The Botanical Model of Mind

 

The work of American poet Ronald Johnson (1935-1998) was a lifelong investigation of the relationship of "mind" to nature that took place in the mid-twentieth century. His was an era where a libidinal and instinctual model of mind had yet to be fully succeeded by computational models of mind. In my research I argue that Johnson's work anticipates the broad acceptance of behavioural neuroscience's discovery of brain plasticity by about forty years. His plant poetics recuperate Western European tropes of the sylviculture and horticulture of minds to show how metric language acts "concretely" upon the living brain as light upon Whitman's leaves of "hopeful green stuff." Neuroplasticity's metaphorics are conventionally drawn from the language of electrical circuitry, but I take my cue from Bryan Kolb, who wrote the book Brain and Behaviour, when he explains: "The dendrites of a [neuron] cell function as the scaffolding for synapses, much as tree branches provide a location for leaves to grow and be exposed to sunlight." My argument in my broad research is that Johnson's polymorphic plant-mind metaphors must be read as a document of one mind's self-conscious engagement with its own capacity to use language to (re)organize synaptic structures. In my poster, I will focus on the botanics-based model of mind-in-social-interconnectivity that Johnson prompts us to create for ourselves in the 21st century. If this poster is accepted, it will be an experiment in interdisciplinarity. I am a doctoral student in English Literature and an internationally published experimental poet who works with non-narrative models of cognition. My field is the work of Ronald Johnson, my data collected by isolating for his figurative presentation of new models of mind; my mode of analysis literary. Ideally I want to engage scientists in a conversation that asks how poetics can suggest alternative models of cognition and paradigmatic models of innovation, but I will be happy to simply point to the neurobiological wisdom hidden in the story of modern poetry's epistemological relationship to modern botany. It will be a great challenge to present this humanities research in a poster form that speaks to the AAAS community.