The music of the MRI

by DRM

For the first halfhttp://www.psychologytoday.com/files/u107/mri_machine.jpg, I sat in the room with her. She was cov­ered with a white sheet and slid into the mas­sive dough­nut of the machine. Another per­son might see the image mor­bidly, as if she was half slid out of a mor­tu­ary stor­age slot. I didn’t see an image at all; just my girl lying qui­etly in the MRI. All obser­va­tions of fact.

The one metaphor was phys­i­cal, and wasn’t really a metaphor at all: the music of the MRI. Each sequence was num­bered, seem­ingly ran­domly: 3, 19, 14, 12, 7. The num­bers were vis­i­ble on a dig­i­tal dis­play. A sec­ond dis­play showed the dura­tion of the sequence and counted down, like a CD player. Each sequence had a dif­fer­ent rhythm. It was like a rhythm sec­tion was lay­ing down the foun­da­tion track, and as I sat there, I let my thoughts lay over the melody, noodling over the syn­co­pa­tion, beat by beat, search­ing for some­thing that could get its hooks into the track and grow.

I under­stood what Billy Stray­horn heard when he wrote Blood Count.

You can hear the music of the MRI here.