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ELLEN SPOLSKY, Sent Away from the Garden? The Pastoral Logic of Tasso, Marvell, and Haley

deed depend heavily on context as they work at cultural construction,
success is not guaranteed. The hypothesis affords a neurological ac-
count of the uncertainty and inevitable risk of error inherent in human
thinking and communication. It provides the biological underpinning
for a phenomenon that literary and cultural theorists have been de-
scribing for years, and also supports the claim that works of imagina-
tion allow and encourage the recalibration, rethinking, and rearrang-
ing of familiar pa erns so that new understanding becomes available.
It describes how what at first looks like a tragedy might turn out to
have a comic ending.
In Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind
(2016), Clark argues the hypothesis in detail, describing the evolved dy-
namic of thinking as powered by error messages in neural networks
that prompt and produce correction. He summarizes the empirical work
that studies the neural system monitoring its own uncertainty, keeping
continuously up to date by prompting revision and correction. On this
view, the brain uses its sense perception mechanisms not, as once might
have been said, to collect and store information, but by matching mo-
ment-by-moment input against what is already available in memory.
Incoming sense data is checked against past experience which functions
as a prediction or guess about what must now be dealt with, acted upon.
But since past experience is always, by definition, obsolescent, the
process of matching usually produces an error message. That error mes-
sage stimulates a revision which is then again sent forward for assess-
ment. Speed being of the essence, both operations move as li le infor-
mation as possible, repeating the shu le until a satisfactory representa-
tion emerges; satisfaction, here, is whatever is likely to produce appro-
priate action. What drives the system toward success is the generation
of conflict between what is expected and what is encountered, and cru-
cially, in Clark’s language, the surprise of the mis-matches.
We cheer from the sidelines as the received view of the brain as
a collector of incoming information is replaced by a dynamic in which
recourse to experience produces recalibration. Although cognition
cannot but be biased toward the familiar – what else have we got? –
as the deconstructionists called the “always already,” memory is not
the brain’s only resource. Not waiting for all precincts to report, the
system produces pa erns that are guesses, penciled in, as it were. Bits

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