly describing general problems of significance and reference when readers interpret poetry through ‘sense-making paradigms’, Anthony Mellors suggests that with Wound Response, Prynne’s poetry ‘requires of its readers a high awareness of the contingency of mental models in order to contextualise and interpret poems’.⁷⁰ In other words, the reader performs a kind of thought-experiment with respect to the textual specimen so that ‘the reader’s description becomes a partial view of the available “data”’.⁷¹18 This opportunity of experimental reading may be part of the performative context of Prynne’s work of this period, but perhaps this confusion of the thematic orientation of wound response with the reader’s experience too easily falls into the inviting circularity of a mimetic correspondence between reader and text.⁷² What this claim boils down to is that reading itself generates a reflective awareness of being an agent of the text—of attending to its incompleteness and responding to its configuration of the sensible. But this is by no means an exclusive feature of Prynne’s work, it could be said of narrative or epic poetry, or perhaps any kind of literature. Even the minimization of desire manufactured by recent conceptual writing (as in texts which read like putative directories or indices) may occasionally invite an enthusiastic and cathectic self-fashioning. The reader of the scientific image is not placed within the role of scientific researcher any more than the text within the role of a bacterium.

Back to High Pink

Below poem seven in High Pink on Chrome, there is a prose passage at the bottom of the page, as though it had been inserted after writing the verse above. It is cited verbatim and without reference from J.L. Turk’s ‘Role of Immune Reactions in Response to Toxic Metals’:

Cross-breeding experiments using sensitivity to BeF2 as a marker in the Hartley strain of guinea-pigs indicated that the ability to react to a particular metal is inherited as a simple Mendelian dominant characteristic (Polák, Barnes & Turk, 1968). Thus there is no doubt that some of the toxic effects of these metals is the result of a cell-mediated immunological reaction against the body’s own proteins modified antigenically by the metal and that this is in some way genetically controlled. As yet we have not investigated the level at which the genetic control operates. It may be that some animals contain certain enzymes which are involved in the change of antigenic nature of the protein caused by the toxic metal.⁷³

The cited passage, given here in bold, points to the capacity of the metal toxin to react with the very genetic makeup of the human immunological response. But it also complicates the lay picture of what constitutes a reaction. Indeed, this type of immunological response reacts not only to the alien particles of metal, but to its own proteins which have been altered by the metal. In a sense, the body’s defensive mechanism inflicts the immunological response against itself. Toxicity is relative to the quantity of substance administered and to the genetic quality of experimental subject to which it is administered.81 Here, the link between gene expression and toxicity is analogous to that between hormones and death in the plant world. The lack of Turk’s context has a destructive effect; it inhibits the comprehension of the scientific image and makes it into a kind of auratic or artefactual inscription, as though it had been left there to be found.

Above Turk’s excerpt, poem seven relates toxic effects to a lethal dose of an unnamed substance, with symptomatic descriptions of toxic response. The introductory self-declaration of poem one—‘it is I who say this, not to | fade or shine out, | to be trusted and played’ (ll.8-10, 248)—now makes the voicing of a toxic event complicitous, by attesting to a vantage within a mise-en-scène, or as kind of abstracted monologic aside. In both cases, the effect is dramaturgical. The same might be said for poem seven, apposite to poem six’s mention of ‘wound’:

from poem 6 in High Pink on Chrome (ll.6-13, 251)

LD50 is the professional abbreviation for lethal dose, a statistical median which represents the lethal concentration of a toxic substance. It provides the estimation that 50% of test subjects would be killed by this particular dose, and therefore represents the end-point for toxicity, although it does not specify method of administration.⁷⁴ As a statistical median, however, its geometrical curve is frequently smoothed out to eliminate ‘eccentric’ toxicological responses.⁷⁵ The symptoms, ‘intense burning’, ‘pain in the chest’, and ‘(shallow breathing)’ are cued not only as potential declarations of diagnostic knowledge, but also as orders: ‘you must say quickly […] how much to give’. The inherent danger of the drug’s administration is given unexpected comic invasion: ‘a scruple of fair dealing and upright | fashion’; perhaps, thinking not only of ‘scruple’ as a prick of conscience or doubtful hesitation as to right and wrong, but also ‘scruple’ as a very small unit of measurement, a dose (OED). The administration of toxicity is fair dealing—it is appropriate and even deserved.

The issue of cell-mediated toxicity is brought once more into focus in poem fourteen, once again, close to ‘burned skin’ (l.7, 257) and ‘blood | may track into a false channel’ (ll.3-4, 257). Here, the notice of toxic elements is well-defined:

from poem 14 in High Pink on Chrome (ll.9-16, 257)

Paraquat is a popular herbicide used to desiccate foliage and to kill weeds. Gramoxone and Weedol contain various concentrations of the chemical compound, and the mid-1970s mark a growing public and global awareness to its high level of toxicity in humans; it was the cause of a not insignificant number of accidental and suicidal deaths.⁷⁶ Subjects who ingested small amounts of paraquat in liquid form had symptoms of burning and pain in the mouth and throat, kidney failure, gradual pulmonary inflammation, hardening, and in many cases death by complete respiratory failure or cardiac arrest.⁷⁷ Thus, it is not unreasonable to associate those who descend in ‘feare and trembling’ to ‘threatened shock’ with the human contingencies of paraquat use in commercial and residential farming. High Pink on Chrome endeavours to illustrate elements of the post-industrial counter-pastoral. The orthographical flavour of ‘feare’ and ‘Faire’ primes up for somewhat remote historical usage, and the context is inscribed with the overwhelming presence of divine Spirit. For example, recall 2 Corinthians 7.15: ‘And his inward affection is more abundant toward you; whilst he remembreth the obedience of you all, how with fear and trembling ye received him’. The distance from the ‘dry arbour’—here the desiccated arbor vitae—becomes the emblem of technocratic endorsement for land depletion and mismanagement. Such distance is not risky, it is the daily grind, another checked task box. Public awareness is even further removed, far from helplessness: ‘we read the papers | with coy amazement and concern’ (l.23-24).

The phrase, ‘we spray off’ adds a colloquial and even pseudo-professional verbal quality to the task, absorbing not just a single user but ‘we’: a managed team of toxic administrators, the fate of which quickly separates into an imagined ‘them and us’ allegory. ‘51Cr’ is a kind of radioactive, artificial chromium with a half-life of 27.7 days, primarily used for microbiological and toxicological testing.⁷⁸ The ‘51Cr label’ refers to the use of chromium-51 isotope to examine cell-mediated cytotoxicity. In what are known as ‘assays’, this isotope is placed in a fluid medium, mixed with the target cells, and incubated for several hours to allow chemical bonding to occur between the target cells and the 51Cr. The target cells have now been ‘labelled’ with 51Cr. These labelled cells are then mixed with cytotoxic cells (i.e., killer T cells), and the proportion of radioactive chrome found after this process is proportional to the quantity of dead cells. This ratio is the test for cell-mediated immunity.⁷⁹ If we recall Turk’s article above, this is precisely the kind of immune response under discussion. That is to say, it does not concern the system of circulating antibodies designed to neutralize specific antigens, but concerns the transformative capacity of certain antigens: that by genetically altering the body’s cells they also trigger the self-inflicted immune response of killer cytotoxic cells. Turk emphasizes that the antigen does more than bond to the outer surface of a molecule, it actually changes the target’s chemical structure.⁸⁰ Hence, the figurative suggestion of toxic contact in the book title here finds its on Chrome (although there is no necessary correlation between paraquat and chromium-51).

“Treatment in the Field”

A polarity of sensation and desensitization guides the mapping of first-person experience in ‘Treatment in the Field’, Wound Response’s first poem. The perspective of this poem vaguely connotes the microscopic field of view during a chemical experiment; the experience of a supine patient looking out the window, hallucinating just prior to anaestheticization; it is also that of a wounded soldier looking out as ‘the sky clears’ at ‘the order of battle’. Like other poems in Wound Response, ‘Treatment in the Field’ describes the enactment of scientific experiments within a contingent logical space wherein other events are also being processed and observed. Prynne’s choice of the ‘field’ as a scientific image creates a semantic imbrication analogous to Prynne’s use of the shamanistic ‘vocabulary’ in ‘Aristeas’. It is therefore important to keep the ‘field’ pliable and unenclosed; the more we insist on a definitive version of its measure, the more we may lose some of the term’s value.

The first stanza reads:

from “Treatment in the Field” (ll.1-14, 216)

The fourteen-line stanza manoeuvres the cascading descent of lineation in an irregular way, distant from the block indentation of Prynne’s earlier period but continuous with the odic designs of Brass. In this stanza alone, lines 1, 8, and 12; 2 and 14; 3 and 9; 4 and 13; 6 and 10; 7 and 11 align their vertical indentation patterns, respectively. The visual design suggests a complex pattern. Just as the patient in ‘sedate attachment’ imagines or views the ‘order of battle’ from behind the window of the medical tent or hospital, so the ‘window’ is also the microscope, the only way of looking at the nanometrical particulars of intermolecular reactions. The simile to ‘quiet as a colour chart’ subtly announces the scene to be the site of laboratory research; the clearing of the sky is the washing the solution under the microscope. The mention of ‘gold leaf’ confirms, I think, the representation of a colloidal gold reaction, which is later suggested by the ‘gold number’. Colloidal chemistry studies heterogeneous molecules of various sizes in a continuous medium. The colloid is a molecular combination, often inert, and does not easily coagulate or diffuse. A ‘colloid’ is a small particle between one nanometre (nm = 10-9 and one micrometre (μm = 10-6m) in diameter.⁸¹89 Thus, the shift from ‘Blue-green to yellow | in memory beyond the gold number’ reveals a shift beyond that threshold of colloidal protection. A low gold number signifies an increased protection against dispersion.⁸² Moving beyond the gold number entails an intermolecular dispersion, the loss of protection, and the ability to recognize the singular identity of a particle.

‘Treatment in the Field’ corresponds to multiple fields of scientific practice: diagnostic, analytic and so on. The spatial and cognitive relation is one of ‘sedate attachment’ because the subject has been anaestheticized by the ‘brietal perfusion’. The latter is a general anaesthetic, the brand name for methohexital sodium, approximately effectual as the ‘di | methyl hydroxy | thiopentone’ mentioned in ‘An Evening Walk’ (ll.50-52, 228) where Prynne asks of his protagonist ‘How | does he not feel a feeling’ (ll.31-32, 227). Thiopentone is an intravenous barbiturate, which moves rapidly through the nervous system ‘across the blood-brain barrier and subsequently diffuse[s] quickly into all tissues’.⁸³ It is primarily a sleeping-device, and its ability to produce restful and peaceful sleep in the patient made it a popular barbiturate.⁸⁴ However, the conditions of this word’s usage in ‘An Evening Walk’ are suspicious. I have not found any substance known as ‘di | methyl hydroxy | thiopentone’. That is to say, despite its appearance to the lay observer, it is not a specialized term, but an agglomerative compound, as though one were reading a label while phasing in and out of consciousness. It marks its significance through line breaks: the end ‘di’ which homophonically (i.e. ‘die’) foreshadows the distorted and withered descent into a representation of overdose, ‘Infantile, | recursive pandect’. The comprehensive treatise of knowledge (‘pandect’), along with its relation to law and justice here represents those last moments when, allegedly, your life flashes before your eyes. ‘The in | fibrillate’ is a second lapse of syllabic cohesion. Here, it represents the loss of speech, the aphasic contraction (‘infibrillate’ is syntactically an ‘adjective’ or verbal command, but its lexical status is uncertain). Fibrillation, as in atrial fibrillation or arrhythmia, indicates a spontaneous twitching of muscle fibres; but its occurrence at ‘membrane’ is both terminologically specific and contextually vague.

Pharmacology is a recurrent discursive target of both collections. Relevant to the scene of battle in ‘Treatment in the Field’—recalling the mention of ‘General Staff’ (l.23, 216) and the violent spectacle of ‘love like a wren hunt’ (l.15)93—is another scene of combat that appears in the final poem of High Pink on Chrome.

from poem 20 in High Pink on Chrome, (ll.1-12, 263)

The term which locks in a specific context is ‘dimercaprol 200mg’. Dimercaprol is known by several names, but most notoriously as the antidote to the arsenic poison Lewisite; hence, its moniker, ‘British anti-Lewisite’ (BAL). First synthesized in 1904, and then rediscovered by Captain W. Lee Lewis in the USA for use in the Great War, Lewisite, like mustard gas, is a vesicant (blister-producing agent) that primarily irritates the lungs, severely burns the skin and eyes, and shocks its victim.⁸⁵ It became known as the ‘dew of death’ probably because it smelled of geraniums. However, unlike mustard gas, it was not a very effective agent of chemical warfare. It is largely ineffective in wet conditions, it has an easily detectable odour, it does not penetrate clothing quickly, and is largely destroyed by water.⁸⁶ 200mg is the typical dosage of its antidote Dimercaprol, typically administered in a small ampoule.⁸⁷ We see evidence of the text’s denotative specificity in the corrosion of the victim’s throat which ‘nails him twitching to the Earth’. This capitalization stands out. It stands out because since the end of the second World War dimercaprol is principally used as a general antidote to arsenical poisoning, not from warring chemical agents, but from types of poisoning common in agricultural labour, similar to paraquat. The capitalization of ‘Earth’ sarcastically signals a reproach toward the magnanimity of the homeland. Such is the counter-pastoral motive of High Pink on Chrome. The specific vocabulary of modern agricultural practices show that this counter-pastoral is not inflicted from the poetic outsider, but, indeed, represents the status quo of willed ignorance and the ‘coy’ disbelief of those on the other side of the daily news.

“Again in the Black Cloud”

‘Again in the Black Cloud’ involves the superimposition and deft intercalation of several conceptual registers, which are largely synthesized by syntactic continuity and grammatical predication: the scene of persons (perhaps, children) playing on the water, or on some other feature of landscape; synaesthesia (‘sounds towards purple’; by metonymic extension: ‘white bees’); stormy weather (‘storm-light’); an experimental questionnaire likely related to psychopharmacology; an electroencephalogram (EEG) reading in quotation marks; and an unmarked citation from The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time, a highly-technical discussion of predictions based on Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity by fellow Caius’ astrophysicist, Stephen Hawking and G.F.R. Ellis. In addition to these registers, there is a tangible sense that causality here is subject to reversal, contraction and expansions of time relative to the action occurring within it. In short, the poem is an ‘open work’, in Umberto Eco’s sense: ‘a complex interplay of motive forces is envisaged, a configuration of possible events, a complete dynamism of structure’.⁸⁸ And it is no coincidence that Eco’s theorization of the ‘open work’ draws from the same conceptual reservoir as Prynne’s does: post-Einstein theories of physical relativity. Here is the first stanza:

The ‘sound towards purple’ alerts us to a reference frame which would place sound and light on a plane of comparison, that is to say, as wave forms. These two are not identified so much as constructed as co-operations in a common index. The cellular return through hope to hope’s cause indicates an internal perspective at the level at which we can perceive such cells. Perhaps the ‘white bees’ are the metaphor for lycocytes, white blood cells which run back to the cause of hope because of the injury which ‘shears | past’ the physiological ‘curve of recall’; the injury has made the subject forgetful of this injury. Prynne’s metaphysics of memory, love, and emotion draws on cosmology. And indeed, terms like ‘shear’ and ‘curve’, ‘field’ and ‘double-valued’ have a connotative ambience in the domain of cosmological fields, later made specific in the unmarked citation from The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time. The ‘field’ here is a topological domain, a mathematical set of quantitative values which coordinate a space-time manifold. The origin of field theory grew out of Euler’s theory of hydrodynamics in the late eighteenth-century and was taken up by Faraday and Maxwell in the nineteenth-century to describe electromagnetism. It emerged out of a necessity to describe action in a ‘continuous medium’, rather than mechanically as parts reacting against one another in an absolute spatial substratum. As such, the modern ‘field’ is an ‘active medium’ and implies the elimination of the concept of ‘absolute space’.⁸⁹ What J.D. North suggests in his influential study about the concept of the ‘field’ in early twentieth-century physical science—‘There is unfortunately no standard meaning for the phrase ‘field theory’—may also be said about Prynne’s use of ‘field’ here.⁹⁰

After the four-part survey of check-box results for how patients responded under some unknown test conditions, there is a further complication of scenery. The ‘Shouts’ which arose from the ‘water | surface’ are now compounded by an image of ‘snow-fields’:

from “Again in the Black Cloud” (ll. 19-25)

The ‘Shouts’ which in the first line rose from the ‘water | surface’ here seem to modify the meaningful doing of the ‘aimless beasts’. The phrase ‘dichroic in gratitude’ is perplexing not because we cannot imagine a state of thankfulness or even grace as having two colours, but principally because of the strain such constructions place on prepositions, in this case ‘in’. The cross-categorical dissolves in a construction like ‘being in gratitude’, so that if I am in your gratitude you are thankful for me. We are stuck on its graphic and phonological surface. Prynne’s link between sound (‘shouts’) and color (‘dichroic’) is another instance of synaesthetic disjunction, similar to ‘sounds towards purple’.

After the child-like exclamations tightly contained in three trisyllabic lines, there is the suggestion of a child’s game. The ‘shouting and intense felicity’ of ‘follow the leader’, or some other such play gives way to an image detailing a violent fracture:

from “Again in the Black Cloud” (ll.33-39, 230-231)

The quotation marks enclose an interpretation of a reading from the electroencephalogram. The latter term literally signifies an ‘electrical x-ray photograph of the brain’. It measures the electrical activity of the brain by measuring currents detected by electrodes placed on the scalp. The first human electroencephalogram was recorded in the late 1920s by Hans Berger, whose subsequent experiments led to an elaborate theory of the EEG and its relation to psychophysiology and pathology.⁹¹ The basic procedure and apparatus may be outlined as follows:

Electrodes are placed on the subject’s scalp, and the voltages across the electrodes are magnified or amplified by means of a vacuum tube amplifier. Finally, the voltage changes are recorded with an ink writer or oscillograph. In normal subjects there is a characteristic pattern made up of waves of varying frequency and magnitude. Such a changing pattern represents the algebraic sum of the potentials of billions of cortical neurons. The record obtained is an electroencephalogram or EEG, and the oscillations recorded are popularly known as ‘brain waves’.⁹²

Even a skilled practitioner in electroencephalography might find Prynne’s excerpt slightly bewildering. In absence of the actual reading, which would consist of a diagram of wave rhythms corresponding to each electrode indicating location on the subject’s scalp, even the professional admits ‘how difficult it is to describe in words what the eye can see’.⁹³ Indeed, EEG study itself possesses ‘little diagnostic specificity’.⁹⁴ Prynne’s description is ensconced within an obscure context which I have not been able to precisely locate. There are thousands of EEG studies through 1974; it may be a translation from German or French; or it may be fabricated. EEG rhythms are not denotative. Without the precise experimental context of procedure and measurement, they exist in a hazy datum of severed indication. Nevertheless, this blurring effect may be part of the citation’s very purpose, to represent not the final diagnosis or correspondence between a condition and its possible EEG reading, but a snapshot of one brief step in the process of scientific measurement.

Prynne’s EEG gives us four basic points of information: 1) decrease in alpha-wave activity; 2) increase in slow-frequency waves, which includes both theta and delta waves, respectively; 3) increase in beta waves; 4) paroxysmal potentials. The names of these waves indicate bands on the frequency spectrum: ‘slow’ (i.e. delta and theta) = less than 8Hz; alpha = from 8Hz to 13Hz; beta = more than 13Hz. Waveforms are sequenced into rhythms by measuring their peak-to-peak value (e.g., from the waveform produced on one electrode to that of another) in microvolts. Waveform measures two variables: voltage and time, so that the shape of the electrical phenomena as given on the EEG depends upon the sensitivity of the equipment settings and the speed at which the paper is moving under the ink pens.⁹⁵ The alpha rhythm is the most predominant form of coordinate waveform measurement. It is something like the average against which other waveforms, rhythms and anomalies are defined.

Assessing these four points of information is problematic to say the least. The primary cause of reduced alpha-wave activity is eye opening.⁹⁶ The correlation between EEG and cerebral blood flow (whose stoppage is known as isychaemia, impairment as anoxia) is illustrated in two extremes; by epileptic seizure: paroxysmal discharges in the EEG and increased cerebral blood flow; and in coma conditions: slowing of the EEG (i.e., its alpha wave median) and reduced cerebral blood flow.⁹⁷ Hyperventilation is an experimental condition often utilised by EEG tests. In one such study, the production of slow wave activity is related to ‘hypocapnic constriction of cerebral vessels leading to a reduction of cerebral blood flow and consequent ischaemic anoxia’.⁹⁸Nervous tension and anxiety, even in non-pathological cases, satisfies both the decreased alpha-wave activity and the increase in beta waves.⁹⁹

The poetic context gives us two basic terms from which to infer: the ‘damage’ that precedes the EEG and the ‘sleep’’ which succeeds it. ‘Damage makes perfect’ (l.35) directly precedes, and indeed, leads into the quotation, as though the EEG were a definition of such damage. To make perfect is to make something complete, to make it morally excellent or supreme, to give it a kind of immaculate presentation. This holy connotation is not accidental; it was preceded by ‘the field double-valued at the divine point’. A double-valued field is a surface point that consists of two overlapping geometries. One example would be a prism crystal, where two overlapping geometries produce a double-light refraction (C.f., ‘dichroic’).¹⁰⁰ As we have already mentioned in connection with Prynne’s allusion to Anselm, the ‘divine point’ is something like the horizon of consciousness during bodily damage. If we think about the EEG as a kind of ‘internal clock’, this reading becomes an interpretation of the deletion of the contained and individual subject in order to permit the negative presence of the divine.¹⁰¹ Hence, the perfection made by damage as indicative of an EEG of epilepsy, suggested by the appearance of ‘paroxysmal potentials’. Indeed, epileptic fits were long considered as manifestations of divine presence.¹⁰² Damage, typically construed as an impairment or destruction of matter, here actually makes complete, immaculate, holy, ‘perfect’—recall Prynne’s remark from High Pink on Chrome vis-à-vis Wound Response: ‘a wound is not | anything lost’. Just as the wound response catalyses vital hormonal production as a result of cytolysis (cell death), so does the capacity for damage afford a kind of segue into an embodied ‘afterlife’, here conceived as a temporary loss of consciousness:

from “Again in the Black Cloud” (ll.40-50, 231)

As the text continues on the other side of the text diagram, the waveform of the EEG is interpreted as ‘the | child line dips into sleep’. Whereas normal adult sleep is notable for its increased, not reduced, cerebral blood flow—drug-induced narcosis or other various ‘toxic comatose states’ aside¹⁰³—it is true that the EEG readings of both epileptic patients and children sleeping contain such ‘paroxysmal potentials’¹⁰⁴. Such is the scene of the poem, which blends the description of the child with the synaesthetic confusion of pathological attention. Just as the child hears ‘her blue | coat!’ (ll.30-31), ‘fear | grips the optic muscle’ (ll.34-35); as ‘injury’ (l.10) and ‘the sounds towards purple’ (l.5) (i.e., bruising) are the ‘“treasure”’(l.6) which lead at the cellular level ‘back | through hope to the cause of it’ (ll.7-8). And here a unique feature of the recontextualised scientific image comes to light. On the input and output sides of this textual diagram, it would seem that the suspension of ostensive reference makes what may have intended to be something of a rough, interpretive diagnosis of a condition, into an auratic emblem of double-movement, ‘in | to the way out’.

“Thanks for the Memory”

In Wound Response, Prynne makes his most radical détournement of the scientific image. ‘Thanks for the Memory’ (220) is a verbatim citation taken from Edward M. Kosower’s ‘A Molecular Basis for Learning and Memory’.¹⁰⁵This shows that Prynne is interested in the measure of molecular realities, what remains invisible to the naked eye. This is a kind of radicalization of previous modes of appropriation and citation (not to mention disorientation). What can we make of this lineated science article? The title responds to the technical jargon used by Kosower (and the institutional field of which he is a part), as though it were sarcastically thanking the mechanistic analysis of molecular movement, so distanced from the lay language and phenomenological perspective of remembering, recalling and referring. It also thanks the apparent automatism of the body at the molecular level, which makes the gap between consciousness and the body stand out. At this level, the body does not ‘require’, so to speak, the mind’s conscious input or direction. Or at least our conceptual apparatus for intending our body to do things at the molecular level is drastically insufficient to explain how such intention functions. Perhaps, another way it says ‘thanks’ is by calling to mind the mnemonic function of the line break, so as to thank itself for presenting a scientific text in a consumable poetic form, an aestheticisation of a confident poetic declaration, which affects the hermeneutic reliance on reading conventions.

To give a sense of what this poem deletes by its shape, I’ve supplied its immediately preceding and succeeding context:

The discussion given previously concerning the two types of ACh receptor allows a simple way of explaining how the postsynaptic receptor region can respond to an increase in the quantity of transmitter released by the presynaptic side of a synapse.

“Thanks for the Memory”

that disulphide links are near the receptor sites (51, 52).] The possibility for partial degradation of the postsynaptic receptor region through depolymer-ization of receptors allows for apparent inactivation of synaptic pathways. Reactivation of previously learned behaviour could occur rather easily, since the permanent store is still present in the presynaptic membranes of the pathways involved in the learning. The expansion of synapses in response to learning has been reported (53-56).

VRS stands for ‘vesicle-release site’ on the presynaptic side of the nerve impulse, referring to that package of neurotransmitters (‘transmitters’ in Kosower’s vocabulary) which bond to the neuronal membrane and projects the chemical across the synapse into the postsynaptic membrane of another neuron. For Kosower, these VRS sites lead to exocytosis (the projection of materials outside of the cell), and therefore, the passage of the electrical signal or ‘information’ to another neuron. A certain type of chemical interaction known as the ‘disulfide bond’ occurs at these sites of nerve action, and these are ‘the labile forms of information storage’ which work by promoting the effectiveness of the VRS. Kosower specifies the half-life for short-term memory as between 10 seconds and 30 hours. A further chemical reaction with glutathione can erase this ‘labile store’ (p. 3294). Long-term memory is also related to the integrity of disulfide bond, but requires a long-term chemical stability. Kosower explains that the disulfide bond represents ‘a distortion in equilibrium form of the VRS’, that is to say, in the balanced package of neurotransmitters, such as acetylcholine (p. 3294). There are two mechanism of repair: the first is the one already pointed out, which leads to an erasure of this storage; the second, however, depends upon what Kosower names a synaptomeric protein, which corrects the imbalance by expanding the VRS. Long-term memory depends upon this increase in synaptic size and effectiveness, and therefore an quantitatively greater release of neurotransmitters (p. 3294).

The poem ends by cutting off Kosower mid-sentence. This mischievous cancellation of the signal makes the poem into surgical detritus. The result is a form of closure, a refusal of the complex conjunction in neural space which, Kosower argues, expands in order to increase information storage. With its sharp edges, we might view the poem itself as a form of short-term memory, however unmemorable its prose may be. The contraction of line-length in the last three lines referring to the ‘acquisition | of transmitter | by receptor’ on the postsynaptic receptor is now out of perceptible range. The poem loudly flags up the conceptual distinction between discursive registers, so that the poetic theft de-legitimates Kosower’s search for the neuronal basis for memory. Its recontextualisation and titular frame gives Kosower’s fortified technicality a kind of awkwardness; it appears as an estranged descriptive blip of that type of short-term memory for which Prynne now gives thanks.

Concluding Note

The ‘scientific image’ permits a way to think about perspectivism and the limits of human perception. I have explored how Prynne moves agency into the logical space of the theoretical diagram, the enlarged micro-environment of internal molecular movements, or even the diagnostic position of the experimental scientist or medical doctor, administering tests and submitting data. Prynne exacerbates the relation between the manifest and scientific images by inter-splicing the representation of the functional body as a reflection of the mind’s constitution with the diagnostics of injury, pain and toxicity.

Both Wound Response and High Pink on Chrome suggest that Prynne’s study of scientific discourse does not seek merely to defame the validity or truth claims of such discourse, nor to enthusiastically and uncritically embrace scientific discourse as some type of ‘answer’ or clarifying redemption of our understanding of the material world. Rather, Prynne’s curiosity and desire for inscribing the scientific image into the context of the poem increases the tension between the manifest and scientific images by disallowing a propositional or prosaic fashioning to give closure to an animated and shifting medium. It does not ‘wound’ its reader, just as ‘Aristeas’ did not seek to deprive its reader, but Prynne’s scientific image does have a particularly destructive function. At times, it seems to excoriate the basic perspectival intentionality we regularly attribute to self-consciousness and our reflective awareness of the body and environment.

In looking at the way Prynne’s usage of scientific terminology and unmarked citations of texts in these poems, I have not shied away from glossing. It is one thing to research the pragmatic context of a technical term within a scientific discipline—that is, when such and such term is appropriate for its descriptive value—but quite another to assess how it is used in the alien context of the poem, and furthermore, how that usage is relevant to the broader concerns of the book as a whole. One of the alluring difficulties of this period in Prynne’s writing is determining to what extent these terms may be said to be used accurately, to what extent they are abused, and to what extent their vagueness appears to be purposeful. By attempting to compare their auras of complexity against the original and relevant discursive contexts, I have tried to dispel their mystificatory appreciation.