Odes to Joy

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Canonical) · Track 371 · middle

The Name They Chiseled Off the Wall

Hatshepsut

Lyrics

**Central Image:** The terraced mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahari—a woman's architectural monument to herself, built into the cliff face, defying erasure.

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[Verse 1]
Your fingers traced the blueprint on the sand,
three tiers climbing like a thought ascending,
each colonnade a synaptic pathway firing—
predictive coding of a world redrawn.
The limestone knew what you already knew:
that stone remembers longer than a name.

[Chorus]
You built yourself in light and shadow,
cortical remapping of the sacred space,
your temple nestled in the mountainside
like a secret the whole kingdom could see.
No whisper, no apology, no veil—
just columns catching the exact angle of the sun.

[Verse 2]
Your hands held architects the way neurons branch,
axonal sprouting toward impossible angles.
Terrace after terrace rose—long-term potentiation
of vision into matter, dream into stone.
Your mirror neurons fired when workers moved,
each gesture myelinated into the next.

[Chorus]
You built yourself in light and shadow,
cortical remapping of the sacred space,
your temple nestled in the mountainside
like a secret the whole kingdom could see.
No whisper, no apology, no veil—
just columns catching the exact angle of the sun.

[Bridge]
The hippocampus doesn't hoard a thing—
it consolidates the moment into forever.
You knew this. Every stone was memory made manifest,
every angle a theta wave of certainty:
*I am here. I remain.*

[Chorus]
You built yourself in light and shadow,
cortical remapping of the sacred space,
your temple nestled in the mountainside
like a secret the whole kingdom could see.
No whisper, no apology, no veil—
just columns catching the exact angle of the sun.

[Outro]
Three terraces climb toward your own horizon.
The cliffs still hold the shape of your becoming,
and stone keeps answering what you already asked.
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