The Music of the MRI

“Take a picture, what’s inside?
Ghost image in my mind
Natural pattern like a spider
Capillary to the center”

Sitting with our morning coffee on Sunday, our pack of dogs snuggled around and on top of us, Caryn and I were listening to NPR’s Weekend Edition. It’s a little thing we try to do on the weekends to recover from one week and steel ourselves for the next.

As soon as I heard an introduction of a segment with the letters “IRM”, my attention was caught. It is the acronym, in many languages for what we know as MRI. I made that correlation quickly. What I wasn’t getting was that this was to be an interview with a French singer about her new album.

Well, as soon as they played title track from Charlotte Gainsbourg’s release IRM, I knew that my assumption was correct.

The unmistakable whine, groan and thump, so familiar to a person living with multiple sclerosis, came across our clock radio. Had it not been for a hypnotic drum track backing the sounds of an actual MRI machine, I may have thought I was having some kind of a flashback!

Ms. Gainsbourg had a series of MRIs (and other neurologic tests with which we living with MS are all too familiar) and, like many of us, was profoundly changed by the experience inside the MRI machine’s lonely tube.

“Hold still and press the button
Looking through a glass onion
Following the X-ray eye
From the cortex to medulla”

The more I listened to her recording (which she co-authored with Beck, who is known for using ordinary sounds to create extraordinary musical experiences) the more I was brought back to my first journey into the world of magnetic revelation of my body. That drumbeat revealed itself as my heart; thumping in my throat, my ears, my eyes…my consciousness. ANYTHING to drown out the electronic grinding and the shaking which seemed to move the very room in which I lay!

I must have looked a fright as I sit, propped against a stack of pillows and in the middle of a Wheaton Terrier sandwich! Caryn didn’t say anything until a few minutes into the interview, once I had a chance to shut my gob which was slacked for the experience.

I’d never thought of those sounds, the ones we experience in total seclusion, as the basis for art. Even with a modest musical training, I never thought to allow them any place in my mind other than annoyance or fear.

I guess it just goes to show us that there can be beauty in nearly every experience; even the MRI. All we have to do is open ourselves to it. The next time (which will be this quarter), I’ll try to stay awake!

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Trevis Gleason

Trevis L. Gleason is a food journalist and published author, an award-winning chef and culinary instructor who has taught at institutions such as Cornell University, New England Culinary Institute and...read more