At some point in the last year and a half, I learned that it’s helpful to take your body off the bathroom floor and put it on the couch. There, your body should listen to one song: “Peace Piece,” both the Bill Evans original and the Green-House cover.
This advice comes courtesy of the actor Cillian Murphy, who for two years hosted shows on BBC Radio 6. I was lucky enough to catch the 2021 series, Cillian Murphy’s Limited Edition, when it was airing. (Although it’s no longer available through BBC Sounds, you can listen to all the songs from the series on this playlist.)
These shows were passion projects, legitimate ones: Murphy was originally a musician—his band, The Sons of Mr. Green Genes, received a multi-record deal—but then he saw a production of A Clockwork Orange and decided to become an actor instead.
He has incredible music taste. Take this three track sequence from volume 2 of Limited Edition: Love Is A Hurtin’ Thing (7” Single Version, Gloria Ann Taylor); They Say I’m Different (Betty Davis), The Boss (James Brown feat. The J.B.’s). It is impossible to listen to these tracks, in that order, and not feel better.
In the last episode of Limited Edition, he closed with two tracks that he turns to when the world gets too loud. (That’s my bad attempt at paraphrasing him; I wish I had written down exactly what he said.) The songs: “Peace Piece” (the Green-House cover) and “mostly chimes” (Adrianne Lenker), which is 16 minutes of chimes, mostly.
Those songs belong to “unravel, pain,” a two-track playlist that I play on repeat when I have to put my body on the couch, during the pain tunnels that arise, almost always, during deep indigo early mornings. I listen and wait for the painkillers to work and watch, through the loneliness of this time, the highway lights blinking, the sun that refuses to rise.
A year and a week ago, I learned that I have endometriosis. That explained a lot, except the cause and the cure of this chronic disease (science hasn’t figured them out yet). The hospital gave me OxyContin, and grippy socks.
Essentially, endometriosis is a case of flattery gone incredibly wrong. Lesions that are nearly identical to endometrial tissue—the tissue that lines the uterus, developing over a month and then shedding (if an egg isn’t fertilized) as a period—decide to implant themselves into the pelvic area, including the pelvic floor, the ovaries, even the ligaments that connect the uterus to the pelvic wall. My OB-GYN once found endometrial lesions in somebody’s diaphragm. Another patient, he told me, had an abdomen so riddled with lesions and cysts that it looked like a bomb had exploded.
So, endometriosis is super cute and super fun. It’s also super fucking painful, and can cause all kinds of problems with fertility, including ectopic pregnancies or even complete infertility. An estimated one in ten American women have it. (The data reflects incidence rates in cis women).
My high school was very into ‘instilling a lifelong love of learning’ in us; it would have been helpful if that had included what endometriosis is, let alone that it exists. But in my school’s defense, putting a condom on a banana is an experience that has remained with me, and will do so for the rest of my life.
“Peace Piece” was the last song that Bill Evans recorded for his 1958 album Everybody Digs Bill Evans. It’s a nearly seven-minute long improvisation, spare but haunting. The piano strikes lonely notes. It breathes in empty air; even the silence has rhythm. You’re reminded that this is the work of one man: the solitary magic. So potent is this song that throughout Evans’ entire career, which spanned decades and included playing with Miles Davis on Kind of Blue (the highest-selling jazz record of all time), he only played “Peace Piece” live once.
For their cover, Green-House transposes it into the woods, carrying it through a forest of birdsongs. Still, the song retains its singular quality: the embodiment of being alone, with yourself, in the middle of a raging world. Green-House adds a gentle horn (or is it something electronic?) in the background; when I hear it, I imagine a lighthouse sending beams through fog. Home is here, calling.
When pain stabs me awake, I resign myself to this thing called my body. The loneliness of chronic illness is not just the wall it drops between you and others; it is the wall that falls between you and the person you used to be.
In The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness, Meghan O’Rourke recounts her decade-plus journey to learn what was going on in her body, in the face of the medical establishment that minimized or denied her pain—a common experience, as O’Rourke goes to pains to emphasize, especially among people without racial and economic privilege.
In one passage, she recalls a vacation her family took, and how that experience, in retrospect, was one of bodily freedom she would later lose:
I remembered going downstairs before anyone had woken to sit with my book and a bowl of cereal. Later, the dog and I would go for a walk…I remember being so lost in the sun and the dog’s joy and my pleasure in these hours of freedom that I had no sense that I lived in a body, except as a thing that could feel the sun and the wind and the dog’s cold nose.
After I read the book, which was generous and rigorous in its compassion, I scrolled through reviews on Goodreads. While most reviews were positive, Josephine’s was not:
Although there were a few moving passages in this book I found it tedious and overwrought, especially in the (many) parts where she details her illness symptoms and the seemingly neverending quest for whackier and whackier (and expensive) cures.
Yes, Josephine, desperate people will do desperate things. And what do you think chronic means? The next phase of the Marvel Universe?
In college, I had a friend who, to this day, remains one of the few people I know who has always succeeded at his wild, glorious ambition. He’s good at what he loves, and what he loves seems to love him back.
In the few times that we’ve talked since college, I’ve felt a discomforting mix of pride—he’s doing it!—and self-loathing: Why can’t I? When he would ask me what I was doing, I would scramble to come up with anything resembling an accomplishment. I felt pathetic, clutching my laundry list of struggles that, outside the confines of therapy, radiated insignificance. He’s had work on Broadway; I have chronic PTSD. Who would you rather hang out with?
That is a joke, but it is also how I feel, sometimes and occasionally endlessly.
But then, I think about a paragraph from Maggie Nelson’s Bluets that lives in my mind in a box filed WISDOM OR OTHER SUCH NONSENSE. Describing beloved friend and mentor who became paralyzed after an accident, Nelson writes, “She has never held any hierarchy of grief, either before her accident or after, which seems to me nothing less than a form of enlightenment.”
There is no guarantee that pain will be a teacher, let alone a good one. Pain is just pain. But a year after surgery, a year that has been studded with lurches of joy and pangs of despair, in what I did not expect to be the outcome, but was what happened, I am learning what it is to have this body, my body, and the care it needs.
Or, as Cillian Murphy said as he signed off from another episode, “Mind yourselves.”
What’s your small good thing of the week, or a song you turn to for comfort?
Let Me Tell You About Gidget
YES YOU CAN EAT MORE, BUT CAN YOU FIT INTO A BAG?
WITH ROOM TO SPARE?
A Continual Note of Gratitude
Like everything I write these days, this was written during sessions of The Writers’ Hour, an online hourly Zoom writing session hosted by the London Writer’s Salon. LWS is an online writing community so lovely and supportive that reminds me why I love writing in the first place.
Reminded of with your story of your journey: my small good thing is that I’ve officially gone a week without a recurring episode of a weird health thing I’ve been dealing with this month, which could very well be a new, yet-to-be-diagnosed chronic condition, but for now is under control. No ER for me this week! Lovely passage you shared on how treasured simple pleasures in the body can be, especially when sometimes it feels like the body has it out for you.