Secretion Accretion

Does the brain secrete? asks poet Anne Tardos in The Exploding Nothingness Of Never Define. Good question. I go immediately to Doctor Google: the answer is yes. For example, according to Lumen Learning, “strong emotional experiences can trigger the release of neurotransmitters, as well as hormones, which strengthen memory; therefore, our memory for an emotional event is usually better than our memory for a non-emotional event. When humans and animals are stressed, the brain secretes more of the neurotransmitter glutamate, which helps them remember the stressful event. This is clearly evidenced by what is known as the flashbulb memory phenomenon.” And I’m sure there are many more examples. The brain is a mollusk, a convolution of neurons squirting alarums & ruminations in a shell of calcium called a skull. I just watched Derek Jacobi holding one in the BBC’s 1980 production of Hamlet. My brain did a lot of squirting during that production. “That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once. How the knave jowls it to the ground, as if ‘twere Cain’s jawbone, that did the first murder! This might be the pate of a politician, which this ass now o’erreaches; one that would circumvent God, might it not?” Think about that: circumvent God. The human brain secretes religion. God. The infinite. And most especially what the brain craves most: meaning. What are those hormones? What are the hormones that make meaning? That make meaning meaningful? Does the brain squirt meaning? Or does it just slop around in it because it’s got nowhere else to go? Can all thoughts be thought of as secretions? Chemicals? What else does Anne say? “Words on my mind / Page on a desk on my mind / Page on my mind on a desk // Fuzzy-minded thinking / Storm in the brain / Neurons on the edge of chaos.” That bears repeating: neurons on the edge of chaos. That’s exactly how it feels. That mania to write it down, put it in words, those gentle sounds that ripple through the air carrying resonances of otherworldly magic, the possibility of escape. Getting out of the skull. It’s a process similar to building a web. The spider finds a place to anchor a line, then swing out, make another line, then another, then begin from the center spiraling out, secreting lines. Secretion is everywhere. Secretion is the accretion of words in a relentless chain of pitch & idea, a lunatic carnival in a dome of bone. Deborah Harry takes center stage & sings “Heart of Glass.” Is that a secretion, or YouTube? I’m reminded of the sci fi movie Donovan’s Brain: millionaire megalomaniac W.H. Donovan nearly perishes in a plane crash. Only his brain survives, & is kept in a big jar of water with electrodes attached & spends its time possessing the minds of other people while trying to fulfill its agenda of hypercapitalist control. It’s a creepy but highly engaging idea, the secretion of German-American novelist Curt Siodmak, who emigrated to England in the 1930s after hearing an anti-Semitic tirade by Joseph Goebbels. Funny to think of the brain as a monster. But isn’t it much of the time?