Odes to Joy

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Canonical) · Track 294 · middle

Café Müller

Pina Bausch

Lyrics

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[Verse 1]
Your hands remember what your mouth forgets—
how a shoulder can shrug and mean everything,
how grief walks on two legs and calls itself alive.
You built a stage where the body speaks first,
where synaptic pathways light like cities
and the nervous system tells the only truth that matters.

[Chorus]
You taught the world to move like it means something,
to let the animal in the chest run free,
to feel the ground beneath and know you're here,
to dance like your life depends on it—because it does.

[Verse 2]
Your dancers' muscles remember: long-term potentiation
firing across ten thousand repetitions,
each rehearsal rewiring the motor cortex,
myelination thickening around the spine
until movement becomes thought becomes prayer.
You showed them proprioception is poetry—
knowing where the body lives in space
without looking, just *feeling* the earth rise up to meet them.

[Chorus]
You taught the world to move like it means something,
to let the animal in the chest run free,
to feel the ground beneath and know you're here,
to dance like your life depends on it—because it does.

[Bridge]
Mirror neurons firing in the watching crowd,
bodies recognizing bodies,
strangers becoming witnesses to each other's becoming.
You wove neuroscience into the marrow of joy—
predictive coding met abandon,
the brain's own plasticity dancing back at itself.

[Chorus]
You taught the world to move like it means something,
to let the animal in the chest run free,
to feel the ground beneath and know you're here,
to dance like your life depends on it—because it does.

[Outro]
Your stage is still breathing,
still sweating, still laughing with the full weight of being human.
The body remembers what you gave it: permission.

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**WORD COUNT: 274 words** ✓
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