The Serotonin Fall(s)

In Chinese literature, the sorrow of encountering the fall season is as banal as it is old. And as old and banal as it is, it still affects me, conditions my feeling of the fall; so, as the leaves fall, I accordingly suffered from what my roommate, a biologist, calls a seasonal depression. "Your serotonin level falls."

Hah, leaves and my serotonin levels are falling, as they kept falling in the history of Chinese literature. In the eye of a biologist, the repetitious literary laments of the fall season becomes literal: my laments of the season is caused by the fall of my serotonin; which, like the falling of leaves, is no more than a natural phenomenon.


In this vein of thinking, I duely attempt to refresh some of the banality. Take the sound of crow for example. It is often conceived as a unpleasant sound, even the sound of death. Now we can think that certain kind of the sound of the crow strikes a certain gene in us, causing this unpleasant feeling related to death. The Eaolian harp of Shelley can be seen, similarly, as a metaphor of the genes as a system that transforms certain stir into certain coded responses. Strike certain genes in a certain way just like the winds (done naturally) or fingers (suggesting the possibility of manipulating human feeling, even thinking)strike the harp and make sounds out of it.

One day, at least many believe so, science will establish a total causal relationship between brain and mind, between the biological processes and our various mental phenomena. Will we then say that Mind is no more than brain? How will it feel like, when reciting a sonnet by Shakespeare to a youngster, he/she will interrupt you and remind you that "But, uncle Philip, that's just a set of symptoms caused by the the rise of Serotonin and the fall of Ninotores!"

The "poeticizing" of science, however, had always been there. John Keats, was a student of Pharmacology, updated with the recent development of science at his time. His original idea of a radioactive dying, or losing of life, in contrast to a sudden ending of life. This idea is apparently the 19c notion of the Tubeculosis, a gradual consumption of vitality. As scientific ideas enters into discursive community, it will be gradually made "food of thought" or building blocks for poetry. Genes, are already in poetry. One day, perhaps, the fall of serotonin will be as poetic (banal and old) as the falling leaves.

How will the literature in future look like? Will their poetry echo ours? When leaves are falling, I have in mind souls falling and dying away as well as serotonin level dropping down, how can I accept the serotonin fall, how can I RE-imagine autumn?