“Icthanatos ichor hemophile.”

Those were the first words spoken to Ramona Schwartz by her neuron. They sounded just as ridiculous the first time as they do now, but because they came from inside her head, Ramona found them less humorous than others might.

Ramona does not have a psychological pathology. The voice that comes from inside her head is not an illusion created by a chemical imbalance in her brain. She has been studied by doctors who have come to Poultney from places that are as far away as Peru and Berlin, and every single one of them has agreed with the prognosis that something that claims to be one of the neurons inside Ramona’s brain has become fully sentient and aware of itself in its own right.

But whatever it is, it does not speak English, or at least, it doesn’t speak a form of English that is immediately recognizable. But it does speak, in every sense of that word. Not only is it trying to communicate, which is something that can also be said of pre-linguistic children, but it is also accomplishing its task, at least in part.

“No one has quite figured out exactly what it is trying to tell us,” said Dr. Mitchell LesCarbeau, who is an English professor at the college, “But we have been able to decipher some meaning from its words. It takes the courage to liberate language from the stranglehold of reason, which has bound it in the fetters of a formal logic, and the willingness to understand the neuron poetically, but it’s not until those character defining moments have been faced that one can truly begin to appreciate the mystery.”

For example, Dr. LesCarbeau explains that the neuron’s first words, icthanatos ichor hemophile, do have a meaning, at least on their own. Icthanatos is made up of two parts: ic- and –thanatos. The first is usually a suffix in our language, as in alcoholic, academic, and seismic. It means relating to or characterized by. The second part, -thanatos, seems to refer to the Greek god by the same name, who was the god of death and the brother of Hypnos (the god of sleep). Ichor is another mythic word of Greek origin. It was the blood that ran in the veins of the gods. In pathological terms, however, ichor is the discharge from a wound or ulcer. This, of course, leads us to hemophile, which is, again, made up of two Greek parts: hemo- and –phile, where the former means blood and the latter means one that loves, or loving, as in audiophile.

The meaning of the words was clear almost from the start. Once Ramona got over the initial shock of hearing a voice come from inside her head, she immediately wanted to know what the voice was saying. With the help of Dr. LesCarbeau and a standard reference set, they were able to find the basic meanings very quickly. Before they could proceed to the meaning of the entire statement, however, Ramona was besieged by neurospecialists.

“What these medical doctors didn’t understand,” Ramona says, “Was that the answer to their question — what is this thing that speaks? — was not a medical one. The answer was not going to be found with a CAT scan or a microscope or with an old-fashioned scalpel. It was only going to be found in what the thing had to say for itself.”

Two months passed before Dr. LesCarbeau and Ramona would talk again, but the professional poet did not let that stop him from his investigation. He had the only evidence of the thing written on a yellow sticky note and stuck to the edge of his old computer monitor. Ramona wasn’t necessary for his work. All he needed was the words.

Working with the college’s English department, Dr. LesCarbeau and his colleagues considered Ramona’s Neuronal Poem (as they came to call it) their fifth class. They scheduled time to work on its meaning together, and considered any slackening of effort to be a sign of professional failure. Rather than find themselves stifled by the arrangement, the English department felt itself energized.

“You always hear about the sciences working hard to solve a problem together,” Dr. Laird Christensen, chair of the department, says about the experience, “And you always wonder about how inspiring and motivating it must be to work in the R&D labs that are trying to find a cure for AIDs, but you never imagine that you’ll come together with your literary colleagues in the same way. There doesn’t seem to be a real need to end some Shakespeare epidemic.”

Though the department has yet to come to any joint conclusion on what the neuron might have meant when it said “Icthanatos ichor hemophile,” they have not let that stop them from offering a few professional opinions, oftentimes offering more than three or four at any given time. However, they have asked that their opinions not be published out of professional respect to their colleagues.

“If the solution I were to offer you now was to be the one we were to end up offering together,” Dr. Paul Stuewe said, “Then some might make the mistake of thinking the solution was mine. But the truth is, anything I was to offer you now would only be the product of all of our time together as a department. It would not be mine, but ours. And since no one is here to support the idea, I hesitate to offer it in anyone else’s name.”

Meanwhile, Ramona has a theory of her own, and she’s not afraid to talk about it. “What you all have to understand,” she says, “Is that this thing doesn’t say anything else but ‘icthanatos ichor hemophile,’ and it says it over and over. It doesn’t sound like a babbling lunatic, however. Instead, it sounds like a prayer.”