A Kitchen That Was Still in There (Wilder Penfield)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
She is awake
on the table
in a room
whose walls
are the exact color
hospital walls
were painted
in 1951

Her skull
is open
and the room
does not hurt
because the organ
inside the skull
has no nociceptors
of its own

She is awake
because she needs
to be awake —
because the surgeon
is about to touch
her temporal lobe
with a fine
gold probe
and he needs to know
what she feels
when he does

[Verse 2]
He touches
one place
and her left hand
closes

He touches
another
and her tongue
goes numb

He writes down
every coordinate
and every response
in a notebook
that will become
a diagram
of a small body
drawn across
the surface
of the cortex —

a body
whose lips are enormous
whose hands are enormous
and whose back
is the size
of a thumbprint
because the somatosensory strip
does not care
about the back
the way it cares
about a fingertip

He is mapping
the room she lives in
from the inside

[Chorus]
And then
he lowers the probe
onto a spot
near the Sylvian fissure
in the right temporal lobe

And she says —
quietly
the way a person says
a thing
they have not thought
in thirty years —

I smell
my mother's kitchen

She is baking
and the window is open
and the light
is the light
of an afternoon
in August
when I was seven

He asks her
to describe it

She describes it
in the specific tense
of a thing
happening right now
not a thing
remembered

He moves the probe
one millimeter

The kitchen
is gone

He moves the probe
back

The kitchen
returns

[Verse 3]
I know
what the hippocampus does
and what it does not do

And I know
that the scene
she was describing
was not stored
in the place he touched
the way a file
is stored on a shelf

The temporal lobe
is not a library

The temporal lobe
is a doorway
held open
by a three-pound organ
whose whole job
is to pretend
that everything it ever perceived
is not currently
happening

He found
a small crack
in the pretending

And on the other side
of the crack
was a kitchen
in August 1923
with the afternoon light
coming in the window
exactly the way
the afternoon light
came in

[Bridge]
The brain
does not
archive

The brain
re-members —
that is
it re-assembles
the members
of a past
into a present moment
every time
you ask

Most of the time
it refuses to let you
ask
with enough
specificity

A surgeon
with a gold probe
inserted into layer four
of the temporal cortex
can ask
with a specificity
the language
of attention
cannot

That is the only reason
the kitchen came back

The kitchen
was never
not there

[Final Chorus]
He found
hundreds of these
in hundreds of patients —

an orchestra
playing the same four bars
of a song
no one in the theatre
could identify

A grandfather's laugh
from 1908

A staircase
in Warsaw

A lullaby
in a language
the patient's grown mind
no longer spoke

He did not know
what he had found

He suspected
he had found
the archive

It turned out
he had found
the doorway
the archive
was not

The brain
holds everything
and nothing
simultaneously

The kitchen
was still
in there

The mother
at the window
is still
baking

The seven year old
is still
seven

And the surgeon
gently put back
the bone flap
and closed
the dura
and the scalp

And the woman
on the table
went home
to a life
that would never know
how close it had been
to its own kitchen
the whole time

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