This is a most curious book, a personal journey of discovery rather than a theoretical treatise. We might more properly say that we have here a most curious pair of essays that the author sutures together rather loosely and with inexplicable haste. In Anatomy of Potency (Stillness Press, 2000), author Nicholas Handoll covers considerable ground as he moves from his early student days through his arduous explorations of the worlds of contemporary physics and cosmology. The inspiration and reasons for this journey he identifies early. Yet, the path on which he leads us occupies most of the book and our willingness to follow him requires some patience and a level of technical understanding that will challenge yet delight many readers.

Before I comment further on this work, a brief explanatory note. Handoll states in his preface that he intends his book for osteopaths and those who already have a level of understanding of osteopathy comparable to that found in Sutherland’s two main collections of essays: Contributions to Thought and Teachings in the Science of Osteopathy. Some familiarity with the mechanical aspects of Sutherland’s model as presented in The Cranial Bowl and Magoun’s more comprehensive Osteopathy in the Cranial Field, while not overtly stated, are I feel essential for a comfortable reading of this book. The author’s explanations of the complex movements of the bones of the skull and face provided in the text will require multiple readings for most of us. Additionally, the pace with which he covers such topics as embryology, The General Theory of Relativity, recent theories of particle physics and astrophysics will for most readers move rather too briskly and may therefore frustrate those who have not previously read a fair amount on these topics for their own edification or amusement. That being said, let us look in more detail at this brief but far from concise volume.

After laying out some basic assumptions about his readership, Handoll quickly presents a history of Sutherland’s work and his notion of the Primary Respiratory Mechanism (PRM). We soon learn that the author’s sense of this mechanism is that it is passive rather than active. Handoll takes this a step further by arguing that despite Sutherland’s belief that the source of this innate movement is internal, he experiences the source as external, a force of potency that seems to pass through the system rather than originating from within. Handoll also humorously reports going to the minimalist, Rollin Becker, with these concerns and receiving this typically laconic reply: “Read quantum mechanics.” This cryptic suggestion acts as a catalyst for the journey of discovery that the author recounts in a humble yet breathtaking manner.

We also learn about an odd experience that altered Handoll’s experience of time and space. In this vividly recounted event, he describes a sudden sense of his environment as suddenly not solid, a sense of energy passing through and around him, a sense that he was rather like a jellyfish floating in a powerful ocean of energy, the force and dimension of which exceeded anything that he had ever perceived. This profound yet ephemeral perceptual expansion precipitated his drive to better understand the source and nature of this energy. He hoped thereby to satisfactorily explain how this external force affects the PRM and more specifically his clients.

Handoll subsequently backtracks through some general information on Andrew Taylor Still and then looks again at Sutherland’s work and its impact on the evolving science of osteopathy. He does this time and topic shift several times in these opening chapters and the effect is a bit jumbled. Handoll next discusses the embryology of the developing osseous and tissue structures and how this development affects the physical properties that are fundamental to Sutherland’s theory. So much detail is presented so quickly that I marveled at Handoll’s clear explanations of such difficult material.

I particularly enjoyed his discussions of the movements of the major osseous structures as well as his summary of the nature and properties of th cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). The fluid as described by Handoll has a number of important properties: among them are its apparent swelling and receding; its gelatinous movement which we encounter in the face and extremities; and its inherent desire to express motion. Handoll later suggests that as osteopaths track these subtle fluctuations, they attempt to activate the striving potency of the fluid that has been locked down or restricted by some disturbance from within or without.

What I found particularly interesting was the fact that ultimately Handoll ends up arguing that it does not matter if the bones actually move, what matters is that it feels to the osteopath as if they move. The interaction with the client and the relationship between the practitioner’s hands and the bones, this is what is central, this is where accessing the health really occurs, the correctness of any given theory of origin, notwithstanding. Yet, despite this wonderful insight, Handoll proceeds to discuss numerous theories on the internal mechanisms of the PRM, rejects them, and takes us on his wildly hairy journey in search of an alternate quantum theory that matches his experience. I found this very curious while the author seems untroubled by this implicit breach of logic as he bracingly races along.

Before sharing the results of his “readings in quantum mechanics,” Handoll ends the book’s first section with a short discussion of strain patterns, also offering a series of appendices to supplement this tantalizingly brief chapter. One of the many curiosities of this book is the subsequent intercalated chapter on diagnosis and treatment. Why this section is not simply included in the appendices and why he gives such short shrift to these fundamental topics, I cannot say. These decisions are among the many mysteries of this very peculiar work. However, after completing the book, I suspected that this intercalation was a sort of afterthought, a necessary yet odd disruption to this dazzling tour de force.

While contemplating the discussion that follows, I kept hearing the engaging opening line of T.S. Eliot’s poem of alienation, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, which reads “Let us go then, you and I.” Why did this line of a favorite poem haunt me and why did I later decide to introduce it as a hook for my review? For reasons beyond rational understanding, random associations gradually took shape and assumed a life of their own. I came to feel that both Handoll and Eliot’s anti-hero take us on revelatory journeys and invite us into their odd subjective worlds. However, unlike the tentative Prufrock, Handoll launches into densely worded considerations of challenging ideas with courage and supreme confidence. He moves fast, packing his discussions with incredible detail, a bolus of detail that I had trouble digesting and that left me with a feeling of exhaustion once it had passed through me. Why so many facts when so few become key connections for Handoll’s argument? I could not answer this question and was left feeling therefore oddly dissatisfied as I sat for weeks trying to feel my way through his tangled labyrinth of intriguing speculation.

My sense of unease was compounded when I saw that he leaves himself a mere eleven pages to show us how his disjunct peroration through space-time relates to the notion of the PRM as externally activated. As I reflected further, I sensed that, for Handoll, the journey was more important than the destination, a very Zen way of thinking to be sure. Yet, overall, this obliqueness simply failed to satisfy my love of proportion and balance. I could not help but feel that much opportunity for developing clear connections for the wealth of ideas Handoll presents so brilliantly and with such masterful control is inexplicably discarded. This deficit both frustrated and intrigued me, particularly when considering Handoll’s exceptional intuitive insight and intellectual acumen.

Taking an opposite tack from that of the author, I would like to look at a few aspects of Handoll’s conclusions and tie them to those central tenets of recent physics that he explores. The world Handoll offers is a world that explains what Newtonian physics cannot. It is a place without an absolute vantage point, a space-time relativistic milieu where we influence our environment and it commingles with us in gloriously non-ordinary ways. The non-local locale we call our place in the universe is a complex environment of events that defy our limited perceptions at both a macro- and micro-level. At a micro-level, we find that our sense of solid matter is an illusion. What we experience as solid matter is highly permeable and mostly space, a result of repulsive forces that create a fuzzy barrier, an illusory border mimicked in an increasingly indistinct sequence of ever-smaller holographic images. At a macro-level, we and all other solid objects are constantly bombarded by a number of invisible particles, some of which pass through us, others pass deeper than the surface but are deflected, and yet others, such as protons, are repelled. We and all other crystalline objects that have matter, as we understand it, represent a small fraction of what constitutes our universe. Whether we call the remaining substance beyond our perception dark matter, antimatter, or manifestations of the vacuum density, as we come to embrace this dynamic notion of the universe, we ultimately see ourselves as a disturbance in a homogenous yet seething flux of energy.

This energy is a cauldron of activity, one where particles flash in and out of existence at mind boggling speeds, an energy that defies all conventional notions of relational space, a force that flits between multiple universes, moving through multiple time-frames, a magical universe where incomprehensibly large distances are traversed instantaneously, one where particles think and know. What an amazing place this is and how liberating to feel our place in it.

Handoll’s expansive vision of our holoverse frees the practitioner and opens him to a broader perceptual field. It is this world that he works with and lives in as often as he is able to free himself from the limits of his normal perceptions. It is this extraordinary world that he accesses when he works. We come to see that it is his most ardent hope that we too may free ourselves of the need to do, and rather, learn the meditative arts of waiting, perceiving, and sensing, in order that we may allow the healing intelligence of the potency (the health) within our clients to emerge and manifest.

A FINAL CONSIDERATION

In light of recent discussions about the osteopathic tides, I wish to briefly consider Handoll’s external potency theory as it relates to this matter. Handoll mentions the tides only once in a rather cursory manner, not unexpectedly, stating that the experience of the movements of the CSF has a quality that resembles the tides, not that these movements are actual tides in any familiar sense. Again here, the point is not whether what we perceive is an actual tide per se, but rather that this notion of tide is merely one way that practitioners who interact with the fluids experience them. Descriptions of the tides by a few fellow practitioners who do what we normally call fluid work suggested to me a correlation between the notion of the long tide as having an external source and Handoll’s model for the PRM as externally activated. Although Handoll never explicitly states this, there are enough similarities between his language and that of other teaching craniosacral therapists and osteopaths such as Sills and Jealous that we might convincingly argue a linkage between the two.

What occurred to me also was the notion that the mid tide has an internal source of activation, and that this perhaps relates to the various theories proffered (including those of Sutherland) which attempt to explain the source of the potency as an internal mechanism. I fear that this explanation may be far from unanimously accepted and therefore merely offer this as a reasonable deduction based on the material available to me as I write this review. Precisely how Handoll’s model fits into current osteopathic thinking is unclear to me, although we can certainly state that he rejects any internal activation model. Therefore, much as I wish I could present a coherent explanation that would satisfy both Handoll and more traditional osteopaths, I cannot envision what such a unified theory might look like.

The journey we take with Handoll, while interesting and marvelously expansive, takes us so far afield that we are left meandering in the cosmos. My sense of this wonderfully adventurous book is that it raises many questions that it does not answer very well, introducing difficult ideas at a breakneck pace, and failing to tie many of them together in his all-too-brief conclusion. The abrupt and choppy movements that this book stirred in me as I struggled to navigate Handoll’s vast oceans of metaphor caused me considerable consternation. Yet, I mostly found the experience of floating in the hyperactive space of Handoll’s world wonderfully disorienting fun. However, I found the permeable world Handoll strives so valiantly to create oddly impermeable, too heavy in detail that fails to coalesce. This is an ultimate irony that may perhaps be shared by others who link hands with Handoll on his very un-Prufrockian wanderings.