Chiropractic
There is a passage in George Eliot’s Middlemarch about the patterns created by the flame of a candle against scratched glass. The image has one meaning in the context of the novel, but in my memory it has aligned itself with other truths:
Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement.
For Eliot this was a parable about how people interpret the events of their lives egotistically. But the image calls to mind for me narrative structure itself: the way events and material things tend to form patterns of meaning when you hold a certain light up to them, patterns that might appear nonexistent or completely different to another person, with another candle, at a different angle. The question is whether the patterns are illusions, or whether the illusion is that any reality exists we don’t ourselves create.
And the truth of the matter is complicated. Because the need to make sense of the multitudinous wounds and scratches in our lives is very real.
Labor Day Weekend I spent Saturday morning at the chiropractor. My friend Nancy threw her back out and was unable to drive there. I have never been in a chiropractor’s office, and this one was not what I expected.
What did I expect?
Something less Dusty Rose and more New Age, I guess. Chiropractic is, after all, a form of Complementary and Alternative Medicine. In other words, a lot of Woo Woo.
But this was a generic doctor’s waiting area. There were two groupings of six chairs each, one on each side of the room, and a tall counter that acted as a retaining wall between the clients and the receptionist. Each cluster of chairs had a landscape to look at, innocuous, painted by someone with an eye toward colors that complement the furniture. Over-the-sofa painting. The walls were done in a beige speckled wallpaper designed to look like fresco. All in all, more home-and-garden than homeopathic. No insurance card need be ashamed to be presented here.
Nancy, walking with a cane and in considerable pain, managed to find the one chair that had a back support pillow. I was surprised that there were not more of such accommodations about. Some were available for purchase, though: the Chiroflow Waterbase Pillow (Feel the Flow!) could be had for only $49.00.
On the wall was a large magazine rack. In a chiropractor’s office, the rack has something for everyone. Entertainment has a special report: "Living on Camera." The blonde on the cover is MTV’s Lauren Conrad of Laguna Beach. Lauren’s head is on a pillow, her hair fanned out carefully before her, in full make up. On one shoulder you can see a satin lingerie strap. Her eyes, accentuated by liner, are wide and innocent. There’s a camera pointed down at her from behind the magazine title like a gun. A large camera with a fully extended telescopic lens.
“Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and think I am being filmed,” says the quotation below the picture.
This never happens to me.
I wonder if a Chiroflow Waterbase Pillow would help.
Sports Illustrated is having its Fantasy Football Preview, but the reality-based theme for this issue is Back to Work: NFL Training Camp 2008. Names roll like credits below: Shockey. Taylor. The Mannings. Favre??? On the front cover is David Tyree, in full NFL regalia. Mr. Miracle in the Dessert, Lancelot the Wide Receiver, our Knight in Shining Sports Gear. Currently listed on the NY Giants web site as “physically unable to perform.”
I have the strange feeling that these magazines came here on purpose, were driven here by friends, hobbled in on canes. Arranged themselves in concentric circles on the rack.
Both issues of Golf Digest have the same person on them - one is a young woman, and the other a middle aged man, but they share a single soul. It stares out of each, steely-eyed and firm of grip, following through and watching a tiny white ball bounce onto the green, just past the edge of the magazine cover. They have slammed that ball into precisely the corner of the universe God intended it to be. Could you do that with a poorly aligned spine? Of course not.
Nancy fills out a sheaf of papers, and they call her into the Inner Sanctum, where the Arcane Mysteries of Alignment are performed. “It is scary how much I look like my mother,” she tells me as she tests her balance on first one foot, then the other. Her mother is in her eighties and suffering from the early stages of dementia. Nancy has had a hard year, in ways that have affected her emotional health, her physical health, her economic security. This weekend is the anniversary of the breakup of a long term relationship that catapulted all three into crisis. And her back remembers.
The young receptionist smiles cheerily, clipboard in hand. The door closes behind Nancy. She is gone a long time.
Over the intercom they are piping in classical MPR. There’s nothing really unusual about this, anymore than there is anything unusual about the magazines on the magazine rack. Except that the radio seems to know it is in a chiropractor’s office, just like the magazines on the rack seem to align themselves naturally to the physical and emotional stressors of the clients that read them.
The first piece is Dvorak’s Slavonic Dance No. 15. Gypsies leap from chord to chord like bridges over the Danube. I am Slovak (well, half). Nancy, as it happens, is Slovak. I decide to do a little alternative medicine myself. I imagine her leaping over first one obstacle in her life, then another. With music like this in our blood, shouldn’t anything be possible?
Now a Handel concerto is playing. Nancy’s spine is first a French horn, curved in upon itself, brassy and muted; then an oboe, straight and reedy. Perhaps the register key is stuck. I imagine it opening up.
Pachelbel’s Canon is not really a canon when it’s played as a piano solo. But MPR overlooks this.When I was a child visiting my grandparents on the farm, my grandpa used to play the piano. You Are My Sunshine. Jesus Loves Me. Shine On Harvest Moon. He was a small town rural minister. I don’t think he knew Pachelbel.
Most of the time he played his songs on a real piano, but if you climbed into my grandfather’s lap after supper he might decide a more convenient keyboard had presented itself, and he would lay you out across his knee and start to play a tune along your spine. Inevitably the tune would slip and slide, down to your belly or up into your armpits, and soon it was nothing but a tickle fest. “What is wrong with this pianner?” he’d say. “It just keeps wriggling about!” And we would dissolve into spasms of giggles.
I will the chiropractor to work in reverse for Nancy: smooth out the spasms, straighten the keyboard, make the music behave.
But when she emerges at last (to the strains of The Marriage of Figaro), she actually looks worse that before. “There wasn’t much adjustment he could do,” she says. “The area was too inflamed.” He gives her exercises to perform.
She will go home and follow her doctor’s advice, and eventually her back will get better. But first she must wade through concentric circles of pain.
In the meantime I imagine her spine as a candle, flaring up, a flame illuminating the window of her own experience, making patterns where before there were none.