Quote:
Originally Posted by Erik Olson
Dickinson's definition makes more sense to me when once taken as rather more rhetorical and hyperbolical than literal and absolute.
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I take her as being literal and absolute, and know exactly what she's talking about. Sadly, my understanding of brain chemistry is limited, I'm a poet, not a neuroscientist. And it seems there are only a few chemicals involved: dopamine, cortisol, oxytocin, serotonin, gaba. Maybe others, in combination, who knows? But something happens, top of the head, back of the head, somewhere around there. A really good section of poetry induces it. Not light-headedness, exactly, and not precisely the warm glow of orgasmic response, but something in that neighborhood. And it leaves the reader, in this case, me, with a sense of joyful wholeness, a lasting impression of the unity of all being, and a desire to constantly reclaim the immediacy of that sensation.
I think this is what Baudelaire was talking about with his "enivrez-vous sans cesse," although he got the details a little messed up. But the phenomenon is demonstrably real, and, I believe, nearly universal. Most of us experience something like it when encountering true works of art, and the medium doesn't matter so much: poetry, painting, music, they can all induce a variant of the sensation.
Best,
Bbill