Le Sommeil Profond

Lyrics

The lights go out along the sulci.
The great highways of the cortex fall quiet.
One by one.
Here come the slow waves.
The deep tide.
Delta.

The day's noise, a fine dust, settles on everything.
Conversations left in corners.
Unfinished thoughts like papers scattered on a desk.
And the cells, they do this quiet, courteous thing.
They shrink.
Pulling in their edges by sixty percent,
making room.
Making the streets wider for the night crew.

And the wash begins.
The great glymphatic flush.
Cerebrospinal, clear and cold.
Sweeping through the parenchyma.
Taking the metabolic trash,
the amyloid ghosts of yesterday's thinking.
This is the work that happens in the dark.
The slow, deep clean.
The dishwasher hum of the brain.

I think of Hans Berger in 1924,
watching the ink crawl across the paper,
the first slow signature of this deep state.
He didn't know about the floodgates,
the little doors, the Aquaporin-4s,
opening for the tide.
He just saw the rhythm of the clean.
The quiet, powerful work of being undone.

And the wash begins.
The great glymphatic flush.
Cerebrospinal, clear and cold.
Sweeping through the parenchyma.
Taking the metabolic trash,
the amyloid ghosts of yesterday's thinking.
This is the work that happens in the dark.
The slow, deep clean.
The dishwasher hum of the brain.

Maiken called it a dishwasher.
I think of it as a baptism.
Washing the slate, not clean, but clear.
Sorting the memories to keep from the static to release.
So tomorrow's thoughts have a place to land.
So the signal can be found in the noise.
All this, while I am nowhere at all.

The tide recedes.
The streets are clear.
The dust is gone.
The city waits.
Quiet.
Ready for the light.