Read my latest story, "The All-Nighter", at 52|250.

I’m put into a quandary by Lesley Wheeler’s poem, Zombie, because I can’t accept the concluding lines, and I’m not sure if the problem is in me or in the poem. The first nine couplets are full of very physical descriptions of the experiences of a member of the living dead, though clearly not one of those zombies who stumbles around after brains and violence. A descriptive zombie or a reflective one.

But a philosophical zombie? That’s what the (majority of the) final couplet seems to suggest, as the speaker concludes “[t]hat I was less a working / body than a mind’s routine, a rhythm.” Perhaps I should say these are the words of a zombie that is philosophical, since philosophical zombie as a phrase usually refers to the notion that you and I (living live, not living dead) have no free will. I suppose “a mind’s routine” could suggest this idea, but the rest of the poem tells us we’re dealing with a more placid version of a Dawn of the Dead zombie.

I suppose it should be reassuring that the “mind’s routine” continues on, apparently unimpaired, but here’s where I run into trouble. While I’m able to suspend disbelief and accept that the zombie is conscious of its physical state, I have a much harder time with the notion that it is capable of such abstract thought. (Though I suppose this would be easier to accept if I also accepted that we were all philosophical zombies anyway so that the living dead wouldn’t be credited with the choice to think anymore than I would.) The only reason I can think of for my inability to accept higher cognitive functions in the living dead is that I am possessed of some general notion of post-death decay: that if the body rots, so should the mind– but then, the contrast between “working body” and “mind’s routine” in the conclusion would seem to suggest a much greater acceptance of the Cartesian divide than I’m typically willing to give.

Perhaps, then, the problem is my own stereotypes about zombies and this poem is making a valiant attempt to break down these biases. In that case, I can only make the weak plea that perhaps an indication of more abstract capabilities earlier in the poem would have better prepared me to accept them (as well as the divide).

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