The Melancholy of Anatomy
The poet William Butler Yeats prayed: “God guard me from the thoughts men think / In the mind alone” (“A Prayer for Old Age”). He wrote in 1916: “We only believe in those thoughts which have been conceived not in the brain but in the whole body” (introduction to Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa’s Certain Noble Plays of Japan). In the same essay he spoke with foreboding of “a mechanical sequence of ideas.”
As another example, more explicit, here is the poet and translator Philip Sherrard on the Greek poet Anghelos Sikelianos: “He saw [the Western world of his time] as increasingly alienated from those principles which give life significance and beauty and as approaching the condition of a machine out of control and hastening towards destruction… . The organic sense of life was being shattered into countless unconnected fragments… . A system of learning which made extreme demands on the purely mechanical and sterile processes of memory had the effect of absorbing all the spontaneous movements of body and soul of the younger generations” (The Wound of Greece).
Or here is a passage, by the poet and critic John Crowe Ransom, pointed more directly at our specialist system, which he identified as a phase of the Puritanism that began in religion: “You may dissociate the elements of experience and exploit them separately. But then at the best you go on a schedule of small experiences, taking them in turn, and trusting that when the rotation is complete you will have missed nothing. And at the worst you will become so absorbed in some one small experience that you will forget to go on and complete the schedule; in that case you will have missed something. The theory that excellence lies in the perfection of the single functions, and that society should demand that its members be hard specialists, assumes that there is no particular harm in missing something” (The World’s Body).
A proper attention to our language, moreover, informs us that the Greek root of “anatomy” means “dissection,” and that of “analysis” means “to undo.” The two words have essentially the same meaning. Neither suggests a respect for formal integrity. I suppose that the nearest antonym to both is a word we borrow directly from Greek: poiesis, “making” or “creation,” which suggests that the work of the poet, the composer or maker, is the necessary opposite to that of the analyst and the anatomist. Some scientists, I think, are in this sense poets.
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