The Immaculate Perception

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta and
author of Calling Texas.

This is not an easy book to classify. The publisher describes it as prose snapshots, but it has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s award in poetry. Perhaps the closest analogues are the scientific and speculative essays of Annie Dillard and Lewis Thomas. Most of the selections are very brief musings on facts of science, primarily brain structure and what it reveals about such phenomena as consciousness, memory, sleep and dreaming. There are fascinating diagrams and a helpful glossary of terms. Much of the book sticks close to current science, but some of Dewdney’s “snapshots” wander into the mystical, as when he speculates on a possible metaconsciousness transcending the individual or when he talks about Zen enlightenment. He is not as rapturous as Annie Dillard nor as glib as such popularizers as Carl Sagan. Perhaps he comes closest to Lewis Thomas in such works as The Lives of a Cell (Viking, 1974). Most readers will not find this book as interesting as Dewdney’s much fuller selected poems, Predators of the Adoration (McClelland and Stewart, 1983), but it’s good to find a poetic sensibility thriving on science. There are more wonders in neurology than in Tolkien, and Dewdney’s book probes into them on our behalf. He rather stingily doesn’t provide a bibliography so that readers can look up the scientific books and articles that he cites. The omission is surprising: this is a book which stimulates the mind without fully satisfying it. But it is pleasurable to find a writer who can bridge C. P. Snow’s notorious “two cultures” of literary culture and scientific research.