Letter of Recommendation: Acupuncture
When
I was younger, I frequently met people who evangelized for universal
LSD consumption. A wider perspective, the acid-eaters tried to explain. A
benevolent system. They always seemed half-dead to me, some part of
them already partaking in the next world, turned away even as they
stared into my face and tried to explain. I once watched one of them
almost overdose on laughing gas, leering, muttering nastily at my head,
his face blue as day. It was indecent, his romance with death. It should
have been private. They all just seemed as if they’d willingly trade
life for what might be nothing. They seemed infected by the same
unexamined certainty as the religious and the insane, mistaking it for
some greater ontological understanding.
And
then one day I thought I should visit the acupuncturist on Hyperion
Avenue. I’d driven past it every day for months. I don’t remember why it
suddenly seemed like a good idea. I mean, I remember generally. I was
troubled. Things were going wrong. I could produce no reason for it. I
thought I might be carrying a backlog of sadness, that it had begun to
corrode my life from the inside.
Because
I have chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, an autoimmune
disorder affecting the peripheral nerves, I’ve had so many
venipunctures that the crooks of my elbows are pitted with scars. They
look about the same as the scars of my friend who shot heroin for seven
years. I’ve had four central lines in my subclavian vein, two on each
side. One end tunneled under the skin and then fed into the vein; the
other end flopped around on the surface. One of them stayed in for a
year. I did six months of the flushing and dressing changes for the line
myself. I’ve watched my blood go in and out, lost count of the gallons
of other people’s plasma I’ve used, dirtied with autoantibodies, bled
back out. I’ve given myself dozens of shots in my legs. All of which is
to say that I wasn’t afraid of needles.
I
was, however, afraid that I might lose my grip on reality and go
delicately insane, right there on the table. My nightmares were already
bad enough. I preferred to keep my inner terror invisible and unknown. I
respected fear, didn’t need to transcend it, but mine was distributed
oddly. There were certain things I was an ace at — I’m still a
first-rate hospital patient — but it had been six years since I’d driven
on a freeway. I was taking pills to get out of bed and more pills to
get back in. Small, daily things were becoming impossible.
Probably
the decision took place in some barely knowable part of my reasoning
mind; once made, I found it easy to find the number of the place online
and then drive there, park, go inside, take in the obligatory dribbling
fountain and pamphlets about tinctures and powders. The acupuncturist
was white, white-haired, beaming, intelligent. I went into a little
room. The sheets were softer than any I’d ever felt. Eight hundred
thread count? Nine hundred? Is that even a thing? It was like lying on
the underside of a giant cat.
Pulses
were taken; my tongue was observed. Apparently, my liver chi was
trapped, which was getting the organ hot and burning up my heart energy.
I didn’t care about the words. I just wanted to keep hoping this person
would be able to help me. He had worked in the film industry for years
and years, and started studying acupuncture when he was 40. Forty! You
could start something at 40; I was 40 then. It was a revelation. I
planted my face into the headrest.
Lying
there, prone, holding in my flesh a number of those little pins you
can’t quite feel, I caught the glimmer of an understanding that the
slight concentration of energy in and around my body at that moment
could just barely be distinguished from the rest of the universe. I
began to understand that what I called my self was physically delimited
not by my body but by a concentration of energy in and around it. I
tried to determine how far out into the air it reached. Four inches? I
couldn’t sense a boundary. It haloed me and faded into the surrounding
space.
I
began to understand that there was no such thing as death, if death
meant the absolute end of something that once existed and no longer did.
Imagine instead a gradual dissipation of the energy once concentrated
in the general shape of the living entity. A person. A tree. A fruit on
the tree. Pick the fruit and the energy stays in the center of it for
some time. I’m already partaking in death along with everything else
that ever lived and that lives now.
All
of this flooded into my understanding in about 10 seconds. I was
tingling. I was more permeable than I once thought. Bones and meat and
blood, but now, also, the air. The energy all around. Once the needles
were removed, I felt high for days.
Since
then, I don’t think I’ve changed much. The vocabulary of the
acid-eaters still makes me cringe, particularly when I hear myself using
it. This is the burden of the cynic. If your cynicism disappears, even
for a moment, you are dismissed by fellow cynics; worse, you court
self-disdain.
Which
is the real world, the world of doubt and disbelief or the world of
unbelievable free-flowing magic? Or is it a steady oscillation between
the two?
Click here for the source.
