Reading is an advanced form of looking – and of looking at faces, in particular. That’s the fascinating story behind Evolution of Reading and Face Circuits during the First Three Years of Reading Acquisition, a paper published in NeuroImage in 2022 by Xiaoxia Fenge et al in which some interesting distinctions are made. The part of the brain dedicated to facial recognition (the fusiform gyrus) is co-opted when we learn to read. But after that ability has been acquired it can’t be lost, or only when it degrades because of brain damage (or dementia). Face-processing, on the other hand – the Ur-form of reading – continues to develop, perhaps because it is such a necessary form of discrimination. We are one of very few animals able to tell other animals apart. Crows (corvids) can also do this. They know the un-Crowiness of the rest of the world. They are also masters of shared attention. From their ability to remember faces comes the ability to know me from you; to hide things, and to give them.
None of this would be news to Ted Hughes, whose great poem sequence Crow (1970) drew on the tradition of bird poetry in English and the exaltation of the winged messenger in ancient myth to fashion a symbolic verse narrative for the post-war era. His titular character is a reader of change and destruction – a ragged Shamanic figure flying between different spiritual traditions who sees the whole of life as a battle for survival and meaning. The sequence is a violent creation myth, and such “making” myths are all about telling one thing from another.
Creation myths also tend to acknowledge disaster in the background: the urge to make is the urge to rescue something from meaninglessness, or save it from loss. In Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “Sandpiper” (1962), the bird is “looking for something, something, something.” And in Sylvia Plath’s “The Zoo-Keeper’s Wife” (1961), an insomniac spouse sees her marriage as an encounter with animals in an airless ark. It’s not all bad news, though, because Plath’s wide-awake suffering is our gain as readers, and a way of looking sadness in the face.