the brain is a universe unto itself

 

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Our eyes are not transparent windows to the outside world, despite evolution’s brilliant illusion. 

When we think we’re walking the streets of a city, we’re really strolling the neural paths of our brains. Everything that appears to be outside is really inside. For all intents and purposes, there is no outside. 

The brain is a universe unto itself: billions of twinkling neurons, dendrites splayed like fingers reaching for the beginning of time, chemical messengers leaping across the mindless darkness of deep intracranial space.

—Amanda Gefter

Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn

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The Brain—is wider than the Sky—

For—put them side by side—

The one the other will contain

With ease—and You—beside—

The Brain is deeper than the sea—

For—hold them—Blue to Blue—

The one the other will absorb—

As Sponges—Buckets—do—

The Brain is just the weight of God—

For—Heft them—Pound for Pound—

And they will differ—if they do—

As Syllable from Sound—


—Emily Dickinson

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As she writes, [Emily Dickinson] erases herself. She disappears behind the blade of grass that, if not for her, we would never have seen. She does not write to express herself, perish the thought. […S]he doesn’t write to be noticed. She writes to bear witness: here lived a flower, for three days in July, the year of 18**, killed by a morning shower. Each poem is a tiny tomb erected to the memory of the invisible. 

[…] Emily writes about the world she inhabits, knowing that it would be more beautiful still if it were uninhabited. 

[…] She would have liked to make a book with only flowers, like she did at age fourteen. […] Her pen scratches like a bird. Her poems are at least one-half chickadee. She writes on paper, but that is because she was never able to put together an album big enough to contain the spring showers and the autumn wind – there is no herbarium for snow. She dreams of poems written with insects […]. Of the golden sonnets bees trace in honey. 

—Dominique Fortier

Paper Houses

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