Re-Doing Rapunzel's Hair: Viewing Subjective Cognition in Fancifold 1443857130, 9781443857130

Citation preview

Re-doing Rapunzel’s Hair

Re-doing Rapunzel’s Hair: Viewing Subjective Cognition in Fancifold

By

Lisa Pavlik-Malone

Re-doing Rapunzel’s Hair: Viewing Subjective Cognition in Fancifold, by Lisa Pavlik-Malone This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by Lisa Pavlik-Malone All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5713-0, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5713-0

For my friends

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ..................................................................................... ix List of Tables .............................................................................................. xi Acknowledgements .................................................................................. xiii Introduction ............................................................................................. xvii In Death and In Life: (Rapunzel’s) Hair as linked to Embodied Meaning Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1 Characterizing the Psycho-Natural: Fancifold, Mental Gestation, and the Rapunzel-scape Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 19 The Relationship of Hairy Experience to Maiese’s Sensori-Motor Subjectivity Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 31 “Enchanting Follicles, Disenchanting Shafts”: Cognitive Journeys through Fancifold Conclusion ................................................................................................. 53 Into “The fold” Again: Re-doing Rapunzel’s Hair Bibliography .............................................................................................. 55

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Rapunzel (art doll) by Joanna Thomas 2.1 Sunday, Women Drying Their Hair by John French Sloan 3.1 “mermaid holding comb and mirror”, Public Domain 3.2 Pink Hair by Valerie Vargas 3.3 Water Sprites by Gustav Klimt 3.4 Amanda by Dan Cortopassi 3.5 Redtail Moon by Dan Cortopassi 3.6 Untitled by Magda Vasters 3.7 Cups of Tea by Marguerite Sauvage 3.8 Photograph by Bastian Werner; hair by Tanja Kern 3.9 Untitled by Olaf Hajek 3.10 Fungus by Eveline Tarunadjaja 3.11 Untitled by Yuko Shimizu 3.12 Untitled by Toril Baekmark 4.1 “mermaid holding comb and mirror”, Public Domain

LIST OF TABLES

1-1 Four Categories of Life Represented in the Rapunzel Fairytale

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As a child, I was captivated by certain (popular) fairytale images, such as Cinderella’s glass slipper, Sleeping Beauty at rest, and Rapunzel’s incredibly long hair hanging way down a tower. To this day, I still feel an attraction toward, and a curiosity, for these fantastical details. This current book is, essentially, a fruit of this ongoing personal fascination which, as of late, has become couched in the possibility of such memorable images having influence over adult cognition, subjective experience, and the creative imagination. I want to thank many individuals for their help and support in writing and preparing this book: the editors at Cambridge Scholars Publishing for their continued interest in my work and for all of their help in preparing this book; doll artist Joanna Thomas for use of her Rapunzel photo; Addison Gallery Of American Art and Jim Sousa for the use of the painting Sunday, Women Drying Their Hair by John French Sloan; Valerie Vargas for use of her piece Pink Hair; the Bank of Austria Art Collection and Lisa Oetner-Kreil for the use of Gustav Klimt’s Water Sprites, and Susanna from laks@laks; Dan Cortopassi for the use of his two pieces Amanda and Redtail Moon, and Inka Lohrmann at TASCHEN; Marguerite Sauvage for use of her piece Cups of Tea; photographer Bastian Werner and hairstylist Tanja Kern for the use of the photo that is illustration number 4.8 in this book; Olaf Hajek for the use of his piece Untitled that is illustration number 4.9; Eveline Tarunadjaja for use of her piece Fungus, and Koko Nakano for speaking to me on Eveline’s behalf; Yuko Shimizu for use of her piece Untitled that is illustration number 4.11; Toril Baekmark for use of her piece Untitled that is illustration number 4.12; Annette Brunner at Gestalten; Diane Donovan for use of her poems Her Hair and Eighty-Eight; Ruth Moose for use of her poem Blonde; Joyce Odam for use of her poem Leaning Down Into Green; Conciere Taylor for use of her Haiku poem; Hans Van de Bovenkamp on behalf of Siv Cedering Fox for use of her poem Dead Women; Susan Mernit for use of her poem Braiding; my husband, Peter, for his technical guidance in preparing the visual for this project; Peter Simon for his help with the proofreading of the text; Gloria and Bill Kiprais for their continued support for this project.

Rapunzel (doll); Reproduced by permission of Joanna Thomas.

In the beginning, there were ends The woman now sets a trap for the prince, using a trick neither Rapunzel nor her lover considered: cutting off Rapunzel’s hair and using it as a ladder. Had the young lovers thought of this, they might have escaped unscathed…The woman cuts it, stealing Rapunzel’s beauty and sexuality. She now poses as the girl, lowering the hair to the prince… The prince arrives, but now sees only the old woman. She tells him what has happened, and in despair he leaps from the tower, and is blinded by the briars below.

(From “Fairy Tale Rituals”, 2011, by Kenny Klein)

INTRODUCTION

In death and in life: (Rapunzel’s) hair as linked to embodied meaning The “ends” referred to in the scenario just presented, are the long, detached strands of hair currently held in hand by the old woman. As a whole these ends, once natural parts of Rapunzel‘s body, have historically served both women wellas a ladder for one, as a golden avalanche of sex-appeal for the other. Now, much to some’s dismay, it has been used as a luxuriously seductive weapon against the “life force”, the atavistic urge that encapsulates the ecstasy and agony of romantic love. After cutting off her hair, the enchantress banishes Rapunzel to a desert, where the blinded prince aimlessly goes, but where he eventually finds “his” Rapunzel. Kenny Klein describes, The enchantress locks Rapunzel into a new prison, in a desert; the desert is devoid of life. Since Rapunzel sneakily let her natural urge to mate and procreate come through, the enchantress will lock her in a place where life cannot grow, where she will not have sex or make babies (2011: 201). …the prince represents life and love, while Rapunzel has always lived in the dark tower…and has been prohibited from creating new life. Now the prince must experience this dark, lifeless Underworld, as Rapunzel has, before he may be reborn…into our world…“Then he wandered quite blind about the forest, ate nothing but roots, and berries, and did naught but lament and weep…he roamed about in misery for some years, and…came to the desert where Rapunzel, with the twins to which she had given birth, a boy and a girl, lived in wretchedness.” (2011: 202; direct quote taken from the Margaret Hunt translation of the Grimms’ 1812 collection).

In this fairytale, the desert symbolizes what the ancient Greeks refer to as The Underworld, the place where all newly departed souls were believed to go, and so (it was believed) life could never exist. In Greek Mythology, it was also thought that human souls moved from the “living” world to The Underworld, but not from the world of death back to the world of life. The story of Rapunzel is, essentially, the triumph of the continuation of life over death in at least two ways. One, although this

xviii

Introduction

desert is known to be a place where physical life cannot thriveso neither can psychic life, nor romantic life, nor spiritual life, all four kinds of life forces are “played out”. And two, the prince brings himself, Rapunzel, and their two children back into the “living” world, the act that marks their eventual and complete triumph over the motives of the enchantress. Klein writes, …the prince…is drawn to his love…his long time in The Underworld, blind, and relying on only on his inner senses, has given him a psychic ability to connect with dreams and inner urgings. His visions and instincts have guided him to Rapunzel in her desert solitude. There she with the twins he has given her; with the instinct of young women everywhere, she has broken through the deathly energies of even this dark, lifeless place and has brought new life into the world (2011: 202). Rapunzel is now rescued from her Underworld prison. Her lover, the father of her two children, has come back to take her back to our world… Rapunzel is so emotional when the prince holds her that she cries: “Two of her tears wetted his eyes and they grew clear again and he could see with them as before.” (2011: 203).

Both Physical Life and Romantic Life are considered (see Table 1-1) to be “concrete” and “three-dimensional” because each contains energy forces that most would consider tangible in relation to the result or effect they produce, or are believed to produce. For example, one can literally see a baby being delivered or “see” basic sadness in the eyes of man or a woman who has been long separated from his or her “love”. Similarly, one can empirically study (and even manipulate to some degree) human reproductive processes from conception, into gestation, into childbirth. Also, the human ability to read emotions (particularly “basic” emotions, e.g., happiness, sadness, and fear) in the eyes is linked to heightened neuro-cognitive activity in certain areas of the human brain. In contrast, Spiritual Life and Psychic Life are considered to be “invisible” and “not three-dimensional”, since both kinds of energy are not tangibly linked to experiential incarnations in the material world. Thus, one can only assume that one’s intuition can be associated in some way with a certain achieved effect or result, e.g., the prince believes that his intuition led him to find Rapunzel, yet any prototypic concrete form of his intuition eludes even him. The same can be said for Spiritual Life; no tangible, explanatory connection can readily be made between liquid tears of one‘s love falling on said spot, and the sudden healing of the physical affliction.

Re-doing Rapunzel’s Hair: Viewing Subjective Cognition in Fancifold

xix

Four “life” categories (the Rapunzel fairytale) Physical Life

Concrete, Three-dimensional

Rapunzel gives birth to twins, a boy and a girl.

Romantic Life

Concrete, Three-dimensional

During his journey through The Underworld, the prince longs for his love Rapunzel; when he finds her, she cries as he holds her in his arms.

Spiritual Life

Invisible, Not three-dimensional

Rapunzel’s two tears fall into the prince’s eyes, and this brings back his sight.

Psychic Life

Invisible, Not three-dimensional

The prince connects with his dreams and his inner urgings. His visions and instincts guide him to Rapunzel.

Table 1-1 Four Categories of Life Represented in the Rapunzel Fairytale

For this study, a fundamental question is, How does Rapunzel’s hair, including its severed “ends”, relate to each of, as well as all of, the four categories of life force represented in the Rapunzel fairytale? In exploring an answer to this question, each of the four categories needs to be considered in detail within a conceptual context of hair, that includes, more specifically, what is known and/or imagined about Rapunzel’s hair. Physical Life. Here, physical life refers to energy forces that center around and encompass human hair (on the head). In his 2012 book, Hair: The Long and The Short of It, Dr. Art Neufeld writes, Technically, the filament that you see emerging from the scalp is called the hair shaft. For simplicity, we call it hair. There is a part of the hair above the skin surface and a part that penetrates into the upper layer of skin, the epidermis. On average, there is a density of about 1600 hairs per square inch of scalp…the density is not uniform and can vary on different regions of the head… (2012: 16).

xx

Introduction The hair shaft, which has no living parts and is made up of inert, complex proteins, is constructed by specialized living cells in the skin, that are some of the most active, hard working and tireless cells in the body. They have their own independent work schedules. For whatever reason we have hair, we grow a lot of it (2012: 21).

Thus, in hair, we have the synergistic juxtaposition of death and life, of the hair strands deceased, alongside the living cells out of which they have grown. Neufeld continues, The hair follicle is the factory that constructs the hair shafts growing from the skin…The hair follicle is an organ. Other organs include your brain, heart, liver, eyes and kidneys. The hair follicle…has a blood supply, an internal lining of cells, an innervated muscle, a sebaceous gland and a cup of stem cells that sometimes are resting, sometimes are very active, and sometimes are dead. Each hair follicle…has a strenuous life cycle; it works hard for years to build the hair shaft, then shrinks, becomes inactive and rests, and later resurrects itself into a fully functioning organ (2012: 22). Each one of the remarkable hair follicles in your scalp is a separate, independent, autonomous organ. Think about a blade of grass in a lawn…It is not in communication with the individual grass…next to it and there is no external, overall control for the growth of each blade of grass in the lawn. Every blade of grass does its own thing and a beautiful green lawn is produced. Just like a plant producing a blade of grass is autonomous, each hair follicle has its own cycle and schedule, and doesn’t take orders from anyone (2012: 22-23). The hair follicle is located beneath the skin surface…that extends into the dermis…The hair follicle undergoes cyclical changes in size, activity level and structure…When awakening from its dormant state, the cells of the…follicle release, locally within each hair follicle, many chemical signals that orchestrate the self-rebuilding of the hair follicle into an active organ. Rebuilding and reactivation…of the hair follicle is not due to extrinsic factors from the bloodstream or the environment. Control is local, intrinsic and, again, autonomous…a hair shaft emerges from the hair follicle… (2012: 23).

So, each hair cell or hair follicle continually restores its own vitality; neither internal conditions, i.e., the person’s own bloodstream, nor any conditions of the external body environment, including neighboring follicles, contribute to the growth of each strand or shaft. The self-organizing nature of the hair follicle organ has implications for imagining how Rapunzel’s strands of hair might have fared all those years in the desert, where her body managed to carry both her developing

Re-doing Rapunzel’s Hair: Viewing Subjective Cognition in Fancifold

xxi

children to term. For instance, did her hair also continue to grow? And if so, when the prince finally found her in the desert, was her hair luxurious and brightly golden as before, when he secretly visited her by climbing “the golden stair“? Thus, certain alternate scenarios of the fairytale that potentially include Rapunzel’s hair, might allude to synergistic activity between life and death, where life continues to develop (in the forms of a boy and a girl) in the “Kingdom of Death” (the desert). Romantic Life. Here, romantic life refers to energy forces that center around and encompass human lovemaking. Of course, these forces include dynamics of sexual attraction as well as sensual pleasure and allure. In his book, Klein states, Hair is…extremely sexual, and holds a woman’s power to seduce and delight…In Rapunzel’s case, her hair carries both sexuality and power. Locked in her tower, unable to express her sexuality to society in any other way, she is allowed to grow her long, beautiful hair. Like her name, it is an expression of her femininity, her lure. But the enchantress uses the hair to reach the chaste girl, to protect her from the men her hair might attract (2012: 200).

In her book, Rapunzel’s Daughters: What Women’s Hair Tells Us About Women’s Lives (2004), sociologist Rose Weitz describes how encouraging young girls to “play around with” their own (and their friends’) hair, explicitly introduces them to its intrinsic sensual qualities. The pleasures of hair are many. At the simplest level, learning to spend time on hair offers girls a new toy, a continual source of cheap entertainment. Even girls who have many other toys still enjoy the sensual pleasure of playing with hair, either their own or others’. And for those who grow up poor, regardless of the era in which they are born, hair play can compensate partially for their lack of other toys. Those who have few dolls, or only cheap dolls with plastic-molded hair, can play with their own and others’ hair, enjoying the artistic pleasure of experimenting…the opportunity to create new images for themselves and their friends to use in dress-up games (2004: 53).

As young girls become sexually mature, they naturally begin to “play around with” and “move with” their hair in kinesthetic ways that romantically excite not only themselves, but their potential attractors as well. In her book Hair: Surviving the Fall (2004), psychologist Sara Romweber describes her interviews with twenty individuals (ten of whom are women), between the ages 21 and 48, on the personal and social value of hair.

xxii

Introduction “The erotic appeal of a woman’s hair is a complex matter of texture, color, scent, and movement,” said Wendy Cooper, and a woman does have control over most of these elements. She can color her hair, and perfume it, and she can move her head in such a way, setting her hair in motion, so that it will swing in a graceful, sexy manner. She can also play with a strand or two, always an inviting signal. It is simply part of the performance. Angela spoke about women who, when out in a crowd and looking for guys, start playing with a lock of their hair… “It’s just a way of showing that she can be touched…You know, how many times have you seen that behavior…particularly among younger girls…girls who are nervous around boys…it’s like mane-shaking among horses.” (2004: 31).

In addition to the visual and tactile dimensions of hair, there is also the olfactory dimension. Romweber explains, …the scalp hair is identified as one of the seven parts of the body that gives off secretions or odors related to purging and cleansingnatural odors, which are believed to be seductive through their delicate smell. In addition, W. Montagna wrote that larger numbers of sebaceous glands that are located “on the scalp, forehead, cheeks, and chin, and these glands are controlled by sex hormones.” Michael Stoddard, also, identified the scalp as one of the major scent-gland regions of the human body. He identified 17 sites of scent production…and wrote that “the quality of odour produced by human scent glands…links odour production with sexual communication” (2004: 100).

Thus, with the sight, touch, and smell of hair being integral to sexual allure, comes the realization that physical life and romantic life can, on some primordial level, become one and the same force. In line with this notion, is the fact that synthetic treatment of various kinds, e.g., dying, spraying, weaving, are frequently applied to produce sensorial improvements that others would instinctively gravitate their attention towards and find attractive, i.e., having blonde, black, brown, or red rather than grey hair, having a soft musky smell of hair rather than a more bland one, having hair that is thicker rather than thinner. Indeed, the sensory pleasure potentially gleaned from hair also relates to various ways in which it is styled or decorated, and can range from simplistic, e.g., having soft flowing waves or a delicate barrette, to highly detailed, e.g., having interwoven braids or a spray of flowers upon one’s up-do. In her book, Romweber describes how African women of the Malagasy Republic “…used elegantly designed hair to attract men” (2004: 66), whereas sexually mature (non-adolescent aged) women in North Africa “…wore elaborate and complex hairstyles…For ceremonial occasions they adorned these hairstyles with ornaments, such as shells and coins” (2004: 66). So,

Re-doing Rapunzel’s Hair: Viewing Subjective Cognition in Fancifold

xxiii

in the felt need of women, in particular, to “treat” and “train” their hair in certain ways, may come the implicit sense of impending “death” to romantic life without doing so, even if the hair itself continues to re-grow. Indeed, this may be a primordial juncture, where physical life energy and romantic life energy go their own separate ways. In his study of natural hair growth and re-growth, Neufeld mentions how hair follicles on the human adult scalp tend to die off as one advances in age; this happens on the heads of both men and women (but is, generally speaking, more extensive in men). And both Weitz and Romweber have written about the personal awkwardness and even emotional pain that women, in particular, can feel when their hair is “not right”. This “not-rightness” of one’s hair incorporates various physical characteristics such as color, texture, smell, length, movement, thickness, and so on. Weitz explains, …for every pleasure hair brings, there’s a parallel pain. If hair offers girls an opportunity to develop their creativity, it also presses them to stifle their creativity, for in any time and place only a certain range of hairstyles are considered acceptable. Most of the time girls spend on their hair is devoted not to creating hairstyles on their own, but to making their hair look like that of their older sisters, their media idols, or the popular kids in their school (2004: 57). And if lessons about the importance of hair persuade some girls to willingly sacrifice money, time, freedom, and physical comfort for the sake of their hair…Nor are those sacrifices guaranteed to bring the desired results. The more importance a girl places on her hair, the more vulnerable she is when she can’t control it. As a result, for every girl who gains confidence and self-esteem from attractive hair, another lose confidence and self-esteem when her efforts fail (2004: 57).

Sara Romweber also explains, Women who have lost their hair seem to know that they are missing this sexual sign. Yolanda spoke about her fears of rejection. She said that she and her husband were not living together during the initial phase of her hair loss, and when she realized that he wanted a divorce, she said to herself, “Who…is going to want a…woman…who is going bald?”…And Sheila, who doesn’t let men get too close,” said that she’s afraid once a man finds out that she doesn’t hair any hair, “it might change things” (2004: 30).

In addition, there are things to be pondered on these matters in considering photographer Dina Goldstein’s work. Her 2009 collection

xxiv

Introduction

titled Fallen Princesses, is comprised of photographs of fairytale princesses such as Cinderella, Snow White, and Rapunzel, featured in psychologically comprised ways, that are meant to reflect the modern women‘s human condition. She states, I began to imagine Disney’s perfect princesses juxtaposed with real issues that were affecting women around me, such as illness, addiction and self-image issues (June 16, 2009: absenceofalternatives.com). These works place Fairytale characters in modern day scenarios. In all of the images the princess is placed in an environment that articulates her conflict. The “…happily ever after” is replaced with a realistic outcome and addresses current issues (June 16, 2009: absenceofalternatives.com).

More specifically, the Rapunzel photograph seems to relate directly to illness and self-image. One can say illness, because the young woman appears to be in a hospital room. Although she is sitting on, rather than lying in, the bed, she simultaneously holds, in her right hand, the silver pole that includes her IV drip. In her left hand is clutched a part of the very long braid of her golden blonde wig; the entire wig spans from the bed, to her hand, and onto the floor for at least a few feet in front of where she is seated; hence, the image resonates with issues regarding her self-image as well, especially through her emotional need to hold onto her synthetic hair. In terms of replacing the “happily ever after” with a realistic outcome, it seems that a young woman of sexual maturity named Rapunzel, got sick. As a direct result of this illness and/or from the medical treatment of it, she lost all of her natural hair. In light of this scenario, one wonders what would be more traumatic for Rapunzel: having her natural hair cut off (which took place in the actual fairytale), with no means of recovering this loss for at least a very long time…or being given an intact “Rapunzel” wig to compensate for her complete baldness? Based on the ideas described earlier, it seems that, where romantic life is concerned, Rapunzel would not be particularly desiring of either of these alternatives. Spiritual Life. Here, spiritual life refers to energy forces that center around and encompass human inner strength. In her book, Rose Weitz states, “…when we talk about hair and romance, we talk not only about love but also about powerthe ability to obtain desired goals through controlling or influencing others” (2004: 92). Also, Klein considers the potential power and influence of hair as directly related to its uncanny ability to regenerate itself completely anew. “…it is one of the very few parts of our body that we can lose and grow back…For this reason, hair represents regeneration and rebirth. It holds our strength, our power to

Re-doing Rapunzel’s Hair: Viewing Subjective Cognition in Fancifold

xxv

renew the world around us and to exert our control upon the world.” (p.199) These complex metaphors of “hair as strength as re-growth” and “hair as strength as rebirth” have been illustrated in a 2009 television advertisement campaign by the UK company ghd (stands for “good hair day”) for a flat iron, which is a styling iron that straightens hair. The advertisement slogan is you can do anything with your hair. The advertisement is a short narrative film that depicts “…an emancipated Rapunzel…” who “no longer relies on the knight in shining armor to free her from a towering prison: using a straightening iron, her hair becomes longer and helps her escape on her own” (November 17, 2009: SurLaLune Fairy Tales Blog). The advertisement is just a minute or so long. It shows a knight or prince looking through his telescope at Rapunzel sitting in her tower window taking note of his stare, her luxuriously long, straight, red hair flowing from her head down the tower, As if she knew to wait there at precisely that time for his gaze, she then goes to her mirror and applies the flat iron to straighten her hair even more. Immediately following, the knight gets on his motorcycle, fierce and determined, he drives to Rapunzel’s tower, where he, presumably, climbs up the ladder she has made with her own her, into the tower, to find her not there. At the same time, we see the flat iron on her dresser and then streamlined ends of her hair (presumably “ends” that she herself cut off) bound to an attachment on the wall. The next (last) frame shows her with now markedly shorter, though still graceful and flowing hair, getting ready to take off by herself on the knight’s motorcycle, escaping from the towerher prisonby her own hand, by her own independent inner force or spirit. Perhaps, all along, she did not want to depend on the prince to free her. Furthermore, she wants him to know this, as their eyes meet for a moment, from his presence at window in the tower above, and hers from below as she sits on the bike. The potential physical alterations of hair (in this case, from exceedingly long to even longer to considerably shorter) become integral to inner personal strength using sexual allure; hence, physical life and spiritual life and romantic life have, on some primordial level, become one and the same force. However, a flip side of cutting the hair shaft to express inner strength may be its continuous re-growth in the face of impending death. This may be where romantic life energy flows can potentially bifurcate from physical and spiritual life energies intertwined. In the former sense (which refers to details of the narrative advertisement), romantic life energy may be sacrificed by Rapunzel in cutting off her long, flowing hair (that makes her physically attractive to the opposite sex), in order to confirm her inner

xxvi

Introduction

sense of self and her independence. In the latter sense (which refers to details of the fairytale), Rapunzel’s hair may continue to grow despite her long presence in The Underworld. For all that time before she and the prince reunite, there is no romantic life. However, physical life that initially happens to flow by itself, not yet intertwined with spiritual life, is altered when Rapunzel realizes, in a moment of joy, that her hair is getting longer. From this point on, her inner (personal) strength continues to grow, which keeps her able to carry her two children to term and give birth to each of them. Would Rapunzel have been able to carry and eventually have her children, if she was losing her hair instead of growing it? Also, had romantic life forces become part of the energy cocktail again? Early on (had the prince found Rapunzel in the desert as soon as he started wondering as a newly blinded man), would Rapunzel’s inner strength have emerged at all, even with her hair growing?…And if so, would this emergence have been to a degree that was needed to keep her gestating children alive through to and including each one’s birth? It may be that spiritual life having merged with physical life, minus romantic life, produced an energy cocktail that led to a happy ending between mother and children. Psychic Life. Here, psychic life refers to energy forces that center around and encompass human intuition. A few definitions that reflect this characterization include: intuition is “perception via the unconscious” (“Intuition in Jungian Psychology”, Wikipedia: 2013: 2); intuition is “understanding or knowing without conscious recourse to thought, observation or reason…a response to unconscious cues or implicitly apprehended prior learning.” (Gallate & Keen, “Intuition in Jungian Psychology”, Wikipedia: 2013: 2); intuition is “immediate insight or perception as contrasted with conscious reasoning or reflection… characterized…as the products of instinct, feeling, minimal sense impressions, or unconscious forces” (APA, 2007: 499). Based on these three definitions, at least two overarching qualities seem to characterize intuition: one, intuitive thought is immediate; and two, intuitive thought resides at a level of cognition that this below the momentary forefront of conscious. In this study, the psychological nature of intuition will be characterized, more specifically, as comprised of nuance cycles in the brain (Briggs, 1990), as part of a metaphoric Global Workspace of conscious experience (Baars, 1997), as well as the synergistic interplay between the two. First, the term nuance refers to “…a shade of meaning, a complex of feeling, or subtlety of perception for which the mind has no words or mental categories…Since its richness isn’t described by or contained in the normal forms of thought, it isn’t easy to share with other people”

Re-doing Rapunzel’s Hair: Viewing Subjective Cognition in Fancifold xxvii

(Briggs & Peat: 1989: 194). Thus, what constitutes “normal thought” would include the presence of words that can be used to express, as well as create, mental categories; for instance, the statement “I don’t like his spunk”. In his 1990 book, Fire in the Crucible, Briggs writes about what he refers to as the “open brain”, in his consultation with physician William Grey and scientist Paul LaViolette on the subject of nuance. …thoughts and memories may be coded or logged in the brain according to their “emotional nuances or feeling tones.” Feelings are basic…anger, rejection, fear, loss, joy, astonishment. Between and among these are a huge variety of possible shades and combinations: nuances. Thoughts containing a similar nuance of feeling are filed together, even if they aren’t logically or chronologically connected. This would account for the mind’s sometimes strange association of ideas.…thought-emotions become associated together into structures vastly larger and more complex than 2+2=4...for example, our knowledge of mathematics as a whole…These “emotional-cognitive structures” become “organizationally closed” when the richness of their nuances are summarized by a simpler emotional response (such as liking blondes) or turned into thoughts which have a feeling of closure attached to them (1990: 48-50).

Thus, in the above spunk example, the word “spunk” refers to a mental category (of ideas about various behavior patterns and expressions) that exists in the mind of this individual. Presumably, the subtle shades of feeling or “nuances” that might lead this individual to make this statement about someone else, might be aroused by a quick glance in that person’s general direction, that produces a feeling sensation in this individual’s gut which the brain interprets as unpleasant. However, at a later time, this same individual may spontaneously think “flaky” (rather than “spunky”) in the presence of the same person, while having, essentially, the same emotional “gut” reaction. It may be minute differences or “nuances” felt in the gut and received by this individual’s unconscious (though barely, if at all, by his or her conscious), that leads to (what exists in this individual’s mind) as a slightly different word or concept than before. Thus, these two concepts“spunky” and “flaky”are coded in this individual’s brain with the same general feeling tones (that contain negative emotional feelings). However, it may be that the slight change in the gut (not registered much by consciousness) produced a thought in the form of the word “flaky” that the individual feels is “not quite right”, even though he or she is psychologically unable to grasp a “better” word. In such a case, his or her “emotional-cognitive structures” or feeling tones remain organizationally (more) open than if the applied word”flaky”had not been given a conscious thought when used by this individual. For this

xxviii

Introduction

reason, the individual may be in a better position psychologically for the “right word” to enter consciousness. In addition, LaViolette characterized (to Briggs) what he refers to as “nuance cycles” in the brain. These neuro-cognitive energy flows combine perceptual and emotional patterns, and roam about the limbic system in two rotations or “loops”. Briggs describes, loop 1...raw sense data passes through the thalamus into the limbic system where it circulates around and around in what is called the Papez circuit, a closed loop network of neurons connecting the limbic organs…there they trigger feeling-tone responses and generate what Grey and LaVoilette call an emotional ‘theme’…composed of an organized pattern of feeling tones…loop 2...the ‘theme’…enters a second loop communicating between portions of the thalamus and the prefrontal cortex…this loop abstracts and filters out certain nuances and amplifies them, reintroduces them into the Papez circuit…With each cycling through the prefrontal cortex, the idea…might be abstracted and amplified…The result would be a thought…The nuances, the complex of emotion and perception, are still there, but they now lie in the shadow of this abstraction (1990: 52-55).

Thus, in considering the “spunk” example once again, both words “spunky” and “flaky” are abstracted ideas used by the individual to describe someone else. If the individual feels that the word “flaky” is not “quite right”, his or her conscious experience is tapping into “the complex of emotion and perception” or nuances of his or her personal experience of the other person. Related to this idea of nuance cycles in the brain, is the Global Workspace Theory of cognitive psychologist Bernard Baars. A fundamental assumption of this theory is that consciousness encompasses multiple areas or levels of the brain simultaneously. These areas include conscious experience (what the person is aware of moment-to-moment), as well as current neuro-cognitive activity at all levels below consciousness (also referred to as the preconscious). At each of these levels are multiple activated areas that are currently communicating with numerous areas of the other levels. These internally orchestrated neuro-cognitive energy flows relay various patterns or preconscious information into consciousness. Baar’s theory relates to the idea of “nuance cycles” in both structure and function; the prefrontal cortex (in loop 2) has a significant relation to conscious experience, while neural networks below the prefrontal area, including the Papez circuit (in loop 1) where “feeling tone responses” reside, are part and parcel of the global communicative brain activity that relays patterns of preconscious information into consciousness. Might perceptual information contained in Rapunzel’s singing voice

Re-doing Rapunzel’s Hair: Viewing Subjective Cognition in Fancifold

xxix

resonate, for the prince, with certain emotional nuances or feeling tones? In the fairytale, we know that the prince did not fall in with her, at least initially, for her physical beauty. Instead, it was her beautiful, fairy-like singing voice, that he would listen to everyday in the forest, that captivated him before he even saw what she looked like. “It is the beauty of her soul that makes him want to ascend the tower” (Grimm & Grimm: 2003: 279). If this is so, might the blind prince, connecting to his dreams, visions, instincts, and inner urging while roaming through the desert, have had emotionally-laced internal images of his loveRapunzelthat included her beautiful singing voice and her long, flowing blonde hair simultaneously? Indeed, it may be that spiritual life (connecting his mind to her soul) giving him inner strength to persevere, and romantic life (connecting his mind to her hair and body) giving him something to desire and dream about, become one with psychic life minus physical life. Without any physical trace of even a hair of Rapunzel‘s, the prince’s profound focus inwardhis persistent attention to nuanced feeling and his incessant keeping track of subtle changes in patterns of information in consciousnessguided him to her location in the desert.

Embodiment (A Case for Death and Life…and Hair) Here, embodiment includes not only interplays among the concrete, three-dimensional components of the individual, i.e., the physical realm of hair, the romantic realm of lovemaking, but also components that are invisible to the five senses, and so which exist outside the concrete, three-dimensional landscape of human consciousness. Both the psychic realm and the spiritual realm are being added, as two fundamental dimensions of the human experience embodied. Within each realm is the essence of both life and death, as death is the natural “flipside” to not only physical life (the shaft produced by the hair follicle) and romantic life (when the body stops having sex and/or being sexually attractive in some concrete way, i.e., in terms of hair), but to spiritual life and psychic life as well. However, when it comes to the latter two realms, the lack of “life” force or energy seems to elude instances of concreteness. While there may be “a sense” within the individual, that his or her energy is fading or dying, the particulars of this sense are not necessarily definitive, and so are difficult to characterize matter-of-factly, even when symbolic and metaphoric thought find a way. A purpose of this study is to explore some of the cognitive psychological complexities of the four death and life realms of embodied experience. In doing so, there will be an attempt to characterize the

xxx

Introduction

spiritual and psychic realms of inner experience as synergistically integrated with the physical and romantic ones, during imaginative artistic expressions of hair. This is so, even when one or more of the forces are negated or “not present” in the momentary dynamic (similar to when patterns of neuronal energy flow contain some neurons excited and other neurons inhibited at the same time). Imagery presented from Grimm’s fairytale Rapunzel, will continue to be an integral component of the study. In exploring the four realms of embodiment, it seems appropriate to incorporate the fairytale genre for reasons articulated by child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim some four decades ago, in his famous book titled, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairytales (1976). In it, Bettelheim vividly articulates the central role of the fairytale in helping a child to understand and psychologically integrate unconscious forces that naturally exist within himself or herself, with conscious experience. He writes, A child needs to understand what is going on within his conscious self… not through rational comprehension of the nature and content of his unconscious, but by becoming familiar with it through spinning out daydreams--ruminating, rearranging, and fantasizing about suitable story elements in response to unconscious pressures. By doing this, the child fits unconscious content into conscious fantasies, which then enable him to deal with that content. It is here that fairytales have unequaled value, because they offer new dimensions to the child’s imagination…the form and structure of fairytales suggest images to the child by which he can structure his daydreams… (1973: 7).

To use fairytale imagery that includes human dynamics may be psychologically beneficial not only for children, but also for adults. In doing so, adults can continue to learn about themselves and their psychological processes through their own continued motivation personal needs, wants, and desires, to re-organize and re-interpret internal experience. Indeed, this seems to be what took place in the two alternative Rapunzel scenarios recently presented (Dina Goldstein‘s Rapunzel, as well as the Rapunzel of the company ghd). Like the classic version of the fairytale (more intended for children), the implicit messages in these new, revised scenarios (more intended for adults) are meant to reach a wide audience of people on a subjective level. Here, one can speak of a “collective” unconsciousness merging with a “collective” consciousness, to create a new, socially shared experience or understanding of the meaning of hair for women that is more emotionally relevant, and so ultimately more emotionally satisfying.

Re-doing Rapunzel’s Hair: Viewing Subjective Cognition in Fancifold

xxxi

Besides using fairytale imagery to convey social psychological messages, adults can, and indeed do, use “hair” imagery that is much more individual. Here, imagination and fantasy are used to merge unconscious or preconscious forces with new emerging thoughts, feelings, and conceptions about self, in much more private, even idiosyncratic ways. In addition, like the study of the effects of fairytale imagery on mind, these emergent psychological patterns can be studied by a third party who may apply imagery and human dynamics of a particular fairy tale, in order to better understand the “self” of another. Table 1.1, consulted earlier, includes the four categories of imagistic details that contribute to this thesis; these details are being used here, primarily to characterize the four realms of embodimentphysical, romantic, spiritual, psychicthat essentially link the Grimm’s Rapunzel fairy tale to the study of creative interpretations of hair that are more personally meaningful. To do so, the semantic (and later the semiotic) links between life and death and enchantment and disenchantment are, and will continue to be, vitally important. The term enchant means “to impart a magical quality or effect to” or “to delight to a high degree” (Random House, 1984: 435). There is “magic” or “delight” in the story of Rapunzel that, for several reasons, embrace the four realms of “life”. These include: the endurance of romantic love; the power of life over death; the strength of the spirit to heal; and the ability of dreams and inner visions to positively influence conscious experience. Thus, in having read this classic fairytale, and having identified with its key characters, one can feel inspiration, hope that life will always triumph over death. However, in recent years, there has been an intellectual movement to study the “flipside”, if you will, of fairy tale enchantment, referred to as the anti-fairy tale. To disenchant means “to deprive of or free from enchantment” or to “disillusion” (Random House, 1984: 380). In turn, the term disillusion means “to free from or deprive of illusion” or “a feeling or a being freed from illusion” (Random House, 1984: 381). According to Catriona McAra and David Calvin, art and fairytales, as well as other literary genres, that are meant to disenchant, function not to negate the psychological value of the fairy tale. In their book of collected essays titled, Anti-Tales: The Uses of Disenchantment (2011), McAra and Calvin cite Rosalind Krauss (2000 & 1985) and Hal Foster (1983) “…have been influential with their notions of anti-narrative…” (2011: 4), and who state that the anti-tale “…is not intended as one more assertion of the negation of art or of representation…but rather of a critique which destructures the order of representations in order to reinscribe them” (2011: 4). To this, McAra and Calvin add,

xxxii

Introduction

Whatever the reader’s position, we would advise the reader to refrain from interpreting disenchantment as a complete negation. This collection opens itself to the possibility of dis-enchantment and “anti-ness” as very creative critical tools. In textual and visual terms…the anti-tale is not opposed to narrative, in a purely abstract and formalist way, but is “anti-” in terms of an amoral or cruel depiction and/or subversive re-assemblage (2011: 5).

In addition, Calvin has referred to fairy tale/anti-fairy tale dichotomy as “two sides of the same coin” (2011: 3). As part of his research, he has introduced many “key features” to characterize and illustrate their relationship. Some of these features include: optimism/pessimism; teleological, anticipatory/retrospective, subversive; “once upon a time”/real world context; pedagogical/lessons unlearnt; infantilized, bowdlerized/adult themes, cynicism; telling/un-telling; cultural mirror/breaking the mirror; black and white morality/grey morality or amorality; enchantment/ disenchantment, etc. Some of these “key features” used to describe the classic story of Rapunzel are likely to include “once upon a time” and enchantment. On the flipside, however, the Goldstein and ghd scenarios might be more aptly described as real world context and disenchantment; here, one may see “cruel depiction” in the former, and “subversive re-assemblage” in the latter, in comparing each to the classic scenario. In order to better understand how all three scenarios contribute to self-understanding through hair imagery, adding the two-sided coin that is life and death becomes useful, since “life” and “death”, as a dichotomy, closely associates with all of them. From here, one can begin to explore the more individualistic, nuanced interpretations that link hair to self. Thus, definitions and descriptions given of each of the four realms or forces of embodiment--physical, romantic, spiritual, psychicwill be applied to the exploration of highly personal meanings of “hair imagery”. While the details associated with each of these realms are not necessarily based directly on the classic imagery of the Rapunzel fairy tale, each one is categorically understood as a “life” dimension that contains implicit within it its semantic opposite—a “death” dimension. The story’s enchanting meaning of “life over death”, potentially contains within it the metaphor of the two-sided coin, in this case, with the “life” side showing for all to see, since the life forces intrinsic to physical, romantic, spiritual, and psychic energies, are ultimately triumphant in magical and delightful ways, .i.e. after many years gone by, the prince finds “his princess” in the desert, tears of the princess falling on the prince’s eyes restore his sight, etc. In considering these complexities, central questions of this study include, How might personal artistic representations of hair, in both

Re-doing Rapunzel’s Hair: Viewing Subjective Cognition in Fancifold xxxiii

visual and literary forms, portray enchantment and disenchantment together, such that the showing sides of two coins—one enchanted, one disenchanted, along with their hidden sides, merge to form one coin with front and back images—enchanted and disenchanted—entwined? And, how—might cognitive representations of meaning emerge to produce images-integrated, in the first place? In exploring possible answers to such questions, the author will use the term “fancifold” to refer to when semantic and semiotic elements of enchantment and disenchantment have entwined. Chapter One is a characterization of the mind as being “psychonatural”. In doing so, three interrelated concepts will be explored which include: the essence of the fancifold mindset, the role of mental gestation in facilitating this mindset, as well as the presence of the Rapunzel-scape, which is a metaphoric landscape that portrays how certain neuro-cognitive dynamics may be involved in re-organizing mental elements, that include details of the Rapunzel fairytale, in imaginative ways. Chapter Two provides a detailed, theoretical base for understanding the mental experience of fancifold, principally through the application of philosopher Michelle Maiese‘s idea of sensory-motor subjectivity, as integrated with some ideas and insights form others about cognition and neuro-cognition. Chapter Three explores and analyzes various fancifold incarnations of the imaginative experience of hair through both visual forms of art and literary poetic art. The last Chapter succinctly re-introduces the idea of cognitive connection between the fairytale Rapunzel and the fancifold mindset.

CHAPTER ONE CHARACTERIZING THE PSYCHO-NATURAL: FANCIfOLD, MENTAL GESTATION, AND THE RAPUNZEL-SCAPE

When is the mind in fancifold? The term “fancy” can be understood in at least two ways, in terms of what the mind does and in terms of what the mind contains. Fancy as a verb can mean “to form a conception of”, “to visualize” or “to interpret” (Merriam Webster, 1994: 420). While fancy as a noun can refer to “the power of conception and representation used in artistic expression” as well as “an image or representation…especially of a capricious…delusive sort” (Merriam Webster, 1994: 420). In addition, the term “fold”, understood as a verb, can mean to “entwine”, “to clasp or enwrap closely”, and “to incorporate closely” (Merriam Webster, 1994: 452). Taken together as one combined idea, the term “fancifold” will refer here to instances of imaginative experience that associate seemingly opposite meanings, such as life and death, in ways that are not capricious nor delusional, but that can be unique and unusual, even off-putting, and perhaps even awkward or disturbing. In the book Anti-Tales, scholar Larisa Prokhorova states, “…there are two preconditions, to my mind, that make any text an anti-tale: first, it should bear some signs of a traditional fairy tale genre; second, it should refute the joyful message of the original tales…” (2011: p. 49) Indeed, in both of the disenchanting scenarios of Rapunzel (Goldstein’s and ghd’s) there are life and death elements. In one (Goldstein’s) Rapunzel is a young, healthy looking woman (life) who has lost her natural hair (death); in the other (ghd ’s), Rapunzel is a young woman being romantically pursued by a young man who desperately wants to save her (life), even though she does not want his help and wants him to know it (death). As was mentioned earlier, both scenarios incorporate death of romantic life, in one way or another. In something of a contrast here, the term “fancifold” is being used to refer to the

2

Chapter One

imaginative act of entwining the “seemingly magical” or fanciful (enchantment) with the “seemingly grounded” (disenchantment) Thus, in the very private, intra-subjective dimension referred to as “the mind in fancifold”, it becomes more difficult to deciphor the “fanciful” elements from the “grounded” ones, since the unconscious and conscious ultimately coalesce on the same conscious plane of subjective experience. Within such a mental place, ideas such as “life” and “death” and “hair”, can come to have all kinds of semantic and semiotic associations and instantiations. In fancifold, the mind, by its nature, uses fantasy in the most personally intelligible or “grounded” way, to construct extravagant conceptions and images of self that are at once idiosyncratically believable (or rational) to the individual, often deeply emotionally satisfying, while, at the same time, profoundly free from delusion (that includes neurotic self-delusion) or mental derangement. Indeed, the emotional need or desire to imaginatively capture and artistically codify such flows of energy that lead to individually represented and deeply personally satisfying incarnations, necessarily requires continued focus and sustained attention to nuanced feeling patterns which naturally arise from the unconscious principally through mental gestation.

The role of “mental gestation” in producing the fancifold mindset In his book Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind (1997), psychologist Guy Claxton, vividly writes of biological gestation in the womb as analogous to mental gestation in the human mind. There are a number of metaphors that creators use to describe their process, but none more common than that of gestation. ‘Having’ a good idea is akin, they say to having a baby. It is something that needs a seed to get started. It needs a ‘womb’ to grow in that is safe and nurturing, and which is inaccessible. The progenitor is a host, providing the conditions for growth, but is not the manufacturer. You ‘have’ a baby, you do not ‘make’ itand so which insight and inspiration. Gestation is its own timetable: psychologically, as biologically, it is the process par excellence that cannot be hurried. And it cannot be controlled; once the process has been set in motion it happens by itself, and will, barring any major accident or intervention, carry through to fruition (1997: 68).

This description may remind one of a pregnant Rapunzel, who was forced (by the old woman) into the barren desert, where she managed to “live” anyway, and carry her twin embryos growing in her womb to gestational

Characterizing the Psycho-Natural

3

fruition. Such a scenario begs the question (put forth by Claxton), What precisely is the nature of the mother’s contribution? She does not decide upon the colour of the baby’s eyes or skin. She gives it her genes, but are they really ‘hers’, when she inherited them from her parents, and through them from an entirely unwilled lineage? She certainly cannot take much personal pride in the hazel eyes and the auburn hair she is handing on. ‘A biologist’, says Skinner, ‘has no difficulty in describing the role of the mother. She is a place, a locus in which a very important biological process takes place. She provides warmth, protection and nourishment, but she does not design the baby who profits from them. The poet is also a locus, a place where certain genetic and environmental causes come together.’ And…what is true of the poet can be equally true of the scientist, the novelist, the sculptor or the product designer (1997: 69). The analogy reminds us that, although the process of creativity is essentially organic rather than mechanical, nevertheless the nature of the ‘incubator’ is vital to the germination of the seed. The mother does not engineer her child’s intrauterine development, but she influences it enormously through her lifestyle and her sensitivity, her anxieties, appetites, and attitudes, her history and her constitution. Who she is, and the physical and emotional environment that she herself inhabits, affects the nature and the quality of the sanctum the she provides for the growing form of life within her. And so it seems to be with intuition: there are conditions which render the mental womb more or less hospitable to the growth and birth of ideas… (1997: 68).

Indeed, the fact that the “quality of the sanctum” provided by the body and mind of the Rapunzel, enabled her babies to grow and be born in the desert, may speak of, not only her genetic constitution that favors the strength of her physical body, but also of her exceptional sensitivity, strength of character or fortitude, as well as her tremendous capacity to love; all of which correspond to the “life” forces of physical, intuitive, spiritual, and romantic, respectively. Here, in essence, we experience the enchanting message of the power of “life” over “death”. A need for seed. While it is already understood that Rapunzel was open to receiving the biological seed of “her” beloved prince, one can also come to know its relationship to mental gestation. In his book, Claxton describes the necessity of one’s openness to mental impregnation as well. …one needs to find the seedand this process, for the creator, requires curiosity: an openness to what is new or puzzling. One must allow oneself to be impregnated. Unless one is piqued by a detail that obstinately refuses to fit the conventional pattern, or a chance remark that somehow resonates

4

Chapter One with one’s own unexpected views or feelings, there is nothing for the creative process to work upon (1997: 69).

And this cognitive process seems to coincide with the emotional need or desire to incorporate one’s self (and so, naturally, some of one’s current ideas and understandings about oneself), into the impregnation. Claxton writes, …the reflective accounts of artists…reveal the importance of…sensitivity to poignant trifles. In the preface to his story ‘The Spoils of Poynton’, Henry James explains how essential such details are. One Christmas Eve he was dining with friends when the lady beside him made, as he puts it, one of those allusions that I have always found myself recognizing on the spot as ‘germs’…Most of the stories straining to shape under my hand have sprung from [such] a…precious article. Such is the interesting truth about the stray suggestion, the wandering word, the vague echo, at the touch of which the novelist’s imagination winces as at the prick of some sharp point: its virtue is all in its needle-like quality, the power to penetrate as finely as possible (1997: 70). It seems that such seeds implant themselves only in those who at an unconscious level are already prepared. Even if the issue is an intellectual rather than an artistic one, its recognition is personal, affective, and even aesthetic (such as Nobel laureate Paul Berg talking about how important, in his work, was the sense of ‘taste’ for a problem or an approach) (1997: 70).

Thus, in either case, the intellectual or the artistic, mental impregnation appeals to the highly personal, private, intra-subjective dimension of the individual, whose cognitive system, cognitive style, or intelligence naturally lends itself to creative, imaginative thought. In addition, this psychological dimension may also naturally lend itself to the pursuit of emotional balance during mental gestation (once impregnation has passed), and this may be particularly so of the adult creative mind, since both cognitive integration and abstraction may typify the more developmentally mature brain. Adult fanciful groundedness. The “seed” that “germinates” within “the sanctum”, be it a “belly” or a brain sanctum, “gives birth” to “a life”. In the latter case, a new mental representation is born as an imaginative symbolic expression of physical life, romantic life, spiritual life, or intuitive life, or any combination of them; naturally, implicit within such representations is the idea “death” as well. And as was described before, the fancifold mindset has a way of melding “magical” elements (those

Characterizing the Psycho-Natural

5

produced primarily by fantasies or suppositions of unreality) and “grounded” elements (those produced primarily by knowledge of the realistic constraints of human experience in the world), to create an imaginative, personally reflective, and deeply emotionally satisfying representation of Self; in doing so, one has simultaneously created a semantically complex image that intertwines elements of enchantment and disenchantment. As has been mentioned before, the Rapunzel fairytale is the story of the power of life over deaththe, essentially, enchanting idea that life can (and so will) prevail even in the sternest, most steadfast face of death. Indeed, the often intensely positive or inspiring feelings and emotions roused by enchantment can only be matched by the emotions of its presumed oppositeoften intensely negative or personally unsettling feelings roused by ideas of disenchantment. As was described earlier, such (disenchanting) narrative instances of Rapunzel may include the notion that a young lady’s physical beauty can be thwarted (Goldstein’s interpretation), as well as the notion that the guy may not, ultimately, get the girl (ghd’s interpretation). In an attempt, here, to understand the cognitive dynamics of subtly and nuance in entwining narrative elements of enchantment and disenchantment, one can consider the general propensity for abstraction (the ability of the mind to “tease out” the shared characteristics among a groups of ideas, memories, or experiences, i.e., having the realization that all of one’s family celebrations involve a subtle deference to Uncle John’s drinking problem) and integration (the mind’s ability to glean “the big picture” by combining details together across various situations that may also include personal familial ones, i.e., having the realization that one’s family members are, in large part, responsible for making sure that one another are safe from harm), as seemingly characteristic of increasingly mature thought. The ability of the human brain to both abstract and integrate information rely on maturing neural circuitry of the prefrontal cortex, the final area of the cortex to show developmental pruning and myelination. Along with this neuropsychological progression may come not only the greater capacity to manipulate ideas in working memory, but also the increased tendency to unconsciously re-organize one’s emotional patterns that naturally connect to such ideas, in more complex, subtle, and less absolute ways. In her book The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain (2010), author Barbara Strauch discusses the nature of “mixed emotions”, As we get older, we also have more mixed emotions, a trait that works in our favor. A study by Susan Turk Charles found that when viewing a scene of clear injusticea film clip…younger people react only with anger, but older people are both angry and sad (2010: 43).

6

Chapter One This more complex, nuanced response to the world slows us down, restricting impulse acts…in our complex world, it might be good to go slower, to think twice (2010: 43-44).

In this particular instance, abstraction would involve the mind rather fluidly distilling similarities across many memories of past situations that have roused anger, as well as of those that have roused sadness, honing in on elements that are shared by both. Here, integration would involve the mind’s realization that circumstances which tend to make one angry, also tend to make one sad as well. These psychological abilities are facilitated not only by having lived and having accumulated personal experiences, but also through the increased neuro-cognitive efficiency of the prefrontal cortex (the area of the brain associated with higher-order thinking and emotional control) and its interconnectedness with the limbic system which includes various brain structures, e.g., the amygdala and the hippocampus, that together produce emotional responses in “raw” form, e.g., feeling immediate or visceral anger or immediate or visceral sadness (rather than more cognitively complex versions of these emotions such as resentment or disappointment which take more time and thought to develop). Indeed, it may also be that adults tend to have “more complex, nuanced” emotional responses (rather than more immediate ones) when surmising understandings and conceptualizations of Self, more specifically. This may be so since their “inner” world, which includes thoughts, feelings, and memories of who they are, tends to become more neuro-cognitively intricate as well; this is due, at least in part, to the continuous experiences, challenges and vicissitudes of having lived as someone in the world. Again, such interplays between “inner” elements and “outer” experiences, are facilitated by the increasingly developed prefrontal cortex and its increasingly developed connectedness to the limbic system. In her book Being Doll (2013), Pavlik-Malone includes the term cognitive consonance which is when “…cognitive elements are consistent with one another, that is, one cognitive element follows from or is implied by the other” (APA, 2007: 188). (This differs fundamentally from cognitive dissonance, which involves the presence of ideas or cognitive elements that seem to contradict one another, and so involve feeling ill at ease or emotionally unsettled). To the extent that such elements include highly personal, intra-subjectively molded thought-feeling complexes, it may be that abstraction and integration, among other processes, can work to facilitate various instantiations of consonance (while a lack of abstraction and integration in one’s thought process may contribute to

Characterizing the Psycho-Natural

7

keeping cognitive elements dissonant.) In other words, being able to “see” similarities across different cognitive elements (abstraction), and being able to surmise enveloping themes from various instances that contain such abstractions (integration), may help to facilitate, as well incorporate within such developing thought-emotion complexes, feelings of ease and personal harmony. Pavlik-Malone writes, …an internal feeling of dissonance presumably includes physiological changes in the body associated with anxiety, i.e., increased heart rate, breathing, etc., as well as being linked to a motivational drive to reduce the psychological state of inconsistency, an internal feeling of consonance may be associated with emergent inner harmony and calm, i.e., decreased heart rate, breathing, etc., that is fuelled by a motivation or desire to achieve understanding (which may include, at times, an integration of elements that may have been previously inconsistent). These latter dynamics, more than the former, seem akin to the equilibration process described by Piaget, in that disequilibrium (or an anxious feeling of not understanding) is not only reduced, but also replaced by equilibrium (a calm or satisfied feeling of understanding) (2013: 3 & 4).

Also, in her book Pictures of The Mind (2010) author Miriam Boleyn-Fitzgerald discusses human emotion and its power to influence brain dynamics involved in psychological well-being: Davidson and others in the fields of neuroscience, psychiatry, and psychology have begun demonstrating extraordinary things about the brain’s ability to transform its response to emotional stress, thereby lessoning physiological stress on the rest of the body. Pictures of the brain in action have shown that connected, loving relationships buffer the way the brain feels fear, and that expectations of manageability can ease the experience of physical pain. They’ve shown that cognitive therapy can retrain the depressed, angry, fearful mind to be skeptical of destructive thoughts, addressing the age-old question: Is temperament fixed, or can people really change (2010: 22)?

Thus, to the extent that one emotion (or more) can be facilitated (through cognitive therapy, for instance) to “buffer” the psychological and physiological effects of another emotion (or more), it seems plausible that one can meta-cognitively decide how one wants to schematically configure one’s emotional dynamics in memory, at least to some degree. In her book, Boleyn-Fitzgerald uses the term mindfulness with respect to such matters.

8

Chapter One Knowing that chronic anger is lousy for us and for the people we love is one thing: knowing how to tame the beast is another. Even if we are up on the research about aggression’s harmful effects, sometimes we just can’t help ourselves. We snap at our partners…we curse the driver who steals our parking spot…we seethe when a coworker takes credit for our ideas…(2010: 23). As it turns out, there might be a healthy reason for the instinct to go head and feel a strong emotion of any kindjust long enough to start working with it. New research shows that when we’re caught in the grip of a powerful emotion, simply repressing the desire to express it isn’t great for us either. Expressive suppression is defined as the conscious effort to inhibit the overt expression of emotions…and recent research on this mode of emotional regulation supports the long-standing psychological wisdom that pretending to be okay is never a fabulous emotional strategy (2010: 23). A growing number of researchers are looking somewhere between the two extremes of reactivity and repression, hoping to fill our emotional toolboxesfirst by using new imaging techniques to figure out what’s happening to our brains as they weather intense emotional storms, and then by watching them react to different attempts to steady the ship. How do sad brains react to antidepressants? How do they react to cognitive therapy? How do panicked brains react to beta-blockers, traumatized brains to mindfulness practice, and angry brains to forgiveness practice 2010: 24).

So, the extreme (cognitive) favoring of an emotion at one side of the “visceral” spectrum, if you will, is neither psychologically nor physiologically beneficial. This is the case since the experience of too much strong emotion too often tends to “block” or inhibit the tendency towards rational, adaptive mental processing in the former case, and wreak havoc on the integrity of body system, e.g., the circulatory system, in the latter case. Certain prescription drugs, forms of psychotherapy, and as well as cognitive re-training practices, can help, even significantly, to tame extreme emotion, so that the rational, thinking part of the brain (the frontal and prefrontal areas) can much more limberly have influence on one‘s emotional expression and behavior; with the result much more often being moderate expressions of feeling, e.g., some sternness in the voice in feeling anger, and better, more social and adaptive behavioral patterns, e. g., allowing the party who has angered you to have their say. However, in some cases, it may be possible for the mind to produce moderate emotional responses, that not only blend the “thinking” parts and the “raw” emotional parts of the human brain, but do so in a way that

Characterizing the Psycho-Natural

9

bootstraps potentially extreme emotion before it ever can become a conscious intra-subjective reality. In doing so, the “thinking” parts and the “raw” emotional parts share intertwined neuro-cognitive circuitry that may begin from on the outskirts of consciousness (at the preconscious level), making way into the current spatio-temporal “center” of awareness in working memory. Presumably, such a dynamically developing thought-emotion complex is facilitated by a relatively free, less inhibited or imaginative state of mind. Indeed, one such state may be “the mind in fancifold”. It is during this state, that both enchanting (positive, life-affirming) and disenchanting (negative, death-affirming) elements, as well as semantic and semiotic ideas, become intertwined by “strands” of physical, romantic, spiritual, and intuitive life-death forces, to produce intricate ideas, characterized here as “fanciful groundedness”. In order to better understand what might be taking place during the fancifold mindset, one needs to speculate about how such psychological connections and complexes might be made. Here, in order to do this, the author explores the mind’s ability to relate human life (and death) forces to a flowering plant, as well as explore the cognitive dynamics of forming (unique and creative) images of hair that distally (as well as proximally) relate to the Rapunzel fairytale.

Inside the Rapunzel-scape In the fairytale Rapunzel, father-to-be manages to sneakily climb into the old woman’s (the sorceress) walled-in garden, to steal some of her Rapunzel plant, over and over again. His wife, currently pregnant with their child has repeatedly strong cravings for this tasty cabbage forming vegetable which also sprouts lovely flowers. When the old woman finally catches him in her garden taking her Rapunzel, she threatens to kill him. If she spares his life, he promises to give her his child. After his baby is born, the old woman is given her and names her “Rapunzel”, after the beautiful flowering plant that grows, normally safe and protected from view, within her stone walls. When the girl turns twelve, old enough to display feminine charm (that naturally includes her long, golden blonde hair) to attract the opposite sex, the woman locks her in a stone tower to protect her from being “plucked”. In his book Fairy Tale Rituals, author Kenny Klein writes, You may or may not have strong feelings for cabbage, but in folklore, cabbage is a pretty potent little vegetable…lush folds in its flower, so…is used in folklore to represent the vagina and a woman’s sexuality…women hold the power of rebirth…and this is expressed literally through their

10

Chapter One vagina, the door to life (2011 196). So here we have these cabbages, vaginal flowers in folklore, behind the wall of the…garden. The mother-to-be wants one. They represent her sex drive and her incredibly strong desire to birth a child. But we see the nature of the sorceress here, too. She locks these plants into her garden, shielding them from the world. Her own sex is hidden, closely guarded. She will trade for the unborn girl because she feels girls must be protected from their own maturity, and she will lock the girl away as she locked away the garden plants (2011: 196). The mother’s gluttony forces her husband to sneak in and steal the cabbage (just as the prince will sneak in and steal Rapunzel’s virginity later in the story). The man is caught, and…forced to trade his child’s life for the vegetable. Because the wife has sinned…the sins of avarice and gluttony…she will lose the child she bears…her sin of avarice will be punished by symbolically changing her daughter into the cabbage she lusts for (2011: 196 & 197).

Indeed, to the extent that the human mind can and does produce simultaneous meanings of thingsof situations, objects, entities, and events that are stored as memoriesone can talk about the semantic and semiotic flexibility of personal representation (of a fairytale detail) that can come to be coded in a person’s (imaginative) brain. Cognitively speaking, this essential “quality of brain”, if you will, is referred to as neuroplasticity, which can lead to changes in basic-to-complex thought patterns and psychological dynamics. This takes place through, among other things, the simultaneously operative characteristics of flexibility and durability: the former being the characteristic that allows two or more neurons to re-wire themselves (at times over and over and over again); the latter being the characteristic that enables two or more neurons to retain their connective integrity (at times indefinitely). In her book Being Doll, Pavlik-Malone explains how this quality can relate to change and development in self-understanding through the imaginative, artistic, and mechanical act of making a doll. An understanding of self that is “sculpted” both literally with the use of tools, and neurologically through the manipulation of neural wiring, presumably involves the tendency of the brain to know what aspects of ones experience of self to change in light of which ones to keep as the same. If a person views him- or herself in terms of “youngness”looking, feeling, and acting a certain kind of waythis quality…does not want to be done away with, as it is a vital part of self-understanding, and so, plastic rigidity or integrity will do what it can to ensure that these neural pathways

Characterizing the Psycho-Natural

11

in the brain remain in tact. At the same time…plastic flexibility allows for this understanding to modify itself in light of new information. This…encompasses a synergistic interplay between the developing object (a doll) and how both the conscious and unconscious mind receives and interprets various aspects of this developing stimulus at different points in the creative process (2013: 81).

Similar to this description, is Claxton’s characterization of continuous and simultaneous “flows” of energy into and out of consciousness to produce a train of thought. In his book The Wayward Mind (2005), he expands on William James’s metaphor of images made by a kaleidoscope. He writes, Let me build on James’s image a little. If the brain were literally dark, and the momentary patterns of activation within it like flickering chains of fairy lights, and if you were able to slow it down, you would see a continuous unfolding of one pattern into the next. All of these shimmering patterns are temporary, but every so often one lasts a little longer, and perhaps glows rather brighter, than the others. Now if you speed the brain up again, and maybe turn up the house-lights a little so the background is not quick so dark, most of the evanescent activity becomes invisible to you, and all that stands out are the occasional patterns that are stronger and more stable…The now-invisible back ground shimmer is the unconscious activity of the brain, while the stronger, bolder patterns correspond to consciousness…In between may be a layer of borderline activity, strong enough to create some kind of hazy halo surrounding the bright moments of full consciousness, but not strong enough to stand out sharply in their own right (2005: 253-254).

This “hazy halo” effect can also be understand as operative within the preconscious of the Global Workspace (Baars, 1997); which includes all kinds of memories such as declarative ones (knowing facts, theories, meanings) episodic and autobiographical ones (knowing declarative details and emotional details of a personal experience, as well as knowing which personal experiences come immediately before and after one another), as well as procedural ones (knowing how to thoroughly brush one’s long, flowing hair). Also, all of these memories tend to resonate with various levels of energy or “glow” as the brain continuously and consistently interfaces with changing stimulation from the outside world, e.g., viewing thinner rather than thicker hair brushes on a particular day in the beauty products store). However, not every memory element that reaches a “full” or “hazy” consciousness level does this through a direct interface between internal neural circuitry of the brain and stimuli in the external environment (in other words, through perception). Indeed, many of these mental elements become more or less immediately linked to one’s

12

Chapter One

current train of thought through the dispersing of neuro-cognitive energy that flows from one area and level of consciousness to the next; this activity is known as spreading activation, and supports Claxton’s description that “…each moment of consciousness is conditioned by the moments that surround it in time, as well as by the complex momentary patterns of underlying currents that never ‘break’ in their own right” (2005: 254). These “patterns” that “never break” illustrate the potentially high durability of memory, experience, and knowledge, be they personal, intellectual, or somewhere in between. Interspersed with these “strong” (maybe even permanent) neural or mental connections are “weaker” ones (of varying degrees) that can much more easily be changed (can become stronger or weaker; can be added or subtracted to and from a neural path) during a train of thought. Here, all trains-of-thought will be assumed to occur within the brain topology referred to as the Rapunzel-scape. This internal, ever-modifying brain circuitry includes thoughts, feelings, information, and memories coded in the brain of the individual at all levels of the Global Workspace, that somehow currently encompass (as well as may come to encompass) the grand idea “Rapunzel”, e.g., having memories of certain details of the Rapunzel fairytale; having knowledge and memories of hair that include meanings of the word “hair”(all linked to the sound of the word itself), as well as having knowledge of “love”, of “joy”, of “sex”, of “hate”, of “intuition”, of “self”, of “endurance”, in this overall same vein. Within the workspace, mental elements have readily moved in and out of full consciousness, into preconscious or “hazy” levels, and back again, down into deeper levels of the unconscious, only to make their way back to “upper” levels again. Presumably, some of these mental elements have formed more cohesive ideas that are relatively (or even absolutely) permanent, while others are still cognitively ready for some degree of change or modification. Indeed, this entire neuro-developmental landscape and its dynamics may come to configure within itself, the fancifold mindset. In Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind, Claxton characterizes the nature of neural connections that comprise a conceptual thought. Experience erodes and moulds the mass of neurons in a three-dimensional ‘brainscape’ where the ‘vertical’ dimension indicates the degree of functional connectedness, the mutual sensitivity and responsivity, of the neurons in that conceptual locality…the more tightly bound together the neurons; the more ‘deeply engrained’, we might say, that concept, that way of segmenting reality, is (1997: 140).

Characterizing the Psycho-Natural

13

He goes on to figuratively interpret the brainscape as a landscape. He explains how some “deeply engrained” ideas have vertical dimensions or “valleys” that “…have steep sides…where the concept being mapped is well defined: it has relatively few associations that are not criterial” (1997: 140). In other words, here, the meaning of an idea within the neural network has many, many neural connections and neural pathways which surround and encompass it that are strongly or tightly connected, and few that are “weakly” or “loosely” connected. In this kind of neural landscape, ideas may readily exist as “opposites”, i.e., as “enchantment” versus “disenchantment”, with little intermingling of neural circuitry among them. These two conceptually opposing thought-feeling complexes might be only remotely related to one another in the Global Workspace. In the semantic sense, both share either few neural circuits or paths to begin with, or several neural circuits or paths that receive only rather small degrees of energy flow through spreading activation. Indeed, such minute amounts of energy present between the two thought-feeling complexes of “enchantment” and ‘disenchantment” may not likely be enough to raise these shared cognitive elements to even preconscious or “hazy halo” levels of inner experience. Also, in the semiotic sense, the imaginative repercussions of such a neural landscape may result in intra-subjective experiences that are lacking in semiotic complexity for the creator, as well as for the viewer. In other words, instances of symbolic representations such as paintings, drawings, and poems, would be first and foremost understood as naturally expressing one idea, e.g., “enchantment”, of two opposing ideas (enchantment/disenchantment). However, Claxton also states that “Gentle slopes indicate a wider range of looser connections and connotations” (1997: 140). Thus, thinking in “opposites” simultaneously may require a relatively loose or malleable portion of the landscape that transverses at least two “steeper” portions namely, one that encompasses “enchantment”, and one that encompasses “disenchantment”, respectively. If this is so, then what does this mean for characterizing the neuro-cognitive nature of the mind in fancifold? And, how might this characterization link more specifically to the idea or thought-feeling complex of “hair”? To explore possible answers to such questions, one can consider Claxon’s wordscape, which resides both topologically and functionally within the landscape. In doing so, the necessity of having not only excitatory circuits (understood to promote neural energy flow) but also inhibitory circuits (understood to constrain neural energy flow) at play during spreading activation, is relevant. Claxton writes,

14

Chapter One The assumption of limited resource helps to explain why thinking in words can impede non-verbal, more intuitive or imaginative kinds of cognition…Names naturally pick out and focus attention on those features and patterns of the concept that are most familiar and essential…they have been given names like, like “Jane” or “breakfast” or “cat”… (1997: 153).

Thus, the word “hair”, like the words “Jane”, “breakfast”, and “cat” for instance, exists within the landscape to promote not only the excitation of some cognitive elements (up to and including those levels that constitute the preconscious and fully conscious), but also the inhibition, often simultaneously, of cognitive elements, as well (down to and including those levels slightly below to far below the preconscious). Because the word is also often considered the label which is the name of the idea or concept, Claxton understands that “Some concepts have no labels… (1997: 154), just as “…some labels are not directly underpinned by concepts” (1997: 154). Thus, it becomes necessary to further expand the landscape in light of it also possessing a wordscape. Slightly fancifully, we might extend the landscape metaphor by planting a tall flagpole at the center of such articulated concepts, at the top of which flutters a flag bearing the concept’s name. The image will serve provided we remember that the ‘flag’ presents another set of neural patterns, to which the concept is linked, corresponding to the way the word sounds, looks, is spoken and written (1997: 153). As a child learns language, the flags proliferate, and themselves become connected together into strings of linguistic bunting that begin to create a ‘wordscape’ that overlays the experientially based brainscape. Words can be combined to ‘name’ concepts that have no underlying reality, no direct conceptual referent, in that person’s experience. Such verbal concepts are heavily influenced by the categories of a particular culture, and conveyed, moulded, through formal and informal tuition. Different languages carve up the world of experience in different ways. The Inuit…have dozens of words for ‘snow’. English has no concept that even remotely resembles Japanese bushido, the warrior code that combines fighting skill, considerable cruelty and aesthetic and emotional sensitivity (1997: 153-154).

Using Claxon’s “extended” metaphor of the landscape, this author expands on it even further in order to characterize the Rapunzel-scape. First, inside the entire Global Workspace (which includes, essentially, the entire neural circuitry of the brain including emotional information) are flags dispersed, more or less evenly (depending on the particular brain and the knowledge, ideas, and information that it holds through learning and experience), which encompasses all labels (flags) and their concepts, as

Characterizing the Psycho-Natural

15

well as labels without concepts, and concepts without labels. As part of this dimensional landscape there may be various labels or flags called “happiness” “hair”, “Rapunzel”, “flower”, “princess”, “beauty”, “sadness”, “vegetable”, just to name but a few. Depending on the individual, and his or her knowledge, experience, and learning opportunities, the more particular, personal, or intra-subjective ways in which this landscape exists is not necessarily knowable (at least not initially), to even the individual him-or herself. What can ultimately be had through the Rapunzel-scape, is the possibility to create a thought-feeling complex that semantically links the labels or flags “enchantment”, “disenchantment”, and “hair” in the imaginer’s mind. This can come to build or incorporate cognitive elements that are semiotic as well, and so may come to be artistically represented in various kinds of artistic works, e.g., paintings, creative writing pieces. Within the fancifold frame of mind, the steepness of the Rapunzel-scape is undermined in many areas that contain flags, by a spreading flow of activation that repeatedly “shakes up the foundation of the landscape”; in other words, neural connections that might otherwise be part of or rather entrenched as excitatory or inhibitory circuits, may remain loosened. This higher level of malleability can keep any bunting that holds groups of flags together, as well as the flags themselves, from becoming deeply or permanently rooted or grounded to any prospective place within the Rapunzelscape. In such a brain network, energy flows chaotically to reproduce more or less fancifully grounded patterns of thought and feeling; producing “seemingly magical” or enchanting details and elements that entwine with “seemingly grounded” or disenchanting ones (so that conscious elements or details, both full and hazy, and unconscious ones, coalesce on the same plane of personal or intra-subjective experience in working memory). Also, this production may initially include new ideas with no labels (no exact words to describe the internal representation), and/or initially include new labels (words) with no exact ideas, e.g,. perhaps, how the word “fancifold” got its start in this author’s mind. Indeed, psychological conditions such as these may be integral, at least at times, to the stirring of nuanced feelings within the mind and body. This grand understanding, that neural networks dynamically re-configure themselves, has been re-recently affirmed and expanded upon in considerably greater detail. In his book Networks of the Brain (2011), cognitive neuroscientist Olaf Sporns describes this activity as a “symbiotic relationship” between structural and functional connectivity, that functions within time and space to continuously generate and modify psychological experience.

16

Chapter One In cortical networks, structural and functional connectivity mutually influence each other on multiple time scales. On fast as well as slower time scales, structural connections shape the topography of functional networks… Conversely, functional connectivity can also mold synaptic patterns via a number of activity-dependent mechanisms. Thus, structure shapes neural activity, and neural activity shapes structure. The mutual interdependency of network topology and dynamics in the brain is an example of what Gross and Blasius (2008) have referred to as “adaptive coevolutionary networks”. In these networks, dynamic processes unfolding on a relatively fast time scale shape the topology of the network on a slower time scale. These changes in topography in turn alter the dynamics of the system… For example, a traffic or communication network may experience congestion, a form of dynamic failure, which triggers efforts to construct new links to ease traffic flow (Gross and Blasius, 2008). The brain is a particularly striking example of a network where fast dynamic processes continually shape and are shaped by the topology of structural connections (2011: 241).

With regard to these ideas, Pavlik-Malone writes, “Thus, topological and dynamical brain networks are ‘coevolutionary’ because they produce positive or desirable changes in each other…As these changes take place, actual thoughts themselves become modified…these literal ‘changes of brain and mind’ reshape one’s understanding…of ‘self’” (Pavlik-Malone, 2011: 82-83). In addition, as part of ongoing, integrative dynamics of structural and functional connectivity, neural networks can also produce synchrony. (Sporns mentions how this may be one of the qualities of neural networks that is particularly operative when performing more cognitively complex tasks.) A rich set of models suggests that…integration can be achieved …through dynamic interactions…resulting in phase locking or synchronization between distant cell populations. This mechanism depends on reciprocal structural connections linking neurons across segregated brain regions…Synchronization has distinct effects on neural processing by enabling…coincident spikes in areas that receive convergent synchronized signals, as well as rhythmic modulations of local inhibition and sensitivity to input. Coherent phase-synchronized activity between neurons facilitates their mutual communication and modulates their interaction strength (Fries, 2005; Womelsdorf et al, 2007). Spontaneous or evoked changes in phase coherence and synchronization can therefore rapidly reconfigure networks of functional…connectivity, while the underlying structural connectivity remains relatively constant (2011: 188).

Characterizing the Psycho-Natural

17

Thus, synchrony is one way in which different groups of neural networks, that may correspond to broadly varying cognitive components, i.e., a group for “language”, a group for “emotion”, and a group for “working memory”, just to name a few, can coordinate with one another, and work simultaneously to enable generation and modification of more complex psychological experience, which would necessarily include some of such varying components. Indeed, within such a network or landscape “spontaneous or evoked changes in phase coherence and synchronization” may be linked psychologically with streams of creative thought-feeling patterns; this may take place within the landscape that is the Rapunzel-scape, more specifically; this, in turn, corresponds to the fancifold mindset within which more personal, intra-subjective patterns of fanciful groundedness are produced. In other words, such spiking or whirlwind activity, just described, may loosen some flags in bunting-strung groups (which correspond to groups of neural networks of different cognitive components); for instance, loosening flags like “blonde” “long” and “Rapunzel” that have formed a string of bunting within the language component, that is also structurally connected to a bunting of at least two flagsa “happy” flag and an “enchanted” flag within the emotion component, may take some time to structurally alter, so that someone thinking creatively (such as photographer Dina Goldstein) can come to associate “blonde” and/or “long” and “Rapunzel” (still situated within the language component) with “sadness” or “disenchanting” or both (in the emotion component); here, part of the bunting that strings these three language flags with the “happy” emotion flag, has been weakened through repeated changes (such as ones spontaneous or evoked) within functional connectivity, and eventually broken by such whirlwind activity, that may naturally include not only highly active, chaotic flows of energy, but also calmer, more leveled flows, as well. Indeed, this whirlwind activity may temporarily level itself as the mind repeatedly slips into and out of psychological incubation over a span of time. It may be during this period, when the individual is consciously away from working on the creative task, that phase locking or synchronization has the chance to repeatedly “loosen its grip” so to speak (in order to conserve neural energy, perhaps), making (easier and easier) way for any “spontaneous or evoked change” in energy flow or spreading activation to upset a present bunting pattern, thereby altering structural connectivity. Such a pattern has, up until this present point of change, remained largely intact in the face of continuous changes in functional connectivity, as the individual has consciously as well as unconsciously attended to the creative task or imaginative idea over and over again. Indeed, when the mind has come to combine, through neuro-cognitively

18

Chapter One

added strings of bunting (changes in structural connectivity), the “enchanting” flag with the “disenchanting” flag (while both remain in the emotional component), this “grouped” emotional complex can potentially re-connect repeatedly with various cognitive elementsthose that encompass various instances of knowledge, ideas, and feelings, which also include those of the Rapunzel fairytale, as well as more or less personal understandings of the nature of physical life, romantic life, spiritual life, and intuitive lifecontained in the individual mind (in fancifold). These elements necessarily encompass not only grouped neurons which comprise the language and emotion components of the human mind, but also many more components such as the visual, the executive functions, the spatial, and the motor ones, for example. These components neurologically connect to parts of the body that include more direct connections i.e., the visual component connects to the eyes: as well as more indirect ones, i.e., the visual component also connects to the lungs, to the extent that what one sees, either in the external environment or in the “internal” environment through the retrieval of a visual memory into consciousness (or pre-consciousness), can facilitate the increase or decrease of one’s breathing and heart rate. In this vein (no pun intended), it becomes relevant to consider that the fancifold experience can be psychologically hairy in and of itself, since within such experience there is risk and even difficulty in exploring the vast, often murky coalescing territories of conscious and unconscious realms. These feelings are comprised, not only of the dynamics of the brain, but also of those of the body as well.

CHAPTER TWO THE RELATIONSHIP OF HAIRY EXPERIENCE TO MAIESE’S SENSORI-MOTOR SUBJECTIVITY

In her book Embodiment, Emotion, and Cognition (2011), philosopher Michelle Maiese introduces the term sensori-motor subjectivity, which she characterizes as, …a sort of primitive bodily awareness that essentially contains phenomenal consciousness and is bound up with a sense of our whole living body and its egocentric spatial-temporal orientation. By virtue of sensori-motor subjectivity, a subject immediately feels herself to be standing in a direct, effective and intimate connection to the actual and potential movements, perceptions, and overall condition of her own living body. Our lived and living bodily dynamics inform our knowledge and understanding of the world, serve as the source of the spatial and temporal structure of conscious experience, and enable us to engage with the world from a unique point of view. The lived body, therefore, is that which makes possible the disclosure of the world as meaningful, and this is particularly evident in the animate, bodily-engaged dynamics of emotional experience (2011: 2).

Indeed, a fundamental part of the world “out there” may include not only things which surround one’s body, but also components and appendages, e.g., one’s right arm, left leg, neck, nose, and hair, of one’s physical body itself. Indeed, one’s hair for example, as well as one’s environment not physically attached to one’s body, are presumably processed through sensorial and motoric channels within the subjective dimension of human experience. Maiese states, …‘subjectivity’ pertains to the fact that sensory experience is ‘for the subject’. The feeling of grasping a bottle, for example, is immediately and non-referentially experienced as mine, and comes with an intrinsic ‘first-personal givenness’ or ipseity (I-ness) that constitutes it subjectivity… Likewise, the feeling of being sad is immediately and non-referentially experienced as mine. All emotional experience involves

20

Chapter Two the first-personal quality of pre-reflective bodily self-consciousness, or what I call sensor motor subjectivity (2011: 45).

So, grasping a bottle is likely to be subjectively similar to flipping one’s hair back with one’s hand, or moving one’s head in a way that causes one’s hair to move in unison. All three behaviors involve a psychologically primitive or base level of self-awareness that Maiese describes, …that being as an embodied proprioceptive sense of self rather than a cognitive or psychological understanding…at every moment of our waking lives we are immediately and non-conceptually aware of the shape, position, and boundaries of out body, at least to some extent. This basic sense of self is immanently reflexive, pre-reflective, and non-conceptual; is a natural outgrowth of our animate, neurobiological dynamic… (2011: 3-4).

All these mechanisms and dynamics make possible one’s potential capacity to register in consciousness, the presence of one’s hair on one’s own head (most saliently by contrast, if that hair is swiftly removed perhaps by shaving it off oneself, or by having someone else do it). Thus, the environment of one’s own physical body, that includes one’s head of hair, can be understood to be integral to sensori-motor subjectivity. To paraphrase using Maiese’s words, …a subject immediately feels her hair to be…in direct, effective and intimate connection to the actual and potential movements, perceptions, and overall condition of her own body. Our lived and living bodily dynamics inform our knowledge and understanding of our hair, serve as the source of the spatial and temporal structure of conscious experience of our hair, and enable us to engage with our own hair from a unique point of view. The lived body, therefore, is that which makes possible the disclosure of our hair as meaningful, and this is particularly evident in the animate, bodily-engaged dynamics of emotional experience of our own hair.

Relationship of Hairy Experience to Maiese’s Sensori-Motor Subjectivity

21

Figure 2.1 Reproduced by permission of Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA.

The emotional, meaning-laden component of this self-awareness is Maiese’s idea that one’s embodied sense of self “is rooted in desire-based emotions and feelings of caring” (2011: 4). Thus, the amygdala, as well as other limbic structures, play a fundamental role in propelling the human mind to construct personal meaning that includes first-person experience with stimuli relevant to bodily sensation and perception at various levels; this includes internal stimulation from the body, e.g., increased and decreased heart rate (autonomic physiological changes), as well as from the mind, i.e., in the forms of sensorial impressions, motor-laden memories, conceptual understandings, episodic and autobiographical memories, etc. Here, degrees of conscious and unconscious activation of various psychological phenomena are, presumably, a function of both current relative positioning within the brain’s vast neural network of Baar’s global workspace, as well as the more or less nuanced nature and degree of emotional energy flow coming from the limbic systemwhat Maiese refers to as “felt desire”that makes various mental forms more

22

Chapter Two

or less easily accessible to and desirable for consciousness. What she calls “conative affectivity” is the essential role played by emotion in orienting the mind towards psychological survival which includes the “impulse to regenerate and go on living” (2011: 2). This “life” impulse is related to the physical body (that includes the brain) as well as to the abstract mind. Indeed, one’s impulse to psychologically regenerate one’s self, is the “felt desire” to re-organize and expand on understandings of whom one is. This complex process of personal development necessarily involves the intermingling of more conscious as well as somewhat-to-considerably less conscious components of mind, that include, among other things, sensory and motor components of the physical brain and body. In their book, Complexity and Education (2006), Davis and Sumara characterize complexity as intrinsically associated with the synergistic forces of equilibrium and disequilibrium. These authors state, One of our most deeply entrenched assumptions of analytic science is that dynamic systems tend toward equilibrium, toward a steady state…the assumption has been that systems in motion must be governed by negative feedback mechanisms, by which variations in activity are somehow pushed toward and held in acceptable ranges. The popular illustration of negative feedback is a thermostat. If the temperature in the room falls, the thermostat triggers a furnace that runs until the thermostat triggers it to stop. Negative feedback, then, is a means of maintaining an internal equilibrium, even when external conditions might be volatile and uncontrollable (2006: 102).

However, these authors also acknowledge the ability of the mind to bootstrap itself from within, and describe how such internalized activity is necessary for creative learning and self-sustenance. The opposite of negative feedbackpredictably known as positive feedbackcan be profoundly troublesome to a system that seeks equilibrium. Positive feedback serves to amplify (or to extinguish) some dynamic aspect of a system. The manner in which fads…arise and move through social systems are familiar examples of positive feedback mechanisms at work (2006: 102). The popular but un-interrogated assumption that dynamic systems tend toward equilibrium can be concisely stated as: Negative feedback is good, positive feedback is bad. As it turns out, however, mechanisms to amplify small perturbations are essential to the viability of living and learning systems (2006: 102).

Relationship of Hairy Experience to Maiese’s Sensori-Motor Subjectivity

23

Similarly, in their book Turbulent Mirror (1989), psychologist John Briggs and physicist F. David Peat characterize the creating mind as a dynamic system that has a tendency to become destabilized during imaginative endeavors. They write, The creator’s mental effort can be pictured as circling around the problem or creative task, bifurcating to new planes of reference, returning to the old plane, branching to another plane and to planes that lie within planes. This mental effort engenders a far-from-equilibrium flux that destabilizes the limit cycles of habitual thinking. It also couples and phase locks feedback among several planes of reference and begins to spontaneously produce a self-organization (1989: 194).

Indeed, there can be emotional risk in having one’s mind destabilized; one may become more or less anxious in the face of a perceived internal threat to one’s current individual identity, at least initially; alternatively, he or she may not even register on a conscious level the reason for feeling such fear in the first place. In an attempt to explain how some emotional control is gained during this creative, self-organizational process, Maiese’s term affective framing which is “… the process whereby we interpret persons, objects, facts, states of affairs, ourselves, and so forth in terms of embodied desiderative feelings” (2011: 3), seems to fit the bill. She explains, Unlike much of emotion theory, which assumes that appraisal takes place in the head and is distinct from bodily arousal and bodily feelings, my account characterizes the cognitive and bodily aspects of emotion as inseparable (2011: 3). Emotional consciousness, broadly construed, includes background ‘affective orientations’, moods, and specifically directed emotions such as fear, anger, joy, and sadness. While these types of emotion usually do involve thoughts, evaluations, bodily changes, feelings, actions tendencies, and shifts in attention, the essential factor in all…is conscious desire…we immediately focus our attention on particular features of our surroundings that are important to us. Unlike traditional cognitive theories of emotion, my proposed account makes sense of the way affectivity and intentionality are bound together, and acknowledges that all processes of appraisal are enabled in part by pre-reflectively conscious, desiderative bodily feelings (2011: 2-3).

Thus, it may be through affective framing that the individual sets his or her overall internal parameters for emotional range that includes relative degrees of depth, complexity, and nuance of feeling, during imaginative

24

Chapter Two

thought. In this way, the individual has, at least some, internal cognitive control over the self-organizational process, so that it functions in a more “meta self-organizational” way. In addition, as part of the creative process embodied, this personal control is presumably exercised in concert with, and can even become an intrinsic part of, the imaginative process. So, those internal parameters related to levels of depth, complexity, and nuance, develop more gradually and organically, based on the personal contentthoughts, feelings, memories, ideasthat become consciously registered, at least to some extent, through their synergistic intermingling at various levels of consciousness. Indeed, within this potentially “risky” intermingling, is the possibility of exploring personal content that the creator himself or herself may not be emotionally ready to explore deeply or more exhaustively at that particular time. And it is here where the delicate balance struck or not struck between enchantment and disenchantment necessarily lives. As was described earlier, within such a mental place, ideas such as “life” and “death” and “hair”, can come to have all kinds of semantic and semiotic associations and instantiations, some that even the individual imaginer may find personally unsettling or disturbing. Thus, described once again “in fancifold” the mind by its nature uses fantasy in a personally intelligible or “grounded” way, successfully combining imagistic elements that both enchant and disenchant, by using both equilibrium and disequilibrium, negative feedback and positive feedback, in order to do so. Indeed, it may be principally through affective framing that the mind oversees this self-organizational process, in such a way that a lack of personal readiness is registered pre-reflectively in the form of desiderative bodily feelings. Thus, for this study, the imaginative expression of hair involves creating images and imagistic elements that can have all kinds of vivid and profound personalized characteristics. For this reason, essentially, this author believes that affective framing is a fundamental emotional process involved in the mind‘s experience of “hair in fancifold“. This creative experience necessarily involves pre-reflective neuro-cognitive sensations of physical movement in the forms of sensory and motor perceptual memories, e, g, consciously knowing what it feels like to move one‘s head a certain way, which are part and parcel of sensori-motor subjectivity.

Subjectivity & Three Categories of Emotive Movement There seems to be at least three broad categories of movement that incorporate private, emotional experience; these include the archetypal, the realistic, and the fanciful, respectively.

Relationship of Hairy Experience to Maiese’s Sensori-Motor Subjectivity

25

Archetypal. In her article “Dancing the Eternal Image: Visual and Narrative Archetypes” (1995), dancer and scholar Andrea Deagon describes the experience of dance for both the dancer and the viewer as essentially sensori-motor and subjective. She writes, A dancer conveys feeling through her body; the dynamism and character of her movement, variations of intensity, clarity of line, and number of subtle rhythms and gestures that neither she nor her audience can consciously process. When a dancer is fully present in her body, none of her gestures are empty and meaningless. They seem to come from a deeper source, and reach into a deeper place in her audience’s perception. What the eyes perceive as movement on a stage resonates through the soul in other forms: a subtle play of emotion or visual images, feelings of yearning or release, the memory of cool water or a child’s touch, or a lover’s (1995: 1).

Thus, in archetypal movement, there is sensor-motor subjectivity in terms of how a universally human idea or experience feels when expressed through one’s own personal artistic body movements. Deagon states that “The…‘archetype,’…refers…to…images and story patterns that arise in similar ways in all societies. Archetypes may be visual images such as the tree of life…and the labyrinth…the trickster…story patterns such as the quest and the dangerous marriage (1995: 2). In terms of how the archetype relates to dance, she goes on to say, There are also universal archetypes of movement: the hands raised in prayer or invocation, the body curved around deep feeling, or arms reaching in an enclosed embrace. As a dancer, I am often aware of coming into archetypal movements, or attitudes that have a significance beyond my immediate circumstances. I imagine a great many feeling dancers are aware of this phenomenon as well (1995: 2).

In addition, Deagon describes the archetype, as expressed through dance in particular, as, cognitively speaking, schematic and mental modeling; the terms she uses are “simplicity” of movement that conveys the “complexity” of ideas, essentially in one foul swoop. Archetypes seem to have their power from the simplicity of their images: the evocatively withered crone, for example or the universal tale of leaving home, conquering a terrible enemy, and returning…archetypes are really powerful because immensely complex and delicate ideas are caught up in a single resonant vision. Their complexity seems simplethe way an egg seems simple, but encompasses the remarkable transformation of embryo living thing…Dance is an ideal medium to express such complexity… movement perceived visually can have many meanings, and in fact, it must (1995: 2).

26

Chapter Two

Indeed, Maiese’s mention of ipseity or “I-ness”, what she refers to as a “first-personal givenness” that is felt “immediately and non-referentially” …as mine” seems intrinsic to archetypal movement; in other words, ancient and innate patterns of the human psyche, that one comes to feel (and overtly express) through the automatic unfolding of these patterns of physical motion made by one’s own body, and which are, at the same time, automatically communicated to others. With regard to this, Deagon says, Archetypal stories are so powerful, and so innate, that when danced they do not even need to achieve the level of plot. The plot can remain “bone” that the audience never sees. A friend of mine once told me that when I dance she sometimes senses me as an organic being, seeing how the bones move beneath my fresh. This is what happens metaphorically when a dance moves with the archetypes (1995: 4).

Realistic. In 2010, researcher Daniel Bernhardt published his dissertation from the University of Cambridge titled “Emotion Inference from Human Body Motion”. This complex study investigated human (automatic) recognition of basic emotions such as happy, sad, and angry from everyday patterns of physical movement; these four “action categories” were walking, throwing, lifting and knocking. He characterizes such movements as motions which are motivated by goals other than communicating affect (2010: 69). He distinguishes between archetypal and everyday physical movement. I regard an affective or expressive gesture any kind of body motion which is motivated by the…expression of affective content…while motions arising from everyday actions are not intended to convey emotions and are indeed carried out to achieve some other goal, qualities of these motions can convey certain emotional information many…animation techniques… target transformations of everyday actions in order to convey a certain emotional content. Lesseter’s description of a happy vs. sad Luxo Jr. is a perfect example of how an action such as walking can have clear emotional qualities (2010: 32).

Bernhardt explains how studies have been done on “certain movement qualities” such as jerkiness, energy or speed (citation for these studies), and states that the results of these studies “…have been predicted by Scherer and Walcott who argued that emotions in the body are likely to be detectable through changes in the speed, rhythm and fluidity of movements.” (2010: 28-29). His describes his experimental approach as “holistic” and states,

Relationship of Hairy Experience to Maiese’s Sensori-Motor Subjectivity

27

In contrast to many previous attempts to recognize emotion from expressive body movements…I described three factors which influence the appearance of human body motions in a systematic way: action, personal motion bias, and emotion. The effect of each of these factors on appearance of body movements had been studied in isolation in the past. My work represents an attempt to reconcile their effects. I’ve showed that there are complex interactions between these factors… (2010: 166).

For this study, what Bernhardt refers to as the “personal motion bias”, is most relevant. This is so, since it may be that such individual differences may cognitively resonate within what Maiese refers to as “I-ness” or sensori- motor subjectivity. On the “Significance of Personal Differences” that he found in his statistical analyses, Bernhardt states, Guided by a holistic motion analysis I investigated the influence of individual motion idiosyncrasies on the appearance of emotional body movements. Building on ideas such as personality detection from gait I demonstrated that…individual motion bias is present in all four action categories…Removing this motion bias before attempting to learn and classify emotion classes makes a very significant difference for all action categories and for both isolated and connected actions (2010: 166).

Fanciful. Like both archetypal and realistic movement, fanciful movement can include a human body itself, as well as concrete, three-dimensional incarnations of an individual’s body, i.e., sculptures, dolls, etc. Also, all three kinds of movement may instead be expressed in more abstract, two-dimensional space in the forms of drawings, paintings, photographs, and even poems, for example. In addition, physical movement that is fanciful, like archetypal, is intended, first and foremost, to express emotion first and foremost. However, it tends to do so in a much more idiosyncratic and nuanced way; thus, these images are often not understood so completely and immediately by the viewer. Here, there is a difference between what is more personally rather than more universally symbolic and semiotic. What might make for this level of personal identity and subjectivity in physical movement? In performing both archetypal and everyday kinds of movement, an individual can potentially view himself or herself in a mirror in a more or less literal way. In other words, the image in the mirror is more or less an identical reflected image of the person in the midst of performing the action (s). But with fanciful movement, the action or actions performed may or may not resemble the individual, and often do not, in any literally physical way. Thus, in fanciful movement, the mirror is essentially metaphoric, and the physical action reflected in it is, essentially, an imaginative transformation

28

Chapter Two

of inner (cognitive) experience, that relies heavily on sensory and motor circuitry in the brain and body in order to literally “feel” the expression of the movement in a spontaneous and pre-reflective way. These sensations are necessarily combined with internal, nuanced perceptions (which form through nuance cycles that include the limbic system and prefrontal cortex) within the global workspace, where mental content and various levels of consciousness intermingle and coalesce on the same conscious plane of subjective experience. At the same time, one engages in affective framing to keep track of and some gain control over what such content enters consciousness, and to what degree. Interestingly, because mental content that produces fanciful movement, is not so uniformly innate or universal (like archetypal movement is), such images may not be, in the midst of being imagined or created, understood by the creator himself or herself; this may be so initially as well as for longer periods of time, both of which the individual may find emotionally unsettling. And it is for this reason, essentially, that such a creative endeavor can be both risky or daring, while, at the same time, producing what may come to be new, often exhilarating, private understandings of self. This is where, essentially, fanciful movement meets fancifold mindset; once again, in the individual’s emotionally successful balancing of personal elements and images that enchant with those that disenchant him or her.

When “I” Becomes “Hair”: Imagination and Artistic Incarnations of a Sensory-Motor Self In fancifold, the self-awareness that is integral to sensori-motor subjectivity presumably plays a vital role in enabling self-organizing, nuanced thoughts, feelings, and emotions to become coded into imagery that is, in some way, potentially expressive to the outside world. These symbolic modes can take the forms of drawings, etchings, paintings, sculptures, art dolls, photographs, poems, music, dance, etc., that may, e.g. a dance, or may not, e.g., a drawing, involve expression in real time. In addition, the creative process of cognitive self-organization, that includes both negative and positive feedback working synergistically, facilitates new imaginative patterns of experience to emerge. At the same time, a current internal range of “degree of newness” is becoming set that involves sensori-motor self-awareness in the form of emotional tolerance kept in check by affective framing. And, it may be through affective framing, that an internal personal balance is struck between imagistic patterns and symbols of enchantment and disenchantment, that are

Relationship of Hairy Experience to Maiese’s Sensori-Motor Subjectivity

29

becoming part and parcel of the specific incarnation, be it a drawing, painting, poem, etc. Also, as was explained before, fanciful movement, in contrast to both archetypal and realistic movement, uses a metaphoric mirror of self, that reflects back to the individual images that may or may not resemble him or her in any recognizable physical way. Thus, in such a mirror, the individual can become anything that the intermingling of conscious and unconscious content desire him or her to. Indeed, it is under such cognitive conditions, that one can figuratively become hair, as long as it is for some private, subjective reason emotionally important for the particular imaginer or creator to do so. Here, the individual’s more pervasive experience “my hair” that is spread throughout the global workplace, may function as a kind of pre-curser, if you will, in the sense that such a reservoir includes memories and feelings of interaction with one’s own and/or with others’ hair that necessarily involve physical sensations and physical movement. Thus, in the chaotic dynamics of self-organization, content elements from this internal reservoir, can lead to imagistic transformations of self that are highly symbolic and semiotic, such as when “I” becomes “hair”. Such subjective experiences can be referred to as hyper-real for at least two reasons: one, since, as anthropologist A. F. Robertson in his 2004 book Life Like Dolls (a study of the emotional importance of the porcelain collector doll or PCD in many women’s lives) states, “…In some respects the PCDs have become a means for measuring-up children rather than the other way round…” (2004: 186), which alludes to the idea that something can become more personally attractive, when one alters it in some way through one’s imagination; and two, the created image and the self become one in a sense, as it becomes increasingly difficult for the imaginer to distinguish between reality and it‘s simulation; here, the imaginer may prefer to recognize himself or herself in a metaphoric mirror (which is an imaginative image he or she created) rather than in an actual one. Indeed, it may be that within the cognitive realm of hyper-reality, comes the ability of the imaginer to create personal representations of hair that express elements of enchantment, e.g., those pertaining to life, and disenchantment, e.g., those pertaining to death, entwined in a way that is highly subjective and pre-reflectively felt through one‘s body. As Maiese states, “…consciousness is not simply something that happens within our brains, but…something that we do through our living bodies…although we are not always, or even usually conscious of our bodies…we are always and necessarily conscious with, or in and through, our living and lived bodies.” (2011:1). Furthermore, it may be through the subjective nature of sensori-motor

30

Chapter Two

channels “caught up” in the hyper-realistic mindset of fancifold, that energy flows from each of the four embodied realms physical life, romantic life, spiritual life, and psychic lifehelp to facilitate highly personal and individualistic renditions, through their own synergy that is part of the self-organizational process. Thus, in one’s quintessentially own, hyper-real experience of hair, there will be what Maiese refers to as “felt desire” tofiguratively speaking“re-do Rapunzel‘s hair”. Here, the fantasy or the fairytale naturally becomes one’s own fantasy or one’s own fairytale; and so it can, by nature, be even more unusual and personal, and even more risky, than Goldstein’s bald Rapunzel and the ghd scenario of a Rapunzel liberated. This is so since both of these images are meant to be comprehended, first and foremost, through a collective consciousness, rather than through ipseity.

CHAPTER THREE “ENCHANTING FOLLICLES, DISENCHANTING SHAFTS”: COGNITIVE JOURNEYS THROUGH FANCIfOLD

Figure 3.1 “mermaid holding comb and mirror”

Bruno Bettelheim understood the emotional need of children to integrate imagery from fairytales into their own imaginative fantasies and internal experiences. He believed that fairytale images can be used psychologically to help children integrate conscious experience, i.e., one’s teacher telling children not to hit one another, with human unconscious desires, i.e., to feel lust, to feel greed, to feel anger etc. In developing this integrated mind, children would become more able to consciously control their base (unconscious) desires, and from this, they would benefit by having a tendency to successfully adapt in a social environment that tends to place even greater emotional demands of prudence and restraint on adults. However, for this study is the basic assumption that adult minds, like those of children, can also benefit from the use of fairytale imagery to integrate conscious with unconscious experience; although this (adult) integration process may be more inclined to weave subjective experience into that which is personally and emotionally complex and nuanced, and so becomes more idiosyncratic in its externalized, artistic form. Under these latter semiotic conditions, classic details of a fairytale more readily become re-assembled into what Calvin describes as “…an amoral or cruel depiction and/or subversive re-assemblage.” (2011: 5). In this chapter, analyses are done of visual and poetic images of hair created by visual artists (including digital artists), hairstylists, and poets. These analyses are explorations of some of the neuro-cognitive complexities already described, that may contribute to one’s creating of entwined

32

Cognitive Journeys through Fancifold

patterns of enchantment/disenchantment, and which encompass influence from the four categories or realms of “life” experiencethe physical, the romantic, the spiritual, and the psychic, respectively. (As was mentioned in the introductory chapter, there will be an attempt to characterize spiritual and psychic realms of inner experience as synergistically integrated with more concrete physical and romantic ones, even when one or more of the forces are negated or “not present” in the momentary dynamic). In addition, the figurative expression “enchanting follicles, disenchanting shafts” as part of the title of this chapter, is meant to convey “magical” (or enchanting) qualities, e.g. the amazing ability of the hair follicle to autonomously regenerate itself, as entwined with “grounded” (or disenchanting) qualities, e.g. the “deadness” of the hair shaft, to produce imaginative artistic incarnations of hair. Here, the individual creates “hair” imagery that has a hyper-real quality to it, such that it may even seem to him or her as a “better”, more expressive reflection of self, than his or her actual mirror image is. In the conduct of these analyses, each artistic and poetic piece on hair will be interpreted through three general lenses of observation simultaneously. One lens will encompass the presumed presence of semiotic elements within the piece that signify an entwining of those that enchant with those that disenchant. Part and parcel of this lens will be Calvin’s “key features” (also listed in the Introductory chapter) that characterize and illustrate the fairytale (enchantment, e.g., “life”) and anti-fairytale (disenchantment, e.g., “death”) interrelation. Once again, these features include: optimism/ pessimism; teleological, anticipatory/ retrospective, subversive; “once upon a time”/real world context; pedagogical/lessens unlearnt; infantilized, bowdlerized/adult themes, cynicism; telling/un-telling; cultural mirror/ breaking the mirror; black and white morality/grey morality or amorality; enchantment/disenchantment, etc. The second lens will include the presumed synergistic dynamics among the four “life” categories or realms (the physical, the romantic, the spiritual, and the psychic). These patterns will be gleaned by interpreting parts or elements of the piece as seemingly reflective of physical life involving hair, romantic life involving hair, spiritual life involving hair, and psychic life involving hair; this includes how each “life” realm seems to interplay with one or more of the others. The third lens includes Maiese’s four-to-five intrinsic structures of conscious experience that encompass sensori-motor subjectivity (2011), which include conative affectivity, egocentricity, spatiality, temporality, and intentionality. According to Maiese, cognitive affectivity refers to “desire-based affectivity” or “…the ‘experiential’ aspect of consciousness,

Cognitive Journeys through Fancifold

33

or what some theorists have described as ’subjective feeling’ or qualitative feel’…” (2011: 26). Here, to describe the basic nature of conative affectivity of a piece, this author will refer to Varela and Depraz’s idea of valence (2005), which, essentially, is tension in the sensori-motor system that is integral to a conscious emotional feeling or response. “Objects, precipitating elements, or other triggers impact and affect us, and their meaning and importance (whether it is of positive, negative, or mixed value) is felt” (Maiese, 2011: p.26). Thus, the triggers will be the artist’s or poet’s felt mixed meaning which may have both positive and negative sensations intertwined, as reflected in his or her piece or imaginative image of hair. Next, according to Maiese (2011: 27), sensori-motor subjectivity has “…an ‘inner’ source point”, as well as an ‘outer’ derivation…and that it is able to relate everything that is experienced to this inner source point.” In other words, there is both an “I” dimension, when the ‘inner’ source point influences the outside world, paradigmatically, through one’s performing of a certain body movement with one’s own physical body (Maiese, 2011: 27), as well as the “me” dimension, when the outside world influences the ‘inner’ source point, paradigmatically, as physically felt by one’s own body (Maiese, 2011: 27). This ‘inner’ source point is essentially egocentricity, which is, essentially, the ipseity or “I-ness” that is immediately or prereflectively felt throughout the body. For these analyses, presence of ipseity or “I-ness/me-ness” in a piece, will be those parts or elements of the “hair” image (either visually or linguistically) that clearly suggest physical movement, or even clearly a lack thereof. Next, is spatiality and temporality, introduced here together, and will be referred to as spatiotemporality. “The notion that conscious experience has ‘temporal width’ reveals that one always uniquely locates oneself in time, such as one always uniquely locates oneself in space.” (Maiese, 2011: 30). Maiese explains how through the spatial dimension of sensorimotor subjectivity, the body’s proprioceptive abilities produce one’s sense of physical balance and physical orientation. “I always experience myself as uniquely located and uniquely positioned…” (2011: 28). At the same time, through the temporal dimension one consciously experiences this balancing and orienting as “unfolding in time” as, “…one’s bodily subjectivity involves a flowing or streaming” (Maiese, 2011: 29). Thus, here, the spatiotemporality of a piece will be described in terms of the physical positioning or physical orientation of the created “hair” image (either in two-dimensional space as in visual art or as linguistically described in poetic art); this includes images of things and objects depicted in various physical relations to this image. Presumably, these relations

34

Cognitive Journeys through Fancifold

visually or linguistically implicate the interconnectedness of space and time. Lastly, is intentionality. Maiese (2011) states: Consciousness always is intentional in the sense that it ‘aims towards’ something beyond itself. Although often directed to objects, not all everyday experience is object-directed in a determinate sense. Experiences without determinate objects include bodily feelings, moods, and absorbed skillful activity. Associated bodily feelings are often that through which one is conscious of other things in the world, so that these feelings influence other cognitive functions. Any particular instance of perception and action, for example, presupposes a background, more general bodily sense of one’s relationship to the world and what sorts of experience are possible. Radcliffe…has described these background orientations as ‘feelings of being’ or‘existential feelings.’ (2011: 31).

Thus, it may be through the intentionality of sensori-motor subjectivity that affective framing is principally operative. This is so since, presumably, in the midst of imagining a highly personal (visual or linguistic) rendition of hair, for example, one’s current “feelings of being” or “feelings of oneness” with the developing image, in part monitor the extent to which emotional content can be feltthe degree to which the artist or poet feels enough but not too much risk to explore various depths and dimensions of his or her own emotional content that transverses various levels of consciousness within the global workspace. Here, attempts will be made to characterize, at least to some extent, the “subjective feeling” or “qualitative feel” of the piece based on its presumed degree of idiosyncratic or intrasubjective renditions; indeed, the degree of its seeming unusualness (for the viewer) in its depiction or portrayal of hair, may be related, at least to some degree, to the artist’s or poet’s level of emotional “risk” taken in creating it. In summary, it will be from the simultaneous look through all three lenses, that the viewer can potentially capture a glimpse of the creator’s “self as hair” in the metaphoric mirror.

Cognitive Journeys through Fancifold

35

Analyses of 18 Visual and Poetic “Hair” Incarnations

Visual Images (11). In Image 1, by Valerie Vargas (2013), is the intertwining of enchanting and disenchanting elements that relates to both color and style. The “pink” hair (that includes the braids and bangs) exudes a feminine quality, as pink often suggests the ethereal-like innocence of a young girl. However, the charmed expectation of a girl’s braided hairdo is undermined or subverted here by the bangs that completely cover both eyes. What is it that others, maybe, are expected not to see? What is it that she herself, maybe, is expected not to see? Indeed, it is at this place of no visible nor visibility of eyes that “once upon a time” (enchantment) mingles with real world context (disenchantment), as well as where infantilized (enchantment) mingles with adult themes (disenchantment). In addition, the physical life force seems to entwine with the psychic life force. Interestingly, this may be so either minus or plus both romantic life and spiritual life forces, since such forces may be present in the sense that what the eyes are expected not to see, may be instances and issues of matters of the heart (romantic and sexual) and/or matters, instances and issues that involve human struggle and emotional healing (spiritual life). Also, the physical forces that produce natural growth from hair follicles on the head do not produce death as pink shafts. The presumed presence of psychic life takes hold in the bangs being completely over the eyes, to the extent that sensory-motor pathways that enable visual sensation and perception from the outside world are blocked, thus rousing a greater need to rely on inner thoughts, feelings, and visions more extensively. In terms of the creator’s conative affectivity, there may have been mixed feelings (at some level of consciousness within the global workspace) that entwined pleasurable neuro-cognitive energy flows of satisfaction with less pleasurable ones that mirror the negative feelings of some viewers possibly roused by this kind of “bangs over the eyes” subversion. Here, the creator may desire to provoke a feeling or idea that has taken concrete visual form as a bold, perfectly straight, perfectly trimmed, static-looking, depiction.

36

Cognitive Journeys through Fancifold

Image 2 is the piece entitled Water Sprites (2012: 585) by Gustav Klimt (1902/03). This painting has been described as “…two…floating creatures…in a watery deep of pale-golden greenness…the two damsels are actually flat round fish…But I would much rather call them little sweet, silent watchful mermaid faces” (Hevesi, 2012: 585 of Tashen‘s book, edited by Tobias Natter). The thin glowing streaks that seem to dart past them are likely to be fish as well, since Silverfish is actually the subtitle of this piece. These seems to be enchanting and disenchanting elements intertwined that includes “sweetness” in their eyes combined with the severe (jet) blackness of their long, enveloping fur-like hair. In other words, the “sweetness” that tends to “soothe” through enchantment is combined with the “blackness” that tends to “scare”. Also, there is the simultaneous presence of optimism (or life) and pessimism (or death), with the former symbolized by the healthy thickness and lushness of the creature’s hair, and the latter symbolized by blue specks or highlights that may contribute to a feeling of bleakness. Indeed, it may even be that for some viewers, these are human women whose heads have been severed from their bodies (death). In addition, there may be an entwining of physical life forces (through the health and lushness of the hair, as well as through the possible issue of death by decapitation) with the forces of romantic life, spiritual life, and psychic life. This may be so since, regarding this piece, Natter has stated, “…the Water Sprites bear witness to Gustav Klimt’s image of woman as perceived by his (male) contemporaries” (2012: 585). Thus, it may be that these two female creatures are, essentially, a desired imaginary rendition of the human woman (which taps into the energy forces of romantic life) who also necessarily possesses the tendency to rouse anxiety through her perceived ability to produce strife of some kind (which implies a connectedness to spiritual life forces of “her inner strength”), using her “feminine intuition” (which implies a connectedness to psychic life forces). Here, the creator’s (Klimt’s) conative affectivity may be the desire for such a portrayal of “male want” that may need to include elements of unpleasantness. The long, thick hair that is completely stationary in water rather than flowing around the head, may be the creator’s sensory-motor portrayal of the female creature who “stands her ground”; possibly, a level of risk in portrayal taken by him so to “feed” male consciousness.

Cognitive Journeys through Fancifold

37

Both Images 4 & 5 are by digital artist Dan A. Cortopassi (2001: 69 & 71), and are being considered together for analyses since they possess the same pattern of color between the head of hair and the lower body. Both images convey enchantment through magical or “once upon a time” appeal of the mermaid figure that is entwined with the real-world context of adult sexuality that involves the kinesthetic touching and tossing back of one’s hair. Here, color seems crucial to “the image in fancifold”, since both images that depict the “magical” lower part of the figure, that includes a tail and fins, are essentially the same color as of the hair on the head of the more realistic upper part. Also, physical life forces seemingly combine with romantic life forces, without spiritual nor psychic ones. The “life” force is evident in the long, shining hair that reflects both the light of the sun and the light of the moon, combined with the romantic seductive ways in which their hands, arms, shoulders, and torsos interplay with their hair. The creator’s conative affectivity seems to be the desire for sensuous beauty that is simultaneously “realistic” and “unrealistic”, encapsulated by the spatiotemporal quality of the images considered together, i.e., from day to night, from night to day, etc. Here, the creator’s emotional risk-taking may involve his having the opportunity to “meet up with” his incarnated forms in digital space.

In Image 6, by digital artist Magdalena Vasters (2001: 307), enchanting elements entwine with disenchanting ones as a fractal-ized hair style. There is a fantastical, dreamlike, even surreal quality that simultaneously possesses an ultra-realness, since “the fractal” is a true pattern found in nature. Here, physical life is present (presumably without romantic life, spiritual life, and psychic life) not principally so in color and shine to the naked human eye, but much more in subtle or discrete natural patterns. The creator’s conative affectivity may encompass the desire for beauty that is “ethereally natural”. Also, the figure’s head is rather symmetrically counterbalanced (tilted down and to the figure’s right) with the contrastingly sized “spikes” of hair. Creating a “fractal” image (of hair) may involve some emotional risk-taking in the process of unveiling a nottypically-seen dimension of “hair” reality.

38

Cognitive Journeys through Fancifold

Image 7 is by Marguerite Sauvage (2009: 74). This image contains classic physical elements of the Gipson Girl (developed by American illustrator Charles Dana Gipson from the late 1800’s to the early 1900’s), that often includes, among other things, a feminine lacey high-collared blouse and pompadour hairstyle, that one might expect of a respectable lady (enchantment), combined with physical elements that tell another story, one of lust or carnal pleasure (disenchantment). This image seems to encapsulate both physical life and psychic life (without necessarily spiritual life). Physical life is portrayed by “the naked women of the pompadour” that seem to be making sexually provocative poses, with some also interacting sexually and perhaps romantically with one another. Here, physical life, romantic life, and psychic life seem to entwine with one another, that takes the incarnated form of “waves upon waves of her hair”, as the figure seems to be in deep (possibly intuitive) thought while continuously sipping tea, . The conative affectivity of the creator may be the desire to portray female sexuality, that may principally involve only other females, or that may involve principally only herself (since all the women in the waves seem to resemble each other as well as the central “sipping” figure). Also, there is a sense of spatiotemporal movement in the “wavy hair”, that may be, in effect, a conglomerate of personal erotic images and memories of the figure involving herself. There may be some risk by the creator, in depicting a prim young woman contemplating (experimental, perhaps) sex.

Image 8 is by photographer Bastian Werner and hairstylist Tanja Kern (2009: 65). The enchanting shiny, golden blonde hair (fit for a princess) is entwined with a style that seems to tell another story, one of a strange and possible other-worldliness. The extra-long wisps that veil the model’s face add to the intrigue of this “hair” image. Here, there is physical life (without romantic life, spiritual life, and psychic life) due to seemingly shining, living hair follicles, as well as the idea of fake (non-living) hair that, instead, may be a kind of shiny, golden foreign entity that seems to resemble hair. The conative affectivity of the creator may be the emotional need or desire for something beautiful-but-expected to also be the unexpected that can-be-beautiful. The slight asymmetry of the bottom trim of the hair wisps, implies subtle physical movement, the actual direction of this movement

Cognitive Journeys through Fancifold

39

mysterious or unknown. The depiction of feminine strangeness ensconced in feminine convention may encompass the creator’s degree of risk here.

Image 9 is by Olaf Hajek (2009: 71). The enchantment of nature flowers, foliage, the butterfly, the “pretty” birdis entwined with disenchantment, as these elements seem visually awkward, displaced, even superimposed on the girl’s head of hair, e.g., a pink flower looks organically connected to her right side part, rather than as being parts of a coiffure ornamentally integrated. There is physical life present through the presence of “natural elements (flowers, foliage, etc.) entwined with intuitive life (without romantic life and spiritual life), since there seems to be an element of calm expressed by this female figure, as if her dimensionally-challenged hairdo “feels right” and is meant to be. The conative affectivity of the creator may be one of composed experimentation with color as well as dimension. There seems to be no sense of physical movement here, not even by the butterfly in (or on) the figure’s middle right hair, nor by the bird situated in (or on) her lower left hair (though, as not intrinsically part of the hairdo, one might have greater expectation of each creature seeming to move). Here, time and space seem to stand still, as the two artificially juxtaposed dimensions may easily come apart otherwise. The risk-taking of the creator may involve an attempt to imagine and artistically convey a harmony-of- hairstyle through more abstract notions of beauty associated with relational, e.g., including brightness rather than dullness, and inter-relational, e.g., putting pink directly next to (even on top of) green, qualities of color.

Image 10 is by Eveline Tarunadjaja (2009: 82). Here, enchantment is linked to natural energy and beauty, as a field of mushrooms seems to harmoniously grow (along with her hair) out of the figure’s head, and blending stylishly with her “cabbage-leafed” collar. At the same time, the viewer may feel disenchanteddisgusted by “fungi” seeming to grow out of a women’s head. There is physical life, romantic life, and intuitive life without necessarily spiritual life. First, both the hair shafts and many of the mushrooms shafts are long and flowing asymmetrically, taking on natural directionality as they grow. Secondly, this figure has a feminine, romantic

40

Cognitive Journeys through Fancifold

Gipson Girl like hairdo, that even includes a rather large fancy-colored ruffled mushroom which protrudes from its left underside, and which, perhaps, is meant to be a kind of “mushroom flower”. Also, she seems to be in deep (possibly intuitive) thought. The conative affectivity of the creator may be reflected in the seeming serenity of mind of the female figure. Both physical movement and spatiotemporality are entwined as functions of nature in both symmetrical and asymmetrical patterns of growth. The risk-taking here, may be in the creator’s attempt to successfully juxtapose seemingly disparate entities beautiful hair and fungi.

Image 11 is by Yuko Shimizu (2009: 203). Included in this work is the teddy bear, with its magical charm that encapsulates emotional warmth and comfort, particularly in childhood, as well as does the furry, bear-ear hat with the pom-pom tie strings. Intertwined in this image is “blackness” (of the teddy bears) that implies that presence of death, doom, and dark forces. Also disenchanting, is the “human into teddy bear into human” theme, as an example of a subversive re-assemblage. Here, there is the physical life of growing thick, black fur on her head couched in the partially inanimate life of the “Teddy Beared Woman”; befittingly, there seems to be no romantic life implied by this hair, despite her own presumed “hairy” marking of her genitalia.) Also, might the furry, bear-ear hat be a kind of Spirit Hooda symbol of, if nothing else, the human “intent to shave”? To the extent that this is so, this (inanimate) woman may have an intuitive need to show some razor stubble somewhere on her body (like on her legs, for example). The conative affectivity of the creator may include the need to make a bold statement. Also, there is physical movement implied in patterns of force of the razorstubbly areas versus smooth ones. Time and space are implied as well, since it seems her body was, at one point, completely covered in black (synthetic) fur, like those of the two (completely inanimate) teddies around her. The risk-taking here may involve depicting self as simultaneously object and subject.

Cognitive Journeys through Fancifold

41

Image 12 is by Toril Baekmark (2009: 82). Here, enchantment is portrayed in the beauty of naturetrees, branches, and the leaves that grow from them. These visual patterns seem analogous to the beauty of one’s continuously growing hair, as conveyed by the two images of the long-haired woman on each side. At the same time, one can characterize the central image as a subversive re-assemblage, in which tree branches, which are typically understood to grow from tree trunks, have (freakishly) grown, instead, from out the top of a woman’s head. There is physical life implied by growing tree branches (with leaves) and growing hair shafts. Also, the connection of romantic life to hair is portrayed in the sensuous pose of the woman using her hair, to the lower right of the large central image. Although there seems to be no spiritual life present, intuitive life portrays the vitality of nature “out there” as connected to the vitality of nature coming out from “inside” one‘s head, literally. The conative affectivity of the creator may include a desire to portray the self as being one with nature. There is implied physical movement of the small image of the woman on the right through her sensuous pose. There is implied spatio-temporality in the simultaneous growth of branches, their leaves, and human hair, over time. There is risk-taking through, once again, the particular subversive re-assemblage portrayed here.

42

Cognitive Journeys through Fancifold

Poetic Images (7). Image 1 is a poem titled “Her Hair” (1980: 29) by Diane Donovan. In it a woman portrays her hair as being immersed in the cosmos, where she feels at the fringe, at least, of “starry-eyed” connectedness and Milky “ways”. It was so long she felt connected to the stars by it when she washed she felt the milky way running through the strands, dripping onto her shoulders. She felt it took wild journeys at night She would dream of stars there was always that connection.

The poem’s fantastical imagery seems to enchant the viewer“Once upon a time, her long hair connected her to the stars…” and “Once upon a time, she felt the Milky Way running through her hair…” The disenchanting elements may be related to her disappointment woven through this imagery that relates to her sensing her hair’s “wild journey” that she seems to never experiences in her dreams for herself. Here, there is physical life and psychic life, without romantic life and spiritual life, Physical life is reflected in the “longness” of her hair, as well in the sensations of her wet hair on her head and around her shoulders. Psychic life involves her nuanced feelings that intuitively connect her to the cosmos through principally sensory and motor experiences. The creator’s conative affectivity seems to be a continuous emotional immersion in the experience of her own hair; she feels continued pleasure from it, and wants to know more about “the cosmos”. There is physical movement that spatiotemporally associates connecting, running, and dripping, as well as “day into night, night into day”. The risk for the creator may relate, at least in part, to her realization of what she does not know, but wants to know.

Cognitive Journeys through Fancifold

43

Image 2 is a poem titled “Blonde” (1980: 37) by Ruth Moose. In it there is a husband who is also an artist, beginning to paint what seems to be his posed blonde, beautiful model. He measures her with his eyes, strokes bare canvas. She is a porcelain vase, still life with hair breasts legs on a stand he turns to light. Her eyes are soft as a lover’s dreaming. In the mirror the artist’s wife gathers dust, makes the lunch of cheese omelet, bitter herbs and scorched green tea.

Through the “male” eyes of this painter, his “blonde object” is a porcelain vase, statue, lamp, etc. that, to him, makes his place more enchanting. Her (or its) presence, seemingly upsets his wife whom, as an “object of desire” of her husband, is “gathering dust”. In other words, she does not receive romantic and sexual attention from her husband, at least as of late. It is these latter elements of the poem, that bring disenchantment into the foldthe reality that this marriage is going stale, that includes ’bitter” herbs and “scorched” tea. There is romantic life, spiritual life, and psychic life, possibly without physical life. This is so since, the viewer has no inkling that the “blonde” hair on the model is real, since presumably certain of her other physical attributes seem “beautifully fake”. It seems as though this metonymic “blonde”, negatively influences the romantic and sexual life of the husband and wife, seemingly to the point of its near-death. The wife may need inner strength to either stay in or leave her marriage, And, it is principally through intuitive life, that she may be sensing the degree of seductive power of “blonde”. The conative affectivity of the poet seems to be one of discouragement and sadness. Presumably, there is little physical movement (since the model is a vase, statue, lamp, etc.), aside from the artist’s eyes that stare his model up and down. The risk-taking of the creator may involve introducing “the blonde” into her creative imagination, in the first place.

44

Cognitive Journeys through Fancifold

Image 3 is the poem “Leaning Down Into Green” (1980: 19) by Joyce Odam. There is a little girl and her father. safe child is leaning down into green as if she knew her way she has found a flower there a small black blossom just at the edge of her fingertips her golden hair is melting past her knees her feet are turning into ivy her father snaps a summer camera now she is captured this is a story saved from sadness

Here, there is an enchanting “once upon a time” feeling of a goldenhaired child reaching to pick a little blossom. The disenchanting elements may include the color black of this blossom (perhaps, a foreshadowing of doom), that involves the displacement of her hair, that her father notices, as she has over-reached her physical limits or boundaries, and so is soon to fall. There is physical life and spiritual life and intuitive life here, minus romantic life. First, her hair is shiny and long, indications of continued vitality and growth. The child’s tenacious spirit that is, essentially her desire to take a risk, besides her age-related lack of judgment, factors into her determination to “stretch her body” as needed to pick the blossom. For her father, this degree of her daughter’s determination is measured by the gradual increase of her hair down past her knees. The conative affectivity of the creator may be the desire to feel, once again, the innocent wonder of a child. The physical movement includes the spatiotemporal falling of the girl’s hair below her in knees in her father’s sense of real time. The possible risk-taking of the creator may involve the father’s momentary snapping of the camera, to capture the physical expression of his child’s wonderment, as well as the creator’s hope that he will catch her before she falls down.

Cognitive Journeys through Fancifold

45

Image 4 is a Haiku (1980: 43) by Conciere Taylor. The comb glides through my hair, I think of my husband fishing the river.

In this tiny poem, there is the implication of enchanting and disenchanting elements combined. Here, the former elements seem to include the narrator’s linking of the texture of her hair to the depth of the river’s water, as well as her engaging with her hair in a way that rouses, perhaps, romantic and sexual thoughts of her husband, whose hands, on occasion, affectionately glide through her hair. At the same time, disenchanting elements may relate to the possibility (she feels) her husband enjoys fishing in the river more than he does her feminine allure, of which the experience of her hair is part. Here, there is physical life, romantic life, and intuitive life (without spiritual life). First, her hair is healthy and tended to. Next, there seems the combing of hair own hair somehow symbolizes for her both the emotional distance and the emotional closeness of her and husband. Furthermore, it may be her intuition that modulates the degree of distance and closeness on a regular basis. The conative affectivity of the creator may involve a subtle feeling of emotional longing. The physical movement includes the wife’s internal spatiotemporal synchrony of the “her combing of hair” and “his combing for fish”. The creator’s degree of risk-taking may be in degree of acknowledgement of emotional distance in relation to emotional closeness.

Cognitive Journeys through Fancifold

46

Image 5 is the poem “Dead Women” (1980: 56) by Siv Cedering Fox. Here, there are female spirits who repeatedly return to the place where they, among other things, brushed and combed their hair. Return to brush their hair. They use our combs, careful not to break the teeth. They borrow our brushes, leaving a trace of hair in the bristles. They enter our beds, to feel the warmth of a man, they have almost forgotten, but not forgotten. They try on our gloves and soft scarves. They try on our nightgowns and turn slowly in front of the mirror. In the morning we wake, smooth out the gowns and scarves in the drawer, sit in front of the mirror. We raise the brush or comb to out heads, stop, notice the hair, continue.

Cognitive Journeys through Fancifold

47

There is enchantment here, as these nightly spirits indulge their feminine impulses to adorn themselvestrying on gloves and scarves and nightgowns, as well as brush their hair. There is also disenchanting elements woven into this imagery, as there seems to be an emotional longing, that involves a man, that these spirits cannot shed; perhaps, this is why they continue to return. There is physical (and metaphysical) life that includes attention to the sexual attractiveness of women’s hair, which also relates to romantic life, spiritual life, and intuitive life. Romantic life involves wanting “to feel the warmth of” a man; spiritual life or inner strength seems to be involved in some way and to some extent in these feminine ghosts, as they have almost forgotten, but not quite forgotten, the “warmth” of a man; and intuitively, the currently “living” women feel their communing of souls with these “dead” women, which involves their “noticing” the stands of hair of these women in the bristles of their brushes and combs as they tend to their own beauty in the morning. The conative affectivity of the creator may be feelings of compassion and empathy, for all of these women. The egocentricity includes, among other things, the act of brushing and combing one’s hair; there is also a spatiotemporal rhythm of brushing and combing by night, and then by day again. The creator’s risk-taking here, may involve transforming “the creepy” into “the comforting”.

Image 6 is the poem “Braiding” (1980: 16-17) by Susan Mernit. In it, the narrator imaginatively reflects on her hair (being braided) as a child, followed by a child’s hair (being braided) later on; in between are musings, memories, as well as a revelation about hair. One two make them tighter you’ll never squeeze the curl out. Even without ribbons they slide way down my back. Cross one, cross over Hair so thick light never catches only gets blocked by my lines in the air a mine field

48

Cognitive Journeys through Fancifold Hair is wild woman around the edges snakes skin at the beginning soft glove leather patting the scalp rough plastic brushing the skin out Hair is a map of years of cells a glyph geometry road map and closet together Pull your hair away from your ear if you have any And I’ll whisper a secret about hair: Ii is beautiful a jumbo magic Rapunzel lived in the tower till the prince pulled her down, arranging her golden prison. Medusa’s snakes opened cuts in her throat. My grandmother was double-process platinum till handfuls came out. Becky Fields at fourteen taking a piano lesson: Bad Skin, bad teeth. Bangs taped up over her eyebrows Her face glued up like an accident with bubble gum. First haircut in the family mythology: My brother losing curls. The most traumatic: My pixie clip at seven. Tree bark is a more tender protein, not to mention sperm. The magic is always implicit. * One, two you’ve got to get all the hair in braids weave a pattern and nothing should frizz out

Cognitive Journeys through Fancifold

49

The smoothness doesn’t appear by magic you have to work for it pull the sections even and make the chld stand still sooner or later they grow to be active but for a while the braids are beautiful the hair young and shiny calmly ordered.

This piece entwines enchanting elementsa little girl’s braided hair, and the constrained discipline that said pe “do” logical hairstyle seems to symbolize, with disenchanting elements of such lessons unlearnthow it is not easy to get “the curl out”, as well as its being a “wild woman around the edges” like a “snake skin”. There is physical life and psychic life present, seemingly without romantic life and spiritual life. First, the hair follicles on the head comprise “a map of years of cells”. Also, intuition or nuance seems to flow through the narrator’s developing realization of the personal “magic” that is hair from initially being “jumbo” to later being “always implicit”. What seems to propel the narrator’s thoughts through to a changed perspective are thoughts and feelings linked to her personal musings and personal memories, such as “Rapunzel” having her “golden prison” arranged by the prince (which, incidentally, is a proximal rather than distal connection to the fairytale, since the tale is made reference to directly in the poem); also, Medusa’s snaked hair causing her physical harm; and, the narrator’s “most traumatic” memory of her “pixie clip”. In addition, the conative affectivity of the creator seems to be one of a composed enlightenment. Also, egocentricity includes the physical feeling or sensation of one’s hair as difficult to tame during its braiding. Here, spatio-temporality relates to the passage of time from the beginning of the poem when she is a child having her hair done, to the end when she refers to a child having her hair done. The creator’s personal risk may relate to her continuing her personal journey through to her changed realization of hair.

50

Cognitive Journeys through Fancifold

Image 7 is the poem “Eighty-Eight” (1980: 55) by Diane Donovan. Eighty-eight she said she was losing her hair at last it was long and flowing like a comet white against the blackness coming. At this time she was used to becoming less: only her hair reminded her of Spanish princess back ground inside she still danced when she heard Greek music: the violins straightened her; her toes tapped time with her cane. Eighty-eight she couldn’t believe she was losing no more the raven but then white suited her better. She supposed it to be color of ermine cloak it was better than being naked and losing All the wrappings.

This piece is of an elderly woman who has seemingly enchanted memories of being like a “Spanish dancer” with long black hair, when she was young. Entwined with these memories is her keen awareness of her currently long, but now white, hair, that she seems to rationalize as “suited for her better” now, because of her advanced age, as well as still “…better

Cognitive Journeys through Fancifold

51

than…losing all the wrappings”. There is physical life (and death), since her hair has grown “long and flowing”. However, it has also lost its pigmentation due to the developed inability of her hair follicles to produce melanin, a part of the natural again process. There is also romantic life (and death) present, since she reminds herself of when she was a “Spanish princess”young, physically attractive, and vital, since this is no longer the case. In addition, there is the presence of spiritual life and psychic life. She seems to have some inner strength since she can tell herself that her long, white hair is the “color of ermine cloak”. Also, she seems to rely on her intuition connected to her “self” long ago, as she automatically knows to “straighten” and “tap” when she hears Greek musicsome sensori-motor subjective details of her memory. The conative affectivity of the creator may include the desire to emotionally connect with the psychological reality of becoming old. Egocentricity is present to the degree that the creator “feels” the elderly woman’s urge to dance, within her own body. Also, there is a spatiotemporal movement that connects the then-young Spanish dancer to the now-old mover to Greek music. Here, the risk for the creator may involve her venturing into her own thoughts, feelings, and even fears, about becoming old.

CONCLUSION INTO “THE fOLD” AGAIN: RE-DOING RAPUNZEL’S HAIR

Figure 4.1 “mermaid holding comb and mirror”

Perhaps like the women drying their hair in John French Sloan’s 1912 painting, might anyone, let’s say in the midst of drying her hair, fancy herself (or be fancied by another) a kind of Rapunzel? Indeed, through one’s imagination, one may pretend that one’s (or another’s) hair is extra-long, extra thick, and golden blonde, no matter what its actual length, texture, and color. Or, instead, one may create an internal image that is markedly different from the fairytale. In other words, it may be possible for the fairytale to become internally re-represented, as its concrete details are explored and elaborated into current ideas of “what can be”. Thus, what may psychologically connect actual details to “fairytale” details, are hypothetical possibilities that relate directly to the details of the narrative (for instance, on physical life in the Introductory chapter, there is speculation, Did her hair also continue to grow? And if so, when the prince finally found her in the desert, was her hair luxurious…as before?). These “past” possibilities can have “future” relevance to “hair” depictions and portrayals that may encompass at least four dimensional “threads”, if you will, of human experience namely, the physical, the romantic, the spiritual, and the psychic; possibly, not only in terms of how each has been characterized here, but also in terms of other prospective characterizations and interpretations as well. Indeed, it is the existence of these threads (and perhaps other ones too) that, through their modifications and re-instantiations, may psychologically link the Rapunzel fairytale, as a classic story involving hair, to others’ current and future inner, subjective experiences of hair.

54

Conclusion

These “Rapunzel-ized” re-interpretations that may implicitly include dimensional “threads” in any developing “hair” image (indeed, often even without the imaginer realizing it), may ultimately lead to the creating of artistic works of hair such as paintings, drawing, photographs, and poems, to name but a few. These essentially internal, interpretive transformations may necessarily rely on embodied cognitive processes of the creator (and even later of the viewer) which, among other things, include sensory and motor channels and pathways of the brain and body. These channels and pathways, may also connect to more or less subtle or nuanced feelings and emotions that take the phenomenological form of “felt desire” (Maiese, 2011). Presumably, such desire can propel the creator’s mind and body into fanciful movement. Through fanciful movement, one uses a metaphoric mirror of self, that reflects back images that may or may not resemble him or her in any realistically recognizable physical way; it is under such cognitive conditions that he or she can figuratively become “hair”. This complex symbolization process paves the way for the possibility of the fancifold mindset, in which the image of interest, in this case the image of hair, can come to include enchanting and disenchanting elements intermingled.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

APA (2007) Dictionary of Psychology, Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Baars, B. (1997) “In the Theater of Consciousness: Global Workplace Theory, a Rigorous Scientific Theory of Consciousness”, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 4 (4): 292-309. Baekmark, T. (2007) “Untitled” in R. Klanten. M. Hubner and S. Ehrmann (eds.) Hair’em Scare’em, Berlin: Gestalten. Bernhardt, D. (October, 2010) “Emotion Inference from Human Body Motion”, University of Cambridge, No. 787: 1-202. Bettelheim, B. (1976) The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairytales, Knopf: New York. Boleyn-Fitzgerald, M. (2010) Pictures of the Mind: What the New Neuroscience Tells Us About Who We Are, New Jersey: Pearson. Briggs, J. and F. David Peat (1989) The Turbulent Mirror: An illustrated Guide to Chaos Theory and the Science of Wholeness, New York: Harper & Row. —. (1990) Fire in the Crucible: The Self Creation of Creativity and Genius, Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher. Claxton, G. (1997) Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: How Intelligence Increases When You Think less, New Jersey: THE ECCO PRESS. —. (2005) The Wayward Mind: An Intimate History Of The Unconscious, London: Abacus. Cortopassi, D. (2001) “Amanda” in J. Wiedemann (ed.) Digital Beauties: 2D & 3D Computer Generated Digital Models, Virtual Idols And Characters, TASCHEN. —. (2001) “Redtail Moon” in J. Wiedemann (ed.) Digital Beauties: 2D & 3D Computer Generated Digital Models, Virtual Idols And Characters, TASCHEN. Davis, B. and D. Sumara (2006) Complexity and Education: Inquiries into Learning, Teaching, and Research, New York: Routledge. Deagon, A. (1995) “Dancing the Eternal Image: Visual and Narrative Archetypes”, Habibi, 14 (1): 1-5. Donovan, D. (1980) “Eighty-Eight” in K. Machan Aal (ed.) Rapunzel, Rapunzel: poems, prose, and photographs by women on the subject of hair, Ithaca, New York: McBooks Press.

56

Bibliography

Donovan, D. (1980) “Her Hair” in K. Machan Aal (ed.) Rapunzel, Rapunzel: poems, prose, and photographs by women on the subject of hair, Ithaca, New York: McBooks Press. Foster, H. (1983) (ed.) The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, Port Townsend: Bay Press. Fox, S. C. (1980) “Dead Women” in K. Machan Aal (ed.) Rapunzel, Rapunzel: poems, prose, and photographs by women on the subject of hair, Ithaca, New York: McBooks Press. Fries, P. (2005) “A Mechanism for Cognitive Dynamics: Neural Communication Through Neural Coherence”, Trends Cogn Sci, 9: 474-480. Gallate, J and S. Keen, “Intuition in Jungian Psychology” (2013), Wikipedia: 1-4. ghd (2009) Fairy Tales Television Ad Campaign, United Kingdom. Goldstein, D. (2009) Fallen Princesses, November 17th: SurLaLune Fairy Tales blog. Gross, T. and B. Blasius (2008) “Adaptive Coevolutionary Networks: A Review”, J R Social Interface, 5: 259-271. Hajek, O. (2007) “Untitled” in R. Klanten., M., Hubner and S. Ehrmann (eds.) Hair’em Scare’em, Berlin: Gestalten. Hunt, M. (1884) (trans. and ed.) Grimm’s Household Tales. Translation of Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm’s Children’s and household Tales (1812). London: George Bell. “Intuition in Jungian Psychology” (2013), Wikipedia: 1-4. Klimt, G. (2012) “Water Sprites” in Tobias G. Natter (ed.) Gustav Klimt: The Complete Paintings, TASCHEN. Klein, K. (2011) Fairy Tale Rituals: Engage the Dark, Eerie & Erotic Power of Familiar Stories, Minnesota: Llewellyn. Krauss, R. and J. Livingston (1985) L’mour fou: Photography and Surrealism, an exhibition catalog, London: Abbeville Press. Maiese, M. (2011) Embodiment, Emotion, and Cognition (New Directions in Philosophy and Cognitive Science), Great Britain: Palgrave Macmillan. McAra, C. and D. Calvin (eds.) Anti-Tales: The Uses of Disenchantment, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Mernit, S. (1980) “Braiding” in K. Machan Aal (ed.) Rapunzel, Rapunzel: poems, prose, and photographs by women on the subject of hair, Ithaca, New York: McBooks Press. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (1994) (10th ed.), Massachusetts: Merriam Webster Inc.

Re-doing Rapunzel’s Hair: Viewing Subjective Cognition in Fancifold

57

Montagna, W. (1965) “The Skin”, Scientific America, 212: 53-59. Moose, R. (1980) “Blonde” in K. Machan Aal (ed.) Rapunzel, Rapunzel: poems, prose, and photographs by women on the subject of hair, Ithaca, New York: McBooks Press. Neufeld, A. (2012) Hair: The Long and the Short of It, USA: CPSIA. Odam, J. (1980) “Leaning Down Into Green” in K. Machan Aal (ed.) Rapunzel, Rapunzel: poems, prose, and photographs by women on the subject of hair, Ithaca, New York: McBooks Press. Pavlik-Malone, L. (2013) Being Doll: A Study Of Youngness & Oldness At Interface, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Random House College Dictionary (1984) (revised ed.), New York: Random House. Robertson, A. F. (2004) Life Like Dolls: The Collector Doll Phenomenon and the Lives of the Women Who Love Them, New York: Routledge. Romweber, S. (2004) Hair: Surviving the Fall, Florida: Rainbow Books. Sauvage, M. (2007) “Cups of Tea” in R. Klanten. M. Hubner and S. Ehrmann (eds.) Hair’em Scare’em, Berlin: Gestalten. Shimizu, Y. (2007) “Untitled” in R. Klanten. M. Hubner and S. Ehrmann (eds.) Hair’em Scare’em, Berlin: Gestalten. Sporns, O. (2011) Networks of the Brain, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Strauch, B. (2010) The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain, New York: Viking. Stoddard, M. (1990) The Scented Ape: The Biology and Culture of Human Odour, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tarunadjaja, E. (2013) “Fungus” (www.cwc-i. com). Taylor, C. (1980) Haiku in K. Machan Aal (ed.) Rapunzel, Rapunzel: poems, prose, and photographs by women on the subject of hair, Ithaca, New York: McBooks Press. Varela, F. and N. Depraz (2005) “At the Source of Time: Valence and the Constitutional Dynamics of Affect”, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 12 (8): 61-81. Vargas, V. (2013). Pink Hair, etsy.com. Vasters, M. (2001) “Untitled” in J. Wiedemann (ed.) Digital Beauties: 2D & 3D Computer Generated Digital Models, Virtual Idols And Characters, TASCHEN. Weitz, R. (2004) Rapunzel’s Daughters: What Women’s Hair Tells Us About Women’s Lives, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Werner, B. and T. Kern (2007) Photograph in R. Klanten. M. Hubner and S. Ehrmann (eds.) Hair’em Scare’em, Berlin: Gestalten.

58

Bibliography

Womelsdorf, T., J. M. Schoffelen, R. Oostenveld, W. Singer and R. Desimone (2007) “Modulation of Neuronal Interactions through neural synchronization”, Science 316: 1609-1612.