This is a test post to inaugurate a novel incarnation of a blog. I could formerly be found elsewhere, but I’ve decided to shift ground—largely to make use of a cleverer, more mature title.
This will likewise be a spot for me to showcase cleverer, more mature writing. Theoretically. Because, really, who am I kidding? I’m neither cleverer nor more mature than I used to be.
But at the very least, I will aim here to be more polished, more systematic, more unembarrassed about myself and my writing.
A little bit of important information:
1. I’ve taken the title of this blog from John Donne’s poem “The Ecstasy,” a poem in turn from his 1635 Songs and Sonnets. The relevant stanza is this one:
[O]ur blood labors to beget
Spirits, as like souls as it can,
Because such fingers need to knit
That subtle knot, which makes us man.
2. I’ve taken the header image from Helkiah Crooke’s 1615 anatomy Mikrokosmographia, specifically the copy at the Huntington Library. It’s from the eighth chapter (“Of the Vessels disseminated through the Braine”) of the seventh book (page 451). It shows a portion of the arterial system of the brain (as it was believed to exist in the early seventeenth century) as well as, on the right-most side, a portion of the rete mirabile or “wonderful knot,” a net of arteries supposed to exist at the bottom of the brain, arteries responsible for, literally and figuratively, binding the soul to the body.
These arteries did not, in fact, exist in humans.
The Donne and the Crooke form part of a series of words and images running through the late-sixteenth to the late-seventeenth century that, together, comprise a kind of early history of human neuroscience. These words and images have haunted me sufficiently to cause me to write a dissertation about them, which is the task in which I currently find myself entangled.
