The Wisdom of the Body
Sir William Osler died in December 1919, his funeral being held in Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford. Almost exactly a year later, to the tolling of Great Tom, W. B. Yeats wrote on All Souls’ Night a poem in which he called up from the dead three theosophist friends of his – Horton, Florence Emery, MacGregor – having set out a glass of muscatel for them to savour upon palates sharpened to ecstasy with death. My mind becomes commemorative not simply for Sir William Osler, whose last months were stricken by the death in war of his only son; nor for Yeats, dying 20 years later in the spring; but for another Osler – Anne Wilkinson, William Osler’s niece who wrote about her own family under the title Lions in the Way, as though – poet and biographer – she would proclaim that the seafaring blood of her Cornish forebears could come to fulfilment not only in the great physician but also in that fine intelligence and clear poetic talent that nothing but the mortal mutiny of the blood could blur. I wish to celebrate and remember her too.
Sir William, no poet I think unless that vivid account of his of Michael Servetus’s execution at the stake in Geneva argues for poetic gifts, loved books and wrote much that brings a humanist into companionable country. A reader of old books as well as a collector, he admired “The Old Humanities” so much that, speaking to the Classical Association under the plea of ignorance (though wearing scarlet and speaking as their President) he could draw apt illustration from Lucretius and quote in Greek. Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici was his first love, his constant companion, and he took the book to death with him; beyond Browne he treasured old learning and Burton’s Anatomy; and many of his essays and addresses were about young people or were addressed to young men, students, the men who, under his influence, were to change the practice of medicine by the infection of his not always grave spirit. His collection of books demonstrates that he was not seeking through literary self-indulgence to shore up a divided mind. “Books have been my delight these 30 years,” he proclaimed in 1901, “and from them I have received incalculable benefits. To study the phenomena of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not to go to sea at all.” His books were of great importance to the practice of his profession; and from this position he could say confidently: “For the general practitioner a well-used library is one of the few correctives of the premature senility which is so apt to overtake him. Self-centred, self-taught, he leads a solitary life, and unless his everyday experience is controlled by careful reading ... it soon ceases to be of the slightest value and becomes a mere accretion of isolated facts, without correlation.”
Is that view of his out of date now, supplanted by computers and the probable techniques of information retrieval? The predilections that he stood for, and the traits of character for which he was notable, are these now dispossessed by a new more scientific mystique? I think not; because I believe in the continuing and fruitful destiny of “the old humanities” in civilization at large and in the compassionate practice of medicine, through their power to supply what in my title is called “The Wisdom of the Body”. But for that phrase I must turn to another writer – Sir Charles Sherrington, the neurologist. Sherrington, born in 1857, was eight years younger than Osler. Osler’s great textbook, The Principles and Practices of Medicine, was published in 1891 (when he was 44); Sherrington’s first major book and his most characteristic was published in 1906 (when he was 49) – The Integrative Action of the Nervous System. This same theme of integrative action (the basis as I understand it of all modern neurological theory and practice) Sherrington was to explore on a much broader canvas 30 years later in his Gifford Lectures of 1937-8 (published 1940) – Man on His Nature. It is the title of Chapter IV of that book that I have chosen for my title and theme.
In the same way that Osler’s work had been richly informed by his study of the historical evolution of medicine, Sherrington had also read deeply in early medical writings, and used as a point of reference the work of Jean Fernel, whose Paris folio of 1542, De Abditis Rerum Causis (On the Hidden Causes of Things), is the source from which modern physiology flows. Fernel, like Osler, was an outstandingly successful practising physician, whether at the Court, as physician to Henri II, or to wealthy patients, or to the poor people who crowded to him for treatment. His portrait shows him in profile with a heavy but not brutish mouth, and a great promontory of a broken-backed nose; his signature is elaborate and fanciful even by sixteenth century standards. Fernel (according to Sherrington) first drew physiology into one discipline, gave it its name, and held that physiology was the necessary introduction to scientific medicine. Sherrington saw in Fernel an illuminating parallel to the state of scientific affairs in the 1930’s, because of his view of Nature. Nature for Fernel was “cause” – “the cause of the manifold of the perceptible works around us. Not in antithesis to man, but rather in corollary to man. The works of Nature stand in relation to Nature as do products of the arts and crafts to man. As when seeing a statue we know there must have been a sculptor, so when we see a mountain, a tree, or a bird, we know there must be an immediate cause for it, and that immediate cause is Nature.” Fernel saw man as integral to Nature; Sherrington went beyond that to see man as integral within himself as well as within his world.
Osler, reflecting on Plato’s Republic, points out how Plato recognized that “states [society] are as men are – they grow out of human characters”; and so Plato gradually came to see that “after all the true state is within, of which each one of us is the founder.” It is the notion (which Osler quotes with approval) of “the true state within” that links Osler and Sherrington in my mind, and suggested as an appropriate figure for what I wanted to say, Sherrington’s phrase “The Wisdom of the Body.” The wisdom of the body is perhaps much of what makes possible the massive and beautiful surgery I watched on one occasion in the past. But Sherrington refers the phrase to a process of self-realization so sure-footed that it is difficult to think of it other than as purposive: it is the way a body knows how to grow; a process not of growth only, but integrative growth of breathtaking scale and intricacy. The growth “from a rounded microscopic speck to a shaped creature” – a story (he says) without parallel outside the world of life – is not only a process of multiplication but also of exact and forward-looking specialization. Sherrington quotes Darwin – “I remember well the time when the thought of the eyes made me cold all over” – and in this IVth chapter traces the process of growth, in the embryo generally but with particular attention to the eye: telling how two hollow buds of the brain move out towards the overlying skin, and how this in turn forms into a cuplike hollow to meet them for the beginning of the formation of the eyes: and how all this – and much else – is possible simply because certain molecules have a trick of folding. And not for the eyes only but for the whole body.
The cells of the various parts of the systematized assembly assume, as need is, special shapes, octagonal, stellate, threadlike, or what not. They, as the case may require, pour out cement which binds, or fluid in which they shall move free; or they hold hands for surer and more sensitive contact. Some will have changed their stuff and become rigid bone or, harder still, the enamel of a tooth; some become fluid as water, so to flow along tubes too fine for the eye to see. Some become clear as glass, some opaque as stone, some colourless, some red, some black. Some become factories of a furious chemistry, some become inert as death. Some become engines of mechanical pull, some scaffoldings of static support. Some a system transmitting electrical signs. Each one of all the millions upon millions finally specializes into something helpful to the whole. It might serve as a text for democracy. It is as if the life of each one of all those millions has understood its special part.
The process slows down relatively early when the rate of geometrical expansion has brought the count of cells to a great many millions of millions: but it continues in a temperate and judicious manner – “Not to stop altogether until by misadventure, or, after years, by natural term, there falls on the whole assembly that subversive change called death.” This in Sherrington’s view is the Wisdom of the Body.
Osler had said (following Plato) that “the true State is within”; and Sherrington had said that the systematized specialization of the cells in an organism “might serve as a text for democracy.” This notion of Sherrington’s, like Osler’s appeal to the cumulative wisdom of books, may seem unrealistic. Does our democracy organize itself around an exquisitely self-determinate specialization of function and nature? Neither our government nor our social order tempts us to believe anything of the sort. Yet Sherrington may well be right. Perhaps the process of growth, the development of cells in a living organism, should be held more clearly before our minds as a metaphor for democracy: for it may be that our figures and analogies for our social and individual order are not appropriate, doing violence to interpretation by crudity of expression. In industrial circles, “integration” has become a common euphemism for getting rid of people one no longer wants to employ. (Did Hitler “integrate” the Jews?) But Sherrington used the word deliberately and with great precision, as a luminous analogy so rooted in the actual that the more minutely he traced the analogy in man’s nature and experience, the more light the figure threw upon man’s perceptual experience, his ways of thinking and knowing, his ways of dreaming, recognizing, reflecting. So we seem to have moved out of the immediate context of medicine, physiology and neurology into reflections upon man’s nature and his place in the world.
Sherrington has unexpectedly brought us full circle to recognize the most civilized manifestation in what appears to be the most primitive and radical – the wisdom of the body. Sherrington’s theme is a theme of quasi-purposive specialization that bespeaks a highly developed integration. “Finite mind appears to be an outcome of the integration of the individual,” he says – yet not of any integration whatsoever, but only of a peculiar and complex hierarchical integration as seen in the human being. What holds his attention and delight is “the state within” – in which (to use archaic words) mind, feeling, instinct, intuition, memory interinanimate each other. “The spirit whether of brute or man,” he says, “is impotent of accomplishment unless it have emotion.” “The state within” was Plato’s phrase chosen by Osler: Sherrington states that “Aristotle, as against Plato, knew that what matters is the concrete individual, that the individual is the approach to reality.”
Here we touch upon that broad integration that we may associate with poetry and with the body; and by engaging the nature of poetry (as far as we can define or know it) discover how the body, rather than the mind alone, may proclaim wisdom: for poetry makes its way in the universe of feeling without inhibiting or precluding intellect; and poetry by its intense and accurate concern for concrete particulars finds that particulars – in their intense particularity – may become symbolic, giving access to universals – to what is always and everywhere the case. Wisdom implies a mode of knowing-about-life, with reference to whatever in human life is universal. Wisdom, we may say, has to do with the life and death of the spirit. Our concern therefore is with the ways of knowing that secure life and turn death aside. These life-giving ways of knowing are symbolic.
There is a silent convention among bibliophiles that you never ask questions about the contents of books in case the collector, interested in state, binding, and edition, may be embarrassed to have to admit that he has not read his books. Osler was not one of these. He seems to have read affectionately but with the detachment and analytical attention that he directed towards any phenomena open to scientific inquiry. In his essay “Creators, Transmuters, and Transmitters” he states categorically that “the vast majority of all books are dead, and not one in a thousand has survived its author … The Bodleian is a huge mausoleum … [Books, like salmon eggs, need to proliferate to survive: books need] a thousand or more to secure the transmission of a single one of our very limited stock of ideas.” We commonly remark upon the rapid growth in recent years in the output of printed “knowledge”, saying that as much has been discovered in the past 20 years (or is it 30 or 50 or 10?) as had previously been recorded in the whole history of man. It is true that the number of books, periodicals, and publications of various kinds is multiplying at a rate that overtaxes libraries in the same way that the stamp issues of Monaco overtax the desire and fortitude of keen philatelists. But we might, with Osler, be quizzical, wondering whether we are witnessing a proliferation of detail or a growth in knowledge. What is theoretically available to be known has certainly increased. But details, until they are shaped in the cognitive activity of the mind, until they carry in their own form the implication of the shaping our minds have given, are of little enough substance. I prefer to speak of knowing rather than knowledge: for “knowing” implies an activity or process of relation, while “knowledge” may imply acquirable information.
Since knowing can be negative as well as positive, knowing is in part an activity of unknowing. The matrix of knowledge is ignorance; what can be known is embedded in what is not known, and what is not known gives form to what is known or knowable. The only knowing that is worthy of the name is either functional or symbolic-functional knowing being the grasp of what can be known in a dynamic pattern of how something can or does work; and symbolic knowing being the way something can or does illuminate through its own structure. I don’t suppose that acts of knowing at any level of importance are more common now than they were in Osler’s day. It is surely still true that “the vast majority of all books are dead”. But we must be careful not to take as informative figures the example of inert, unformed, trivial or ephemeral information, else we destroy the foundations of knowing by losing the flair for judicious rejection. We look for the prototypes of knowing in the most complex and highly developed instances. But these are not common or easy to come by: Einstein’s central statements in their astonishing lucidity offer an obvious example; we may also see the prototypes of complex knowing in well-ordered works of art, in poetry. The earmark of this order of knowing is a singular coincidence of the simple with the complex, the plain with the intricate.
By poetry, I mean all imaginative work; whatever flows from the comprehensive state of integration which (since Coleridge at least) has been called imagination. I think of poetry as evolving the wisdom of the body for a number of reasons. Poetry is based on processes of getting to know, upon the fertile action of remembering and forgetting based on body, on what is dark and visceral, rather than on mind. Poetry is active in feeling – that is, in pure psychic energy – and shapes feeling intricately to its meaningful purposes. Poetry is dominantly physical in its transactions, since it is focused upon the sense and tends always to convert non-perceptual activity into a perceptual mode. Poetry is a symbolizing, not a describing activity, providing not information or doctrine primarily (though it may do that incidentally) but providing illumination, extending awareness by its way of shaping our minds to its own patterns and activities. The worst possible single analogy for poetry is “communication”. The study of poetry is astringent and purifying because it involves us in quietness and passivity; for the submission of our personal desires and fantasies and the renunciation of the will-to-know or the will-to-use are the essential preliminaries to being shaped by poetry. Not everybody is capable of this submission; and even those who are capable are not always or in all circumstances capable. (Other activities are legitimate in the presence of poetry, but they are peripheral and differently patterned.) Whatever the use of poetry, it is capable of inducing a state of wholeness, of dynamic integration towards something finely organized which is not ourselves and cannot be changed by us. So it is that what in the inner life is most practical, may become so by being most magical, allusive, and oblique, drawing upon more and more recondite and obscure resources of pattern and energy. And so it is that poetry preserves in us what is most primitive and complex, imparting to the most civilized and intellectual the primordial impulse that flows upward out of darkness to escape the narrower imperatives of will and mere intelligence. Though this scheme embraces and obliterates the ancient and Pauline duality of body and spirit, apparently neglecting mind for body by assigning wisdom to the body, it actually implies a broader and deeper integration of the person than that, a state of wholeness that seems to be accessible only when the first emphasis falls upon what has dominantly to do with the body rather than with mind – the feelings, the sense, the patterned feelings that flow from perception without ever slipping (as is our almost incorrigible habit) into the commerce of conceptual abstraction.
Osler’s Principles and Practices was first published in 1891, sold 41,000 copies in two editions, and was in its 16th edition in 1947. Is the book yet outmoded? It will be one day soon perhaps if its value depends upon the cumulative organization of the best information available. I do not know the book, but I imagine that one hears in it already (if it has not been continuously and carefully rewritten) the increasingly distant and dated trend of assumptions that no longer ring exactly true – not matters of theory or fact, but matters of moral tone, judgments upon man and his nature, guesses about the shape and substance of the moral universe. As far as the book does not in our minds take on the grotesque and patronizing savour of clothes out of fashion, its permanence would be its ability not simply to speak directly to us (for even a liar or guttersnipe may do that) but to fashion our minds to its purpose – as an affectionate tone of voice may, or a gesture of lyrical and guileless fancy. Such a span of life would be unusual indeed in a work of exposition. Sir Thomas Browne nourished Osler, and Fernel refreshed Sherrington at a distance of 400 years; but it is not in the nature of expository works, which are deliberately direct and uttered for an overt purpose, to be so durable or vivid. More oblique, though usually more tenuous, less monumental in their pretensions, are the symbolic statements (of which in their kind both Osler and Sherrington may have given us examples); and therefore I call upon the words of Anne Wilkinson to show, from another angle of wonder and organization no less complex that the physical growth of a body, how sure-footed a poem may be in its obliquity, how ingenious in its self-organization, how direct in its bodily wisdom.
A CAUTIONARY TALE
… we had sold our death ... for the sum of £70:18:6d and lent our fear ... on interest of £3:10:0d per month, so we did not care about death and we did not fear again. – (The Palm Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola.)
She met a lion face to face
As she went walking
Up to her hips in grass
On the wild savannah.
So close they stood they touched
If she put out her thumb
Or he his soft ferocious paw.
She bore no weight of fear,
For only yesterday
She’d leased it to a rich man, poor
In that commodity.
Without her terror she was free
From the alarming smell
That irritates a lion
And makes him lash his tail.
And so he yawned, and stretched
On the long stemmed grasses,
And in the pouring sun
She sat beside his royalty
And sang to him a tale of moon.
Before he rose to go
He opened wide his jaw
And took between his teeth
Her wishing bone, as if to say,
I could, you know.
A rich man had her caution
So she laughed; cool,
In the lion’s ear, her pretty breath.
What happened next happens
To every maiden fair
Who lends her fear
But forgets to sell her death;
The lion ate her up, and down
To the smallest crumb.
Lord have mercy upon
Her sweet white bones. Amen.
I will not try to say what sort of activity this poem represents, nor to say by what means it says what it has to say. Like the hollow brain-buds that become eyes, though no single cell can know its destiny but can know only (it seems) its autonomous duty, so the various images and rhythms in the poem, the lucky accidents and feats of technical virtuosity find their proper relations to each other – if the poet has the grace at some point to leave things alone – taking up an exactly demure attitude that is disarming in its self-possession and unbelievable for its self-definition. This too is hierarchical integration of a very complex order. We might do worse than take poetry – if we knew enough about the facts of its nature and activity – as the metaphorical figure for our highest integrative activities, for our lives and societies: for indeed it may be the prototype of all our ways of knowing and recognizing. In any case, when this order of events happens – wherever or however, in an actual episode of life, in a turn of thought or words, or in the evolution of a complicated and difficult argument or exposition – there is a special tune that we respond to with that open affirmative of renunciation and submission; we become one with ourselves, powerful in our integrity, discovering and disclosing the wisdom of the body.