White Matter

I.

Below the cortex’s gray deliberation runs white matter— not thought itself but thought’s infrastructure, the axons sheathed in myelin so the signal doesn’t dissipate before it arrives.

Speed bought with insulation. Conduction bought with wrapping. The self is mostly wiring.

II.

MS strips the sheath. The signal slows, distorts, arrives at the wrong address or not at all.

A demyelinating disease— the body attacking its own ability to send and receive.

We treat it badly. We slow the attack. We cannot tell the body to stop being afraid of what it is made of.

III.

My neuroanatomy professor, first day of lab, held up a coronal section and said: this is what a person looks like from the inside.

I kept thinking about signal. How much of what we call a mind is just transit— one region reaching another in time, the message intact.

How the white gives way to gray at every sulcus. How the difference between processing and connection is almost invisible in the tissue.

IV.

I want to say the brain is more than its substrate. I cannot find the argument.

It is made of what it is made of. The signal goes where the wire goes. We are as we are conducted— quick through the myelinated paths, slow where there is damage, sometimes not arriving.

Sometimes the message is only this: there was something I meant to tell you.