I’ve always wanted to write a short story called PAINLESS EXTRACTION, a story written from the point of view of a person who goes to the dentist to have a tooth out. He checks in, gets ushered into the little room with the big chair, gets sat down, laid back, chatted with, bibbed and masked with the soft plastic pyramid through which the nitrous oxide and oxygen begin to flow.
His thoughts about his day and how this dental visit fits into it begin to scratch against each other, time against time, but then become filmy, sliding over each other, expanding without losing depth somehow and then they lose depth and dissolve without tearing, noiselessly, echoing, little trips and zips ticking off that way and doubling, tripling, turning into solid lines as they vanish just before reaching the edge of the map of the map at the center of which on a grid made of thoughts passing over each other the dentist is there at the same time that he knows he has been there a long time, her assistant too, that’s known, it’s known, it wasn’t known but now it’s known that it was known then and the tooth is out, there it is, Magritte, and we’re almost done and his walk to the car afterwards his imagined walk to the car afterwards when he’d think that things can be imagined before they happen and it would all go on like that and it could all be imagined and remembered that in the middle before the knowing of the knowing the dentist had already been there that that had all been imagined or hadn’t been what it seemed to be almost done, it hadn’t been about the tooth it had been something else and yes I was wrong about that that a person could be wrong had been imagined it has all been imagined since before I knew I was remembering I was wrong I’d been wrong about that too that a person could be wrong or a person at all what a game it all is was and will be a game and they call it a game when it ends and the point of the story would be he had died in the chair and not known it and the point that what happens that matters most you don’t know and once you know it you know it didn’t matter most, that nothing matters most, that it all matters, Magritte, and the way you know it’s a game is it ends and a ride is when you only get off when they say but it’s happened. The tooth is out.
The reason that story I never wrote and never will is on my mind is I did something last night I rarely do. I watched the Harris-Trump debate. And since I’m not great with tension, I drank a little too much and thought about other things while I watched and went in and out of the room and of course what I thought about was The idea is that something is happening right now that’s pivotal, that’s a plot point, and you could say it was: Taylor endorsed Harris afterwards (although that was probably her plan all along) and Harris “won” but we all know that winning is losing, victory is defeat, and if you do win, whatever comes next is the part where you lose or you win more but the part that comes next after that will be hard, it’s a process. And what I thought while the debate went on was What is happening while this is happening that we’re not experiencing? What is changing or has already changed while this is filling up our viewfinders? How do you tell the difference between the music and the noise when they’re so much alike and does it matter? Which is the text and which is the subtext? What is the evidence and what is the case and why?
I have a visceral reaction, I have to admit, to watching people watching events in which they think they have a stake reacting passionately. It’s why I refuse to react passionately to much and thereby lose quite a lot in the process, but it’s me and I don’t want to change enough to do it. Robert Frost said, wrongly but interestingly, in his notebooks, that there’s nothing sadder than an adult treating something with tenderness and grave interest that another person would recognize quite rightly as trash, and what’s wrong about that and right about it would take a while to explain, but to me there’s something hopeless to the point of being scary when teams confirm their shared commitments. It ping-pongs me back to my ping-pong consciousness of what’s always being lost when something is found, about the way the blind spot moves every time you turn around, about how you have to be wrong to be right about anything but you have to be something and so you are, you get it wrong for the chance to be something, you sleep in order to dream, which is fine as long as you’re not proud, but you have to be proud and you have to be something and you also know that somehow there really is something at stake and it’s kindness but so much has to be trampled to know that, is it better not to know…?
I’m “glad” Harris “won” the debate. I’m even more glad Taylor Swift endorsed her, SO GLAD, even as I am already pre-emptively preparing for the violence and rank idiocy — and the idiocy, I’ll admit, is harder for me than the violence because that’s just how I am, to me the scary part of being here isn’t the ECT or the blood on the linoleum, it’s how the rules don’t make sense — preparing for how that’s going to explode like Krakatoa after the election and the Supreme Court WILL get involved because our system isn’t perfect and the only time Alan Lichtman was wrong was when Bush beat Gore and this could be that again, it will be, maybe, because our healthy Western mania for fetishizing the well-being of the least among us means anyone looking the least bit like the least among us gets a hearing, how it will all unfold and then refold like those fortune tellers fifth-grade girls love to make, what a lie, you can’t tell the future, but you can because everything is true. And what’s on my mind this morning is what’s being lost while we watch, while we stare, at all of these screens, what wisdom in our arms is being lost, what deep knowing in our legs is being lost, what’s already lost when we agree to believe anything and thereby stop seeing what’s there, what we can’t even remember how to see. There’s a tribe somewhee with no word for “blue,” so they can’t see it — and there’s no word for what we call “our politics” costs us, but it’s gone.
It’s so sad to me that to protect women, children, trees, the Earth, and even men who cry, we have to forget so much to fight hard enough to win.