The Drawings Were Too Early (Leonardo da Vinci)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
He worked by candle
in a room
above the hospital
in Florence
where the bodies
of the indigent
were brought
to be bathed
and wrapped
and buried
at the expense
of the city

The city
did not know
he came back to the room
an hour after
the washers left
with a small knife
and a quill
and a stack
of folded sheets
of rough cotton paper
and a habit
of working until dawn
in a smell
that would make
a modern surgeon
reach for the mask
he did not yet have
the luxury
of being offered

[Verse 2]
He dissected
thirty bodies
in his lifetime
that we know about

He drew what he saw
with a left hand
that wrote backward
in a script nobody
after his death
could read
for two hundred years
without a mirror

He drew the fetus
inside the womb
as if he had been
present at its arranging

He drew the valves
of the heart
closing
against the pressure
of the blood
the chamber
had just expelled —
and he was
two hundred years
early

He drew the nerves
of the shoulder
in their actual arrangement
before anyone alive
had given any of them
a Latin name

And then he did something
nobody in the history
of the species
had ever done:

he poured warm wax
into the central cavities
of a fresh ox brain
and waited for it to cool
and peeled away the tissue
and held up
in his candlelight
the first cast
anyone had ever seen
of the lateral ventricles
and the third ventricle
and the fourth
and the small channel
connecting them

And he drew that too

[Chorus]
I know
what the ventricular system is
and what it does

And I know how long
the people I trained with
spent learning
what a young bastard
from a village
outside Florence
had already drawn
by candle
in 1508

The lateral ventricles
are two C-shaped cavities
filled with cerebrospinal fluid
produced by
the choroid plexus
and they drain
through a small passage
we now call
the aqueduct of Sylvius
into the fourth ventricle
and from there
around the brainstem
and down the spine

He found all of this
without the words

He used the wax
because he did not trust
his own eye
to hold the shape
of a thing
he had never seen
before

The wax
was the instrument
his hand
had invented
for honesty

[Verse 3]
He never published
the drawings

He put them in a notebook
and the notebook traveled
from France
from a trunk
to an auction
to a royal cabinet
in England
and sat in the cabinet
for four hundred years

When anatomists
finally opened the cabinet
they did not believe
what they were holding

They thought
they were looking at
nineteenth-century
anatomical plates
mis-shelved
among Renaissance papers

They were not

They were holding
the drawings of a man
who had worked alone
by candle
in a room above a hospital
in Florence
at the end
of the fifteenth century
and who had seen
what his generation
did not have
the words
to describe

He drew the words
he did not have

The drawings were the vocabulary
the language
caught up to
four centuries
later

[Bridge]
I trained
at an institution
that hands you
a cadaver
and a scalpel
and a manual
of the names of the parts
and the manual
is nine hundred pages long

It took nine hundred pages
of Latin
compiled from nearly
two thousand years
of medical argument
to say
what a left-handed
illegitimate apprentice
from a village
near Vinci
saw in thirty bodies
by his own candle
in less than
three decades

The gap between
what he saw
and what his century
could discuss
is the gap
I have spent
my whole career
trying to close
from the other side

He was working forward
from evidence

We are working backward
from him

[Final Chorus]
The drawings were too early

The drawings had no contemporary
to be shown to
who would not run
to the Inquisition

The drawings had no
thesaurus of Latin names
to attach to them

The drawings had no network
of peers
to confirm them
or correct them
or improve on them

The drawings had only
a candle
a corpse
a quill
a left hand
writing mirror-style
and a man
who did not know
he was the only anatomist
for three hundred years

He died in France
in the arms
of a king
who loved him
without understanding
what the man in his arms
had been up to
every night
for thirty years
by himself
in a room
no one else
had wanted
to enter

And the drawings
in the cabinet at Windsor
are still
correct

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