The Trees in the Forest of the Mind (Santiago Ramón y Cajal)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
You did not start
as anyone's idea
of a scientist.
You were a Spanish boy
who got beaten
by his country-doctor father
for drawing
in the margin
of every book
he had ever been given,
and you escaped
to the cliffs above your town
to draw birds
that did not yet know
they were the first cells
of the brain
forty years later.

[Verse 2]
You bought a microscope
with the money
you did not have
and you taught yourself
the silver stain
the Italian had invented
and could not understand
the meaning of,
and you used the Italian's stain
in the attic of your house
in Madrid
to disprove
the theory
the Italian
had built
his whole life
around.

[Chorus]
You drew the cells
of the cerebellum
of a chicken
in brown ink
on cream paper
and you saw
what your century
had refused to see —
that the brain
is a forest,
and the trees
in the forest
do not touch,
and the message
makes the jump
across a gap
the eye
cannot see.

You laughed in the attic.
You named the gap
*the synapse.*

[Verse 3]
You shared the prize
in Stockholm
with the man
whose theory you had broken,
and you sat next to him
on the stage
and did not say
the obvious thing
because the drawings
had already said it
and the drawings
were going home
with you.

[Outro]
Every neurosurgeon
in the century after yours
operates inside the forest
you drew
in an attic
in Madrid
on a winter night
in eighteen eighty-eight
when no one
had told you
the forest
was there.
The trees
are still
not touching.
The message
is still
making the jump.

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