Odes to Joy

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Canonical) · Track 599 · middle

Still Transmitting

Voyager 2

Lyrics

**Central Image:** The Golden Record — the physical artifact carrying human voices, music, and images into deep space aboard Voyager 2, humanity's ambassador to the void.

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[Verse 1]
You carry our voices past the heliopause,
a golden disc spinning through the dark—
encoded in grooves: Mozart, whale song, laughter,
a mother's greeting in fifty languages.
Your cameras mapped the grand tour,
four gas giants tilted in your lens,
while your magnetometer read the solar wind
like a blind hand learning a face.

[Chorus]
You're still transmitting, still reaching,
still teaching the dark that we were here.
Every signal you send back grows stronger
in the chambers where we listen—
your wandering is our long-term potentiation,
each pulse rewiring how we hold the distance.

[Verse 2]
Your Voyager Golden Record plays on,
and in the cortical regions where we dream,
mirror neurons fire in recognition—
someone, somewhere, hears themselves
in those grooved spirals of home.
Your predictive coding mapped the moons,
reading gravitational futures before they arrived,
while your body, myelinated and precise,
kept singing even as the sun became a star.

[Chorus]
You're still transmitting, still reaching,
still teaching the dark that we were here.
Every signal you send back grows stronger
in the chambers where we listen—
your wandering is our long-term potentiation,
each pulse rewiring how we hold the distance.

[Bridge]
The axonal branches of your antenna
still fire toward Earth,
and we feel it in our spines—
that reaching, that refusal to go silent,
that golden proof that we dared.

[Outro]
Your record spins in the interstellar dark,
still playing our names into forever,
still saying: *we were here, we were alive, we sang.*
Pick a song