A Brief History of Interconnection
(after a paper comparing the neural network of the human brain to the cosmic web of galaxies)
1.
When I was a child
I believed my mind lived in a box
just behind my eyes
a small red room
with a blinking light.
The sky was somewhere else.
Above us. Blue. Endless.
I did not yet understand
that one could live
inside a mirror.
2.
Consider:
A neuron.
A galaxy.
A silence
spun into shape
by absence and
longing.
The neuron sends.
The galaxy receives.
Or the other way around.
(Does it matter?)
Connection is not local.
It is luminous.
3.
Network degree centrality:
who gets to be the center
of gravity?
The brain has rules.
The universe does not.
Still, they share
the urge to branch
the logic of filaments
the lust to cluster
the danger of becoming
a knot.
4.
I read once
that the cosmos is 13.8 billion years old
and your brain
contains a memory of light
that old.
Who stored it?
What language was it written in?
Why does grief feel
like starlight
arriving late?
5.
Electrochemical impulse.
Gravitational drift.
You see the difference?
You do.
But the difference may be
semantics.
My father used to say
Don’t go looking for meaning in a thunderstorm.
But I say
Why not?
Lightning is a network.
So is thought.
So is regret.
6.
Sometimes
when I close my eyes
I see the filaments
not as threads
but as ribs
of a sleeping god.
And in that ribcage:
a brain.
A star cluster.
A woman writing this poem.
A mosquito drunk on blood.
7.
There is a story
told in both
the synapse
and the spiral arm.
It begins in silence.
And ends
in recursion.
Which is to say:
We are what connects.
We are what forgets.
We are what remembers.
All memory is
a constellation
seen from the inside out.
✷
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