LIVE RECORDINGS

4 6 Y L I V E R E C O R D I N G S W I L L E A V E S f o r I a n I have learned some secrets of life which are now dimmed in my memory by the operation of that same law which ordains that the convalescent, once cured, ceases to understand the mysterious truths laid bare by illness, and that the prisoner, set free, forgets his torture, or the conqueror, his triumph passed, forgets his glory. – Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian He took a history, diagnosed my problem (a tilted and rotated pelvis), and spent an hour and a half making little rolling and kneading moves up and down my back and my legs before teaching me to stand up. I have been favoring my right leg for years. He perceived, somehow, that I’d been anxious and angry, and anxious about being angry; that I harbored, as he put it, ‘‘fiery thoughts’’ which (of course) a√ected my behavior towards others but found an equal expression in dreamlike self-recriminations. His treat- 4 7 R ment rooms, above a newsagent, were unkempt to the point of squalor. The Balmain Therapy Center has no shop front, to put it mildly: no calming music, no ornamental arrangement of willow sticks in an amphora, no green tea. Robert McCusker works in a musty apartment with yellow blinds, no carpets, no light, a padlocked toilet, and rooms containing single mattresses on faded floral divan bases. His clothes were clean but he smelled of smoke. Before becoming a Bowen therapist, Mr. McCusker was an engineer . He described circulatory problems as an engineer might, making reference to fluid dynamics and hydraulic systems. He also spent some part of his life designing toothbrushes: there were a few examples (still in their packaging) on the wall above a couple of pages of A4 on which were printed some not quite grammatical a≈rmations about living a life of possibility and being kind. He did not take card payments. He had no cash register or box. He didn’t mention money. I told him I had a hundred bucks with me. The physiotherapy practice I’d called the day before charged ‘‘between $200 and $250 for an initial assessment.’’ Robert McCusker told me to walk up and down the length of my friend’s house for one minute every half hour for the rest of the day and then, starting tomorrow, to walk for half an hour every day for the rest of my life. He didn’t do anything with the hundred bucks I put on the table. He shook my hand three times before saying good-bye and wishing me well. ‘‘Your pelvis is pretty much level now, and I think you’ll find you’re not as anxious.’’ ≤ People who emigrate quite early on in life and adopt a new language still speak to dogs in their mother tongue, even if it is one they have for the most part forgotten. Something interesting is happening. Speech is a higher brain function, a result of the evolution of the cerebral cortex, but the mother tongue, as the term suggests, is that part of the function that is nearest to the mammalian brain, where emotions and concern for others (including other creatures) and for the young originate. So when we speak to dogs in our mother tongue, we are not being soppy. We do it because our limbic system has recognized Dog, and with it the pre-human mammal. We do it without thinking because we are reaching very quickly for a way of responding to a signal transmis- 4 8 E A V E S Y sion – a communication – that predates thought. The signal is not a language, but it has information to which we respond. We have received a message we can’t open. Pace Thomas Nagel, of course we don’t know what it is like to be a dog, or to form a concept of what it is like to be a dog; but our instinctive deployment of an abandoned human language in front of one suggests by potent analogy that...