Perkus Tooth

Today while reading chapter seven in Jonathan Letham’s Chronic City, I felt the desire to slow down, savor and digest sentences and paragraphs. It is sometimes difficult to string together the sentences, observe the spire of the church he sees past the Dorffl tower. It was all started by this sentence: “When I confirm the church's actuality (buildings do persist, Manhattan does exist, things are relentlessly what they seem even if they serve as hosts, as homes, for other phenomena), the sight acts on my mind like an eraser rubbing away the words that might describe it, into crumbs easily swept from the page.” This was what caught my attention, not the first sentence of the chapter with Chase Insteadman (by the way I just got the brilliant description of his last name, what his character serves for other characters in the book, a vessel or “cauldron”) said he wanted to get this description right. It was the image of the eraser leavings, fragments of what was there on the page, changed but still containing the raw material that made the sentence. You can still make out what is there, barely, unless you erase so hard that the paper begins to peel, rubbed raw to expose its pulp. I thought how this sentence was on my brain as pencil on paper, erased by the next sentence I might read, so instead I went back and read it aloud, intending to connect the two thoughts that were separated by the paragraph. Yes, the church does exist, there is something there beyond the eraser rubbing, just not in my brain. So I proceeded to read the rest of the chapter out loud, pausing after realizing I was more concerned with the way my voice sounded and annunciating things succinctly because usually when I read aloud it is to someone else, and the concern that they hear the words properly overwhelms my concern with my own understanding. But it was just me, so I went back to the description of the church, trying to see it.

This brings me to my biofeedback session yesterday. Louise, fixed the sensors, in a process that is called LENS (not sure if it is an acronym or not). The process begins by putting a clip on my shirt, just below my collarbone, then two clamps on my ears, as if I was a drained car battery. Then one of the electrodes is placed precisely on a spot at my crown, Lousie feeling for points on my scalp that will direct her to the mark, then re-feeling to make sure she got it right. Then after talk of, I can’t quite remember now, she asks me to relax. I am expecting the usual relaxing of my forehead (something I’ve had trouble with. You know when a relaxation or meditation cd says to relax your forehead, well my neurons always endeavored to produce the opposite effect) and this time one side relaxes, the right side and the contrast is striking. As my head involuntarily tilts back I feel the tension in the right side of my face dissolve I feel the pulling of my jaw on the left side, the residual clamping of night dreams, (TMJ), the pull of muscles adjacent my left eye. The next site she fixes the electrode to is down, toward the right side, above my ear I believe. There is a reduction of the tension pulling my left forehead, eye, jaw, nose. My jaw goes completely slack and hangs, mouth partially open, and I’m sure tongue slightly protruding. By this time I must be pretty relaxed because I don’t remember the third site, I think it may be at the back of my head. As I write this my brain must be endeavoring to reproduce the effect because my jaw is slack and my eyes limply open. Afterwards, Louise says we will try some biofeedback and fixes a different kind of clamp on my right ear, to measure my heart beat. Then on the little screen in front of me she opens a window with wavy lines, reminiscent of pictures from my online BYU physical science class describing sound waves or light waves. A ball travels up and down and a mans voice tells me to feel my heart in my chest, and my attention goes there. Feeling becomes connected to sight. I am instructed to breath in and out, through my heart, as the ball travels up the wave, in, down as the ball travels down, out. I noticed something monitoring my heart beat at the beginning. Three blocks of color, rapidly rearranging the color between themselves. I am instructed to try to feel a positive feeling, memory, but not to hard. So my brain and heart dance on the top of memories. Everything is converted to feeling as my brain lets go of the desire to describe things in words. Continue breathing through the heart, and follow the ball. The program says I am doing well, and I am now in a state of high consciousness. It repeats it again later, and though my breathing is a little difficult, as my spine is not straight but slightly slumped in the comfy chair, it doesn’t seem to matter, because I am trying to breathe through the heart, not the diaphragm. I find I don’t mind the switching of screens to another visualization, there is no anxiety of what is to come next. Changing lightwaves of color, like an old screen saver, as I breathe. Then another image, a very new age image, the back of a child’s head, I think he was blond and he is wearing a sweater. He seems to be out in space because he looks at the world. Little fuzzy balls of blue light radiate from his chest, the location of his heart, towards the world. All the sudden the balls of light increase, as an organized angle of balls of color streams towards the world. Instead of feeling my normal oh, man this is a cheesy picture, which I knew, I felt, isn’t that little boy cute. As the balls changed to orange, pink, red I couldn’t help thinking of holding a child to my left breast, suckling him, and I wondered if the change of color was automatically designed to go through a spectrum or if this feeling was influencing the color to change red. As the color continued to change to fire orange and then wind its way through yellow, green, and back to blue I think that the color of the light was actually influencing my thoughts and feelings, not the other way around. Though I describe this all now, at the time it was all half thought, mostly felt, dissolving into heartbeat and breathing, back to impression, or maybe I felt it all simultaneously, but no thought held hold, and not frantic sifting through them or longing to hold on. It felt good to let it change and go where it wanted. My mind wandered.