Like Something

Dale Tracy

I don’t perceive my brain, 
its surfaced waves.
In these waters, 
I’m submersive.

I don’t get wet. 
I don’t touch seafloor. 
But it gives me patterns, 
my astrolabe.

I’m an ocean of information. 
I know myself this way.
I’m in the water, 
but my knowing so is a boat.

I’m partial against the shores,
rubbing some stones smoother.
I’m the stone smooth from rubbing.
I monitor my smoothness.
From the fields, particles immersed in forces,
I know beauty, an arrival from me,
from this art working 
that is knowing the world.

Like the poem,
my brain’s states emerge as my experience, 
and I emerge like the plume from the whale,
an ars poetica it is like something to be.

The Science

This poem considers access consciousness (my ability to perceive the world as me) and phenomenal consciousness (what it feels like to be me) alongside questions about the efficacy of considering the brain as a computer and of calling the representations of the world it provides illusions. Taking together that our knowing of the world works through consciousness and that there is much we don’t know about consciousness, this poem understands being conscious as a creative engagement, using the metaphor of making art.

The Poet

Dale Tracy is the author of the full-length poetry collection Derelict Bicycles (Anvil); the chapbooks Gnomics (above/ground), Lines That Open (Surrey Art Gallery), The Mystery of Ornament (above/ground), and Celebration Machine (Proper Tales); and the monograph With the Witnesses (McGill-Queen’s). She is a faculty member in the English Department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.

Next poem: network effect by Tyler L. McIntosh