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On Learning That Yale Scientists Restored the Brain Function of 32 Dead Pigs

I make the same Frankenstein comparisons that everyone does, though I end in wonder, dressing up my questions in philosophy, reclining in the lap of poetry. Let’s say it all comes down to this: a neuron’s electrical charge, pre-frontal cortex recruiting memories. Like the other day, a game of peekaboo with my daughter: Where’s Raina? I ask. She aims a tiny index finger at her head as her father points to her heart: What about here? The toddler no is absolute. She touches her head again. It starts so early, he tells me, the way a scientist might observe.

Rebooted pig brains haunt me the way Descartes does, with hard problems of where consciousness lives; if it’s a trick, a radio signal, a light switch turned on and off. How could those 32 ever tell? Perhaps we will know them by their suffering, the kind that comes from knowing too much or too little.

Last summer I met a pig rescued from love. One of those mini pigs that never did exist, that start out tiny adorable in the manner of all babies. Beloved for a year at home until flattened furniture got him sent to pasture, the family tossing sweets from afar to ease the shock of him not being one of them after all. His rescuers said he might walk again, after a change of diet and a companion to cheer him up. One told me: You know, they have minds like a human four-year-old? My own little human, nearly two, understands more than I think. Maybe everything.

Here’s another memory: Before she died, my grandmother had a mind of a 94-year-old human, whose lucid moments vanished like islands amid rising seas. We watched as her consciousness abandoned ship, slipped out the holes in her brain. Did any fall into the net of her heart and cling there? Once she told me, haltingly, in a place of knowing and not knowing: Sometimes I don’t remember things too well.

I can’t imagine waking up and not being the me I remember. I expect that even a pig after death finds it hard to give up the me, if pigs also have egos. My little girl’s just learning to say me; she still says Raina, as if introducing this other person she is. We don’t correct her. As if we’ve anything to teach her about who any of us are.

Angela Sucich holds a Ph.D. in medieval literature from the University of Washington. Her poems and short prose have appeared in such journals as The Ekphrastic ReviewNimrod International JournalPassengers Journal, and Cave Wall. She was honorably mentioned for the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry in 2021.

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