The Default Mode (The Furies)

Lyrics

[Intro]
Tisiphone, in the shadow of Areopagus, 458 BCE,
I whisper your name despite the taboo,
while Aeschylus watched from the audience below.

[Verse 1]
You coil in my cortex, Megaera,
serpents of thought hissing through the default network,
relentless as the blood from Uranus' wound,
c. 700 BCE, Hesiod scribbling in the dim light.
This whip you wield, leather cracked from centuries,
stings the hippocampus, loops of guilt unspooling
like the Styx's black current at midnight.

[Chorus]
Default mode, my furious companion,
rumination's torch flickering in the cavern,
sulfur thick in the air, chilling my bones to zero.
You pursue like wings over Orestes' trail,
no appeasement in honey or milk offerings,
just the heavy gaze of introspection's court.

[Verse 2]
Alecto, your cries pierce the night of my mind,
echoing off the Areopagus stones,
where Athena's vote turned wrath to kindness in '75 translation.
But here, in the neural folds, no transformation yet,
only the osmotic pull of unresolved debts,
whips cracking against synaptic walls,
temperature dropping to underworld frost.

[Bridge]
Eumenides, I call you softly, avoiding the true fury,
as if renaming could quiet the static garden of thoughts.
In this intimate dark, close as breath on a microphone,
I address you, my tool of torment, my necessary ghost.

[Chorus]
Default mode, my furious companion,
rumination's torch flickering in the cavern,
sulfur thick in the air, chilling my bones to zero.
You pursue like wings over Orestes' trail,
no appeasement in honey or milk offerings,
just the heavy gaze of introspection's court.

[Verse 3]
From the acrid brimstone scent rising at dusk,
to the cold mist clinging like guilt's residue,
your serpents tangle in the probability map of memory.
Aeschylus, in his 60s, penned your pursuit,
but missed the brain's quiet anarchy,
this default state where furies dwell unnamed.

[Outro]
Rest now, Erinyes, in the deep awe of release,
let the default fade to equanimity's horizon.