Into the belly of the beast
 

REVISION

Another room, but quite the opposite,
as busy as 60s SciFi set
in which a friendly and obliging crew
in uniforms of deep cerulean blue,
grouped round this alien hardware, slide me in
so that the gentle probing can begin.
Breathe in … breathe out … hold your breath …

continue breathing … planet Earth
seems far away, and Time has lost its place
in all this infinitely narrow space
in which seem I to drift away, cocooned
within these threatening noises, not Marooned.
These creatures come in peace. Calm and benign,
they mean no harm to this old heart of mine.

ORIGINAL

Another room, but quite the opposite,
as busy as a SciFi TV set
in which a friendly and obliging crew
in uniforms of deep cerulean blue,
grouped round this alien hardware, slide me in
so that the gentle probing can begin.
Breathe in … breathe out … hold your breath …

continue breathing … planet Earth
seems far away, and Time has lost its place
in all this infinitely narrow space.
These creatures come in peace. Calm and benign,
they mean no harm to this old heart of mine,
solicitous as all the saints above
whose moving principle, like theirs, is Love.

David,

I'm really happy they weren't wide eyed, wearing pea green and speaking Martian! But I agree the belly of the MRI can be constricting, consuming and scary, especially if it's about our hearts. This works well for me, adds some playful lightness, even Biblical dimension, to the serious event. It seems to be missing a beat in line 1 of S2.

Cheers,

Enjoying this series of medical memories David. I like the "infinitely narrow space" in the MRI, and the echoes of Major Tom.

My memory of MRI was that it was disturbingly noisy, as if powered by clockwork and steam. I half expected a huge spring to punch its way through the shell at any moment.

The sentiment at the end was lovely but I wondered if it could include a hint of uncertainty eg

"whose principle, like theirs, I hope, is Love."

I love the little jolt of the imperfect "Earth" rhyme, the eerie off-ness of which clearly signals a transition as clearly as the stanza break.

Perhaps something like

     whose motivation, just like theirs, is Love.

Ah, MRIs. Not a lot of fun, though very useful.

I was half-hoping, reading the thread's title, that the N would be inside an actual beast, like Jonah. There really is a sense of being spit out at the end of those sessions.

Cynical me, I’m skeptical about the last two lines of this poem. Depicting the technicians as saints somehow seems to dehumanize the scene. The Dantesque conclusion of being moved by capital-L love stretches the poem beyond its scope, even with Joe’s suggestion for toning it down. I’d prefer some more down-to-earth way of suggesting their attentiveness.

In S1, “SciFi” could be lowercase “sci-fi.” In line 4 “blue” is redundant after “cerulean.” That line in general could be tighter, as it uses a lot of syllables just to say they were wearing blue uniforms. “Scrubs” is the standard name for those uniforms, at least in U.S. English, so that might be an alternative.

For S2L3, “inside this infinitely narrow space” would eliminate the need for the filler “all.”

Hi David,

I have a question about "SciFi TV set." When I grew up where I lived we called televisions "TV sets", so when I first read that phrase in your poem I first thought of the appliance rather than of a crew making a show. Your context quickly put me straight but I did have a little glitch in my reading that wouldn't have happened with "movie set." That phrase "TV set" is not used widely now for the appliance itself and maybe it was not used over a wide area even when I grew up and perhaps not at all in the UK. The phrase "TV set" having a double meaning referring to the appliance does echo though the idea of the N being inside of a machine, which is useful. My question is do/did Brits call televisions TV sets?

All the best,
Jim

I love this, David: an alien abduction story I can believe. My only suggestion, other than “sci-fi,” is a comma after “above.” In the controversial final couplet, btw, my understanding of the grammar is that “whose” refers to “saints” and “theirs” to the creatures. I think that works, but it tends to discourage Joe’s suggestion: I don’t suppose you’d hope the saints are moved by love.

P.S. Like Jim, I paused a moment to fix the double image from “TV set,” but it didn’t take long enough to bug me.

Thanks Ralph. Glad you enjoyed it. And glad you enjoyed the scifi aspect.

You are right, strictly speaking, about line 1 of S2 (I don’t really think of it as S2, just as the second half of the poem). I have allowed myself a breath there, and I – perversely – count that towards the number of beats.

Thanks Joe. Glad you’re enjoying the ride. (There is one more stop – poetically speaking. Strictly speaking, I suppose that’s inaccurate.)

Ah, you have your own memories of MRI. Memorable, isn’t it?

I quite like your suggested amendment in the last line, but the reference to Love (daringly capitalised, in a sort of 18th century gesture) is supposed to be to the original setting up of our dear old NHS. That, to me, was an act of love towards a populace by its government. That’s my fanciful take on it, anyway. And we could do with more of such acts. Isn’t that what a government’s supposed to be for? (I know, colour me naïve.)

I like the "infinitely narrow space" too - I had a line in Hamlet in mind there, can you guess which one? - but I can see the force of Andrew's objection to it.

Oh Julie, I'm pleased you liked that jolt. And that's another good suggestion for the last line.

I see your point about the last two lines, Andrew - these people were being paid for doing that they do, and of course they're not saints - but I do think that this is a mental stretch that is possible with a national health service, "free at the point of use", as they say, whereas it may not be in a Pay As You Go system. My mind boggles to consider how much this procedure would have cost if I was paying for it myself. Okay, I would have medical insurance, but what sort of last line would that give me ... "whose moving principle, like theirs, is good health cover". I'll stick with Love, while conceding that it is often imperfect. And with long waiting lists.

Yes, scifi is giving me some problems, as is - as Jim has pointed out - that damn TV set. But I like the association - the etymology, even - of "cerulean", and "cerulean blue" seems to be a commonly used phrase.

Jim, we do, or did, call them TV sets. And that is bothering me. I've been messing with that line right from the start, but somehow TV scifi set doesn't seem any better. I even wondered about "more of a 60s TV scifi set" - is that any better?

Carl, very pleased you like - or even love - this. I agree with you about the comma, and I think you must be right about sci-fi. Your reading of the controversial final couplet is the same as mine, but I agree that the "whose" and "theirs" might cause at least momentary confusion.

Cheers, all, as ever

David

I think I’ve had that procedure. Captures it well.

Liking this one a lot. In the below I would not cap Love. Too Victorian for this moving and contemporary poem. I think you need one more twist here, too. The last 4 lines all say the same thing. Better to set it up like, not like bad aliens on movies, probing, cutting, impregnating with their spawn, these ones….

These creatures come in peace. Calm and benign,
they mean no harm to this old heart of mine,
solicitous as all the saints above
whose moving principle, like theirs, is Love.

David, your final couplet is far too soft-focus for me. My sister's father-in-law died on one of those NHS waiting lists, and her husband recently had a close call on another one. It's a great system in theory, and I am willing to assume good will on the part of most of the medical staff, though Love may be going too far. I can remember being vulnerable in a hospital, and the intense gratitude one feels to anyone for their help at that time. But.

Susan

I took the final couplet as intentionally naive. The narrator and reader both know that the MRI techs are not really saint-like, just as they both know that the MRI techs are not really extraterrestrials.

I've certainly encountered a lot of surly and/or incompetent healthcare professionals during my family's many medical adventures, but I'm happy to let this narrator have his childlike moment of calm in a stressful situation.

Another vote to look at the concluding couplet David.

Delicate touch with the alien probing , I assume this was a package deal.

I had my Dunkirk a fortnight ago. The years do condemn lol.

Thanks John. Glad you think so.

Thanks Tony. Glad you like it. Let me have a think about that twist.

Susan, sorry to hear about your personal experience - at a remove - of the NHS. My focus is not necessarily going to be the same as your focus, though. And mine may change. Certainly it's taken long enough to get to this point.

My idea here is not that each of the individual operatives are themselves motivated solely by love, but that Love - in a bureaucratic form - was (is?) the Prime Mover of the system in which they move. And I think that's true.

Thanks for looking in, Julie. I think you've got that about right.

Thanks, Jan. Good luck with your Dunkirk. That didn't end as badly as it could have. I wish the same for you.

Cheers all

David

David, I enjoyed this poem and like your others on this theme, I’ll feel like I’m there. I’m just hoping you’ve been okay through all the scenarios described. It sounds like an ordeal!

The casting of the medics as benign aliens is interesting, funny, and apt, considering that MRI machine. I love the “deep cerulean blue,” the lovely irony of such a poetic term being applied to such a prosaic subject. And yet its cast of earnestness, shored up by following comments evidencing the n’s adoration and trust of the medics, is quite touching. I think it’s rather nice to see a poet unafraid to voice such elevated sentiments in this age of cynicism. Although I did wonder a bit about the emphatic-ness of “saints above” and their “moving principle” being “Love,” I was essentially okay with accepting this as the n’s experience. It’s true that love often moves in semi-disguise in this world, which I do believe is fundamentally propelled by love. The way that the sci-fi motif is expanded (contractedly) into the MRI machine and its otherworldly sense rings true in an adventurous kind of way.

It seems that your ellipses are meant to stand in in a loose way for some missing syllables. I myself have been chastised for using ellipses as stand-ins for syllables, but as a reader, I accept this approach pretty well. However, I’d accept it even better if the ellipses were used consistently to represent a specific number of syllables. In this instance, let’s see, this might be done by using them more sparingly, with each one serving as two syllables:

Breathe in, breathe out … and hold your breath—

continue breathing … planet Earth

or you could just fill in those syllables with words somehow and not have the ellipses count for any syllables, e.g.,

Breathe in … breathe out … breathe in now … hold your breath …

continue breathing deeply … planet Earth

Just fiddling around with possibilities here.

I like the way you break the poem in an uneven way, mid-rhyme, which captures the sense of breathlessness and being transported into another dimension. And the off-rhymes work well to convey a certain sense of tension.

Nice work. You've "got" me as a reader.

Thank you very much for that, Alexandra. I'm delighted to know that you believe the world is fundamentally propelled by love. It's a belief that I try to cling to.

The ellipses sort of stand in in a loose way for some missing syllables, but I'm abandoning the syllabic gravity altogether there. This is the free-floating heart of this particular poem.

I'm very happy to have you as a reader.

Cheers

David

Hi David,

I like it. Sorry I'm coming late to this but I wanted to share my unique perspective.

First, I'm the sister Susan mentioned and I don't recognize her description of the NHS. My father-in-law was not on a waiting list when he died -- on the contrary, the NHS had helped him survive about 25 years after his first heart attack and nearly 10 years after his second. And the only problems my husband experienced during his 18 months waiting for gallbladder surgery were a single short episode of pain passing a stone, and an inability to get travel insurance to visit America, where any sort of medical emergency would have cost us many thousands.

Second, I do MRI research for a living, so I know that tube very well from the inside and out. The BBC Archive recently released this wonderful clip of my PhD Supervisor (the one with the dark moustache) and his supervisor Peter Mansfield on Tomorrow's World in the 1970s: https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=Tomorrow%27s+world+MRI+BBC&mid=FE0C 699F1BE2EC23F872FE0C699F1BE2EC23F872&FORM=VIRE

I think the experience of having an MRI scan comes across very well in your poem, though I do wonder whether you could work in the noises in any way. Without them, I wasn't sure it wasn't CT. I think the breathing instructions with ellipses work fine, and I wouldn't want you to reword them for metrical purposes. 'TV set' threw me too, what about 'sci-fi drama set'? The simile to Star Trek is very apt -- Peter Mansfield's wife takes the credit for MRI because she turned to him while watching an episode where Bones was examining someone with his handheld device and said, 'Why don't you invent something like that?'

The last couplet does make me uncomfortable, for the sort of reasons others have mentioned. Personally I would vote for cutting it to give you room for more sensory evocation or sci-fi simile. The previous couplet is very strong, as is the poem overall.

I want to apologize to Mary and other readers for the combination of misinformation (from a third party, not Mary) and misinterpretation that led to my previous statements about the NHS. I am glad to have the facts set straight. No one likes long waiting lists, but a health system that provides care for everyone, not just for those who can afford it, has obvious benefits compared to the system we have in the U.S.

Susan

Mary, thank you very much for that. As you say, you have a unique perspective, and I thank you for sharing it with me.

Great to see that video. I remember Tomorrow's World very well. Fortunately it's a lot easier to get in and out of the thing nowadays. I don't think I'd have liked that approach. But that, as they say, was an experimental model.

I like your idea of working in the noises. I do remember them, but the vividness of the experience has faded a little now. How would you characterise them? I'm thinking of a humming, or a roaring, or something in between them. And were they intermittent, rather than continuous? I rather think they were, but I'm not sure now.

If I can incorporate the noises, in a new couplet, I can lose the offending couplet at the end. Although I still feel quite drawn towards that same rather starry-eyed conclusion.

So pleased that the Star Trek connection is apt. And I very much like Mrs. Mansfield's story. I like your whole post.

And, just to round things off nicely, the results came through today, via our local cardiologist. I think I can say I couldn't have hoped for better, so there's a feeling of some euphoria around here tonight. MRI is a marvellous invention.

Cheers!

David

Great news on the scan report!
If you Google MRI scan noise recording or similar you will find a lot of youtube videos to refresh your memory. Definitely they are intermittent, usually changing every few minutes.

Ah, that's a good idea. Why didn't I think of that? Thanks Mary.

Cheers

David

I've revised this to try to accommodate Mary's point about the noises, and while I've done that I've also addressed her (and many others') objection to the original closing couplet (by removing it).

David