Ricardo and Mariana’s mother comes along and clarifies that their problem was not bad dreams so much as sleepwalking. No one on their block could sleep well after a body was dismembered in front of their home but then it got worse: the children began to sleepwalk. For months the mother would barricade the door to keep her kids from sleepwalking out into the horrors of the night. They wouldn’t wake up no matter how loud she screamed. But when her children get the needles, she doesn’t have to rearrange the furniture. They don’t sleepwalk anymore. Faith moves mountains, she says. I try to figure out exactly what it is that she has faith in, trying to parse if she thinks of the needles as medicine or as an adjunct to her Catholic faith or as another brand of spiritual undertaking altogether and after several minutes of our going around and around she smiles and pats me on the knee to let me know I have too many questions. Faith is everything, she says.
But I am weighing little things.
One or two grams of steel.
NADA protocol generally requires a whole group of folks to be needled simultaneously, ears poked and sitting together quietly for up to an hour, some falling asleep, others just resting their eyes. So there is a long stretch of stillness in Santa Margarita. I whisper with Rudolpho a bit, who, when I ask him about Bemis, says something like De médico, poeta, y loco, todos tenemos un poco. Every human has something of the doctor, the poet, and the lunatic in their disposition—but Bemis especially. Rudolpho asks why I’ve come here. It’s boring to watch a bunch of people sleep, no? Bemis has asked me this before and will ask me a bunch of times over the next year as I follow him and his needles around Juárez. I say, Sure, nothing is happening. But that’s when the mind roams. Rudolpho is a mechanic and a massage therapist and a butcher and a single father and now, after learning from Bemis, an acupuncturist. He doesn’t like to sit still. Staying busy quiets the mind. Needles quiet the mind. He points out that a roaming mind is sort of the opposite of the meditative state acupuncture encourages. He says he can help quiet my mind by poking my ears but I guess he knows I’m not ready yet because he says nothing else and walks off to inspect his patients. I want to explain to Rudolpho exactly why it’s interesting to stare at needled ears in a chapel, why I am not bored. But I could never get out the convoluted explanation in conversation, an explanation that begins with something like Ah, ears are so weird.
“Those ingenious labyrinthine inlets—those indispensable side-intelligencers,” wrote the nineteenth-century essayist Charles Lamb in “A Chapter on Ears.” Something like ten pounds of pressure will rip an ear from its head, about what it takes to tear through fifteen pages of paper—grab hold of the front matter of this book and tug to get a feel for it. Once the ear is off the head you can appreciate its oddness. An average adult ear weighs just over one hundred grams, or the equivalent of a small tomato. An average adult ear is two and a half inches long, with three-quarters of an inch being lobe. Turn that ear around in your hand and trace the labyrinthine inlets and think about everything that has passed through. Recent studies of Devonian fish fossils suggest our ears evolved from gills, meaning the history of our ears, beginning about 400 million years ago, is about ventilation of water or air. In the womb we still grow our outer ears on our lower neck in six gill-type perforations. The sensitive bones of the inner ear evolved from the jaws of our reptilian ancestors about 195 million years ago. So the history of our ears is also about chewing. First, ears were expelling what we didn’t need, and then they began to help us chew what we did need. By the time we homo sapiens emerged as we are today, around two hundred thousand years ago, our ears were fine-tuned to sense one another’s voices and pick up pretty well all the other sounds of our world—a hole for collecting so much of the invisible around us. And in this way ears become sort of magical. The Ebers Papyrus from around 1550 B.C.E. Egypt, one of the oldest known attempts at a medical text, talks about ears as forces with great existential power: “There are four vessels to his two ears together with the canal, two on his right side and two to his left side. The breath of life enters into the right ear, and the breath of death enters into the left ear.” If we believe our Bibles, just one hundred years after the Ebers Papyrus was authored in Egypt the Jews made their great escape from generations of Egyptian slavery. If we don’t believe our Bibles, it happened a thousand years after Ebers or never at all. The point is that the story of the Exodus—and the Ten Commandments that come out of Exodus and go on to shape all of Western religion—hinges on the problem of magical ears.
Moses is taking too long—chatting with God atop Mount Sinai—and the Israelites are itching to worship something. Aaron is down at the base of the mountain trying to keep the people behaving but he senses a riot brewing and decides to pacify the people and says to them at the beginning of Exodus 32, “Take off the rings of gold which are in the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.” Maybe one thing evolution didn’t account for was that, as our ears grew to hear more and elongated to hear best the frequencies at which human speech occurs, we’d find their folds and curves and lobes irresistible locales for personal décor. The Egyptians knew all about the spirits of death slipping in through the ear hole and this is one reason they began to use earrings, to ward off the demons. But also—and like all things—earrings could represent status. The big gold earrings of a pharaoh could ward off the demons more effectively and that for sure meant that he was better than you. So the earrings of the Israelites are no minor detail in this story; they are symbols of foreign culture, a culture that had until recently enslaved the Israelites, remnants of Egyptian polytheism that the jealous god of the Israelites could never abide.
Then, Exodus 32:3–4, where the story blossoms with blasphemy: “So all the people took off the rings of gold which were in their ears, and brought them to Aaron. And he received the gold at their hands, and hashed it with a graving tool, and made a molten calf.”
The molten calf, that most famous of idols, is made of metal from a foreign culture that the Israelites had poked in their ears. And here we are in Juárez in a chapel after the homily and all the Mexicans have this Japanese steel for practicing Chinese medicine poked in their ears.
Then the people of Israel have a dance party around their molten calf and call it Lord and that pretty well pisses off God. Moses talks him down, calms God down. But when Moses sees the molten calf for himself, he smashes the stones on which God’s commandments are written. He demolishes the calf, grinds it to powder, scatters it upon the water, and makes the people of Israel drink it. We often forget this last part of the story because it is a strange punishment, like making a child smoke a whole pack of cigarettes as atonement for puffing just one. Or more like making a child eat a whole pack of cigarettes as atonement for puffing just one.
The story’s focus on the earrings as the raw material for the idol, as the material on which God and Moses cast their ire, likely exists to scold the Israelites—the earrings being a visible way in which the Israelites had lost something of their identity by assimilating with their captors. But then, the practice of drinking gold was also part of Egyptian culture, something they did to treat illness and promote general spiritual purification. If the Israelites assimilated so much of their former captor’s culture, then God is quite literally giving them a bit of their own medicine when he makes them drink remnants of the idol made of earrings, not to heal them, but to punish them. The healing ways of one culture become an abomination in another. Your medicine is my blasphemy.
Finally God sends Moses down with a second set of tablets and, lo and behold, the first commandment is don’t worship your ear piercings, or “Thou shall make thee no molten gods.” Exodus actually has two different accounts of the commandments, so a whole lot of stuffy debate concerns what exactly was inscribed on the first set of stones and if it jibed with what ended up on the second set of stones, but the first commandment is always the same. There’s no questioning that God gets jealous when his people make an idol out of th
eir ear piercings—the immoral idea that life or death or any old god could float into our ears at any moment, that a bullshit piece of some foreign nation’s metal could even feign the power of truly regulating or demolishing gods and demons. Throughout the rest of the Old Testament, pretty much anytime anyone hears the voice of the one true God, their naked ears tingle.
My point: the metal people had in their ears nearly threw all of monotheism off track. God wasn’t hip to the lobe décor. Sitting here at the chapel in Juárez, staring at all these needled ears just moments after the homily, I wonder if God, or the priests who are now his proxy, will get jealous again.
This may sound outlandish but it’s not at all beyond the realm of possibility. Take Reiki, for instance, a kind of Japanese laying on of hands in which practitioners scan a body by hovering their nondominant hand over all its parts and then spend a half hour just resting their hands on different areas of the body whose energy seems to need realigning, beaming through their hands the healing energy of Reiki. Sometimes they call the practice a spiritual massage, which means not that it is a physical massage with potentially spiritual consequences but that it is a literal working over of the spirit, with minimal physical interaction. In 2009 the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Doctrine released a document called “Guidelines for Evaluating Reiki as an Alternative Therapy.” The misleadingly named document was essentially a ban on Reiki for all Catholics: “To use Reiki one would have to accept at least in an implicit way central elements of the worldview that undergirds Reiki theory, elements that belong neither to Christian faith nor to natural science.”
And: “Superstition corrupts one’s worship of God by turning one’s religious feeling and practice in a false direction. While sometimes people fall into superstition through ignorance, it is the responsibility of all who teach in the name of the Church to eliminate such ignorance as much as possible.”
Finally: “Since Reiki therapy is not compatible with either Christian teaching or scientific evidence, it would be inappropriate for Catholic institutions, such as Catholic health care facilities and retreat centers, or persons representing the Church, such as Catholic chaplains, to promote or to provide support for Reiki therapy.”
Bemis says, Woo-woo. He calls the sort of spiritual aspects of acupuncture woo-woo and distrusts the woo-woo even though he’s got years of expensive training in Eastern alternative medicine and he’s a Western-churchgoing guy. He gives a lot of credit to evangelical churches that saved him during some rough times in his youth but he was raised Catholic and now attends a nondenominational church. When I first visited his acupuncture clinic in Las Cruces, he escorted me to his office in an old bank safe and showed me where he’d hung some bland artwork over a spot at the back where a previous tenant had painted Bow down to The Lord. The covering up of this command in his clinic is less about his personal beliefs and more about his constant attempt to separate acupuncture from the woo-woo—regardless of whether that woo-woo is of the Eastern or Western variety.
Bemis encounters lots of Catholics in Juárez who are interested in pressure points in the palms and in the feet, the locales of stigmata. He tries to deflect that particular interest as the expansion of NADA in Juárez requires that it not get on the wrong side of the Church. According to Bemis, deployment of NADA after mass is a matter of convenience more than a matter of spiritual ritual. That much needs to be clear to any clergy who bust in with a hankering to clarify dogma. Bemis often points to the recent history of NADA as evidence of its nonspiritual nature. But if you go all the way back to NADA’s origins, they are mired in woo-woo.
Before NADA there was the auricular therapy of a guy in France, Dr. Paul Nogier. I’m tempted to go beyond Nogier, back into the origins of acupuncture itself, but those origins are just as muddled as the modern science that tries to explain acupuncture—many variations of needle therapy have existed in China for about twenty-one hundred years, all waxing and waning in popularity, and the vast majority of recent medical studies of modern acupuncture conclude its efficacy in treating most illnesses is nonexistent or equivalent to placebo. Digging much deeper than that opens up a maddening spiral into mountains of biased research and history from both practitioners and decriers of quackery. Best to stay focused on the ears. In the 1950s, Dr. Nogier was cauterizing people’s ears to treat back pain and having so much success burning patients that he decided to start poking them. He studied acupuncture and made maps of the ear that were less like traditional Chinese medicine’s maps of qi—life energy—in the body, and more like the popular nineteenth-century pseudoscience head maps of phrenology. Nogier figured the external part of the ear had points that corresponded to every bodily system and that any ailment could be cleared up with some deft massaging or needling of the ears in just the right places. Upper earlobe for toenail situations. Lower lobe for throat and tongue situations. The spot where your ear first curves back toward its high point for anus situations. And so on for over fifty points. His mapping of these spots eventually led him to conclude that the ear was not at all labyrinthine in shape but that it had the exact proportions of a miniature inverted fetus. He traced these inverted fetuses into his ear diagrams—the ear drawn to look exactly like an inverted fetus—as a way to exemplify how the ear might be a microcosm of the whole body, one magical and accessible spot where any ailment could be remedied. Nogier’s acupuncture diagrams, if you look at them even just once, will irrevocably change the way you see ears forever after. The closest approximation I know is the way a friend of mine dressed up as Princess Leia for a party in college, but she was in a punk phase of her life and had shaved her head and so to get that famous Princess Leia hairdo she just glued some honey buns to the side of her face. Now, whenever I see or even think of Princess Leia, there are those honey buns. But with ears, after Nogier, it’s fetuses, just hanging like sleeping bats from the sides of heads. Obviously we’re still heavy into the woo-woo here. Though, technically, Nogier’s early experiments with auricular therapy were not yet NADA. But then his ideas get transported across the Atlantic in the 1970s and his over fifty points on the ear get distilled down to just five. The five points that became popular with practitioners of auricular therapy in America are the ones for the lungs, liver, kidneys, and two points associated with the nervous system, the Sympathetic Point and the Heavenly Gate Point. That these points correspond with areas of the body most ravaged by addictions—smoking and drinking and snorting and shooting heroin—is no coincidence.
The people practicing and popularizing these five points of ear acupuncture were in the South Bronx at Lincoln Hospital’s drug detox center, a place run in part in the 1970s by groups such as the Black Panthers and the Young Lords. Lincoln Detox began as a methadone clinic but those beginnings were tumultuous, complete with the alleged murder (and cover-up via staged heroin overdose) of a detox doc, killed (allegedly) to stop him from pursuing more public funding. All kinds of more legal and better-documented manipulations were made by the elite of New York City to keep methadone and other resources from the clinic, to maybe keep the troublesome elements of society addicted and in that way pacified, not stirring up issues of civil rights, etc. Here in the fires of poverty and rebellion against all kinds of institutionalized discrimination, the NADA protocol was solidified—an epidemic of addicts being treated for their problems as cheaply as possible, all rounded up in the auditorium of a hospital in the South Bronx and quietly needled in the ears to fix their lungs and livers and kidneys and nervous systems, anything to wean them off the dope. There was little woo-woo about it. Just regular people desperately trying to help other regular people who were stuck in a spiral of hurt. Communities trying to make themselves better without any need to rely on the government or any of the other institutions that had been oppressing them for so long. As the addicts at Lincoln Hospital seemed to get better, NADA spread, caught on as an addiction therapy in urban detox centers and prisons across the country. Because it was so simple to te
ach and practice—just five points in the ear, de nada—and extremely quick to deploy, it expanded into disaster relief, no longer just an adjunct to detox therapy but now becoming a kind of general stress-reducing, pain-relieving behavioral-health therapy. NADA was in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and in Haiti after the earthquake and in Joplin, Missouri, after the tornadoes. The U.S. Center for Substance Abuse has guidelines for the use of NADA. So do the United Nations and now the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs. There are variations of NADA for use on the battlefield and variations for PTSD. NADA was in Guatemala after the civil war and in Manhattan after the towers fell and thrives in places of constant conflict such as Uganda, the Gaza Strip, and Lebanon. Bemis points to all this stuff when he talks about the history of NADA being totally separate from the woo-woo. Three decades after NADA took root in the Bronx, Bemis was trained there at Lincoln Hospital and he is steeped in that history of individual healing intertwined with community organizing. Yes, maybe Nogier was a nut with his inverted fetuses hanging from the head but there are all of these examples of NADA practitioners moving in quickly after catastrophes, before even the Red Cross or any other NGO can get set up, and empowering communities by teaching them this simple kind of health care. When all those other organizations do show up, whatever structure has been put in place for NADA therapy can be used to dispense all sorts of other health care.
But this evolution of NADA may not be so easy to explain to the Mexican clergy, especially with no medical science to verify the efficacy of acupuncture therapy. Even if the priests know nothing of the ear as an inverted fetus, they may walk through the big iron gates of Santa Margarita and see their parishioners, still in pews after the homily, meditating toward the sacristy, toward the giant loinclothed Jesus hanging from the cross, with one or two blasphemous grams of molten god sticking out of their ears. A whole cultural, religious, socioeconomic revolution of possibly pseudoscientific proportions is tied up in these ears. That’s what I want to say to Rudolpho, but I don’t know how to translate the words.
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