Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Canonical) · Track 406 · middle
2,438 Pages About a Hamburger
Nathan Myhrvold
Lyrics
**Central Image:** Photographing a bullet frozen mid-flight through an apple (or flame, or water drop)—the moment made visible that normally escapes human perception. The obsession with slowing time itself. --- [Verse 1] Your camera swallows the bullet before it lands, apple split in a frame no eye was built to see— theta waves firing in your visual cortex fast enough to match the millisecond you've trapped, and the light, god, the light bends around the copper like you've bent the laws of what we're allowed to witness. You've remapped the world into a fractional second. [Chorus] You teach my neurons to see sideways through time, your lens a mirror held up to perception itself— the speed of thought made solid, made *real*, and I'm learning to live in the blur you've exposed, the hidden cathedral of the ordinary. [Verse 2] Synaptic plasticity bends under your obsession: muscle memory in your fingers knows the precise angle, the exact pressure of air against metal and fruit, axonal branching fires new pathways through your cortex each time you frame what human eyes skip over— long-term potentiation etched in your visual memory, the world remapped one frozen moment at a time. [Chorus] You teach my neurons to see sideways through time, your lens a mirror held up to perception itself— the speed of thought made solid, made *real*, and I'm learning to live in the blur you've exposed, the hidden cathedral of the ordinary. [Bridge] Your hands know the weight of slowing down, the proprioceptive truth of perfect timing, and when you grip that shutter, the whole universe waits—just waits—to be translated into light. [Outro] The apple hangs forever, the bullet suspended like a prayer, and you're there in the gap between frames— alive in the space where time breaks open.