THE APHASIA CAFE
Adam Segal is a 23-year old graduate of the UI, an unapologetic English major and student of creative writing. Though he's just left town, he aims to do Iowa City proud wherever he may find himself.
24 August 2012 | Little Village
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Iowa City’s SoBo district: Off Gilbert St between downtown Iowa City & Hwy 6
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GILB ERT
“What I believe is that we have an old brain—an emotional brain.” This emotional brain is occupied with survival and reproduction. “Those [instincts] are underneath awareness. They’re responsible for the immediate feelings of like and dislike for a person. I think they underlie bias and prejudice. I think they underlie uninhibited impulses, especially aggressive ones.” But by no means are we slaves to our instincts. As McGuire explains, “we have this enormous neo-cortex. And that’s where choice lives. We can’t do anything about those fast, preconscious feelings and impulses about the world around us. But we can certainly work with it as a piece of information once it becomes conscious.” It is our job to be conscious of our consciousness. Yet McGuire is certain science will never reveal the truth about our minds in a predictive manner, the way it sometimes happens in nightmarish science-fiction scenarios. “There will not be a ‘neuro-Krebs cycle,’ where we can ring up a brain state with certainty. Will we ever ‘know ourselves’ in voxels? Or in any quantitative sense? Will we be able to predict who we will be or what we will think, choose, deny, repress or love...? Will neuroscience define consciousness, or self-consciousness? I don’t believe so.” To Dr. McGuire, the human impulse to know how our minds work in such a formulaic manner is “a form of fear of the dark.” If I were to voice one very minor complaint about The Aphasia Café, it’s that the first section passes the baton too quickly. I say this partly because the poems here are so unique; McGuire’s intimate understanding of the condition from both medical and poetic standpoints is evident. Also, one might reasonably argue that all literature is based around the tragic inability of humans to fully communicate and connect with one another. I suspect that in a world where people understood each other perfectly, artists would be out of work. But McGuire points out that art is about desiring to understand ourselves, not just each other. “We just want to know,” she told me. “We want prophecy. Even a tragic prophecy makes men demi-gods. We want to be in on the secret. No matter how much info we have, we still fall, we're still members of the House of Atreus. Which brings us to poetry, and its job security.”