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According to Benjamin Doty ("Digesting Moby-Dick," Leviathan 19.1 [Oct. 2017]), the alimentary content in Moby Dick indicates that Melville and his contemporaries attended to the reciprocal relationship between the mind and body. As medical scientists discovered that the brain "was no longer considered to be in charge of the nervous system but rather a part of it," and existed also in "nervous sympathy" with its "cultural and natural environment," nineteenth-century theories of medicine established that good mental health depended on good diet (88–89). The brain depends on the belly, as well as what's in it. Doty cites Melville's incorporation of medical-scientific discourse to argue that the author of Moby Dick believed that the physical realities of embodiment, including digestion, disrupted abstract "philosophical universals" so much so as "to ground philosophical speculation in the body" (91–92). Maybe John Keats shared this belief, when he wrote, in an 1818 letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, that "axioms in philosophy are not axioms unless they are proved upon our pulses." Our metaphysics also has its material basis. The ideal is subtended by the real—not the other way around.

But where did the brain learn how to be a brain? Like a stomach tract, the brain also deals with inputs and outputs. Insofar as the brain is in the body, the brain can't think beyond the belly and its functions. Can the brain be more than a belly, then? A digester itself, the brain, too, is vulnerable to the "vibrancy of matter" (Jane Bennett's term)—that is, what is brought in from without.

Doty's essay reminds us that even scholars have bodies that embody their brains. Poets, too. Surveying the field of digestion studies in the nineteenth century, Doty recalls Sean Ross Meehan's treatment of the "poetics of digestion" in Emerson and Whitman, who recognized that "digestion's ability to break down matter and assimilate it into new forms 'offers a paradox of identity through change'" (86). In the following poem, "Feedback," I perform a "poetics of digestion" that extends Doty's argument by proving its axioms on my pulses, breaking it down, and assimilating it into new forms, an approach spurred by Emerson and Whitman, American poets who engaged in feedback loops as derivative as they were fecund and prolific and gut-floral.

Some of the language and imagery in "Feedback" invokes the tradition of still-life painting, in which edibles are often arranged as codes signifying moral values on the assumption that food and appetite affect the human constitution. For example, from an emblematic, moralizing point of view, the presence on a table of oysters and cracked pepper means something vastly different compared to a table laid with walnuts and unripe peaches. Similarly, as Doty points out, the dietary reform movements of Melville's time were wary that "without regulation, food might be transmuted into the wrong sorts of 'mind and soul'" (90). If the scholar's brain is also her belly, peer review and critical dialogue take on new significance. After all, unless you account for what comes in, you can't account for what comes out.

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But as real as touch as a gauge for realnessis the impulse to touch. As real is the neuralstructure, saturated with acetylcholine asa pant-leg is with meadow-dew. The fabricof Parrhasius's curtain even more real thana clutch of grapes by Zeuxis (birds of the realdescending to gorge themselves), for the curtainwas thought to obscure some actual deception:delicate pastries, say, in a Wan-li bowl, or a tazzafilled with sugar-coated almonds—a milieuintérieur: words used by Claude Bernardto describe his thoughts on homeostasis:the mind no more than a crochet of loopsof feedback, the reality of a thing no morethan the reflex that attends it to attend, whereto clutch is the truer clutch, the obscurer source,the source of a meadow a river eating outits other bank, its own interior, the causeno slope I can tell. For it is all the same to me,all a...