“Go and catch a falling star”

This chapter integrates the current neuropsychology of mental imagery with a discussion of two sets of ekphrastic artworks. Margaret Edson’s 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Wit, chronicles the death of a fictional English teacher in the northeastern United States as she undergoes aggressive treatment for ovarian cancer. Vivian Bearing teaches the poems of John Donne, which appear throughout the play as quotations, close readings, and emblems of difficulty. The chapter delves into Donne’s iconography, and explores questions of the nature of emblems both in poetry and as second-order ekphraseis—images of images. The second work is A. Van Jordan’s The Cineaste (2013), a collection of ekphrastic poems that present films as verbal images. One of these poems, “I’ve heard the mermaids singing” is also a second-order ekphrasis, evoking a film by the same title by Patricia Rozema as well as T. S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Donne’s “Go and catch a falling star,” and Homer’s Odyssey. While the idea that imagery is a subjective phenomenon, private to an individual and unique to their reading experience, dominated for much of the twentieth century, a cognitivist perspective allows readers to understand imagery without having recourse to individualist ideals. While imagery is created “inside” an individual, it can only be produced by way of a cognitive architecture that doesn’t align with post-enlightenment conceptions of subjectivity. In particular, this chapter explores Bayesian inference and perception, embodiment, the difficulty of creating and manipulating imagery, memory, multisensory processes, and the time course of aesthetic experiences.