Brains.

I’m trying to write a poem about Anna Akmatova. She’s a dead Russian poet who was censored by Bolsheviks. She stopped writing for a while, then wrote and burned everything, then kept writing and invited her friends over to memorize her poems, then she burned them.

As I understand it, the catalyst for writing again was another mother who, standing in the cold hoping for news of her children in the prison—these mothers went to the prison every day and stood in the freezing cold for hours hoping for news of their sons—recognized Anna and said to her, “Please, describe this.”

I want my poem to honor her in several ways—and because I’m going with a scientific angle for this project, my idea is to approach from the perspective of neurology:

What is true is that no matter what we learn about the brain, mind, cells, of neurological thunderstorms that fire between neurons to create thoughts and feelings, we can’t locate the soul. There’s nothing that anyone could probe in Anna’s brain, or mine or yours, to retrieve these poems. A neurologist can point a pin to the part of the brain that makes an arm move, say, but they cannot locate the part of the poem that desires the arm to move.

Anna’s poems were safe—and what a solution to censorship, to memorize them and to put them in the minds of others. What a demonstration of the power that creative writing has. It’s threatened an entire government, destabilized countries, healed masses, told the stories that may have otherwise gone untold. Further, Anna couldn’t stop writing for long. And she wouldn’t stop writing, which speaks both to the power of the urge a writer has to write, and to the determination of this amazing artist. After all, she was risking her life. Many more people have been killed for far less offenses.

Consider the brain, though: Not to get all mystical, but it truly is a mystery. And in Anna’s experience, functioned as a sort of locked chest that all at once holds the treasure, but would appear empty if broken into. Well, that’s just kind of beautiful. It is a hiding of art—like human beings are hidden in secret rooms behind book cases during wars. Authorities might’ve heard the echo of the footsteps, but wouldn’t have every found the source.