DisNitrous

Julia’s note: Tom arrived home a few minutes ago after a very difficult root canal. He was clutching a card on which was written: P=J*B, P*J*B= Love. He dictated the following bizarre stream-of-consciousness account of his morning, insisting that I type it verbatim and refusing to do anything else until I had done so. I’ve now put him to bed. The dental assistant said she had never seen anyone so affected by laughing gas.

Tom’s thoughts while coming out of a nitrous oxide induced state:

I could feel the gas penetrating my body from the outside in, just like you would freeze a fish. At first it was just the outside part that was just a little bit tingly, but deep inside I still had complete control, and I knew that anytime I wanted to, I could either tell them to stop the gas or rip the mask off myself. But because I trusted them, I decided to go deeper into the experience and see what would happen. I’ve felt that feeling before and so I had a vague recollelction, but the recollection went back so far and became so basic that I wondered if it was a recollection that I had from childhood or from a time when I got my wisdom teeth out at 18, or just the last time I had laughing gas. After a second it didn’t really seem to matter. I decided it was probably the last time I had laughing gas, but I couldn’t be sure if that was this time also, because time didn’t much matter at that point. The thought occurred to me that I probably was back in the dental chair in Bountiful Utah and that the whole idea of Zach and Alex and Tim and Nigel was probably just some dream I had about what the future might be like. And then the Beetles started playing “Yesterday” and I could hear Paul McCartney’s bass buzzing loudly and the problem when you’re in a state like that is that you can only think of one or two things at a time. Normally, there are thousands of things going on around us and we’ve trained ourselves to ignore them, but when you’re in an altered state, you have to consciously direct yourself to focus on something, and it can only be one or two things. So as I was listening to Paul McCartney’s bass buzzing, I noticed that the bass was getting louder, but it was the exact same tone and frequency as the dentist’s drill, and I thought that was really convenient, and I wondered how they worked that out, because later when he came back with Hey, Jude, the same thing happened again and I wondered if the dentist had re-tuned his drill. But then I realized that that hadn’t really happened at all because the music was only happening in my ears and the music was keeping me down. But there was a little tiny part deep inside myself that was still me, and I thought if only I could stop the music, I could hear what they were saying about me, because if I changed my focus, I could see them talking and laughing above me in the air as if I wasn’t even there, as if I were an object, a piece of meat, just another case. So I decided that even though they could take away my dignity, they couldn’t take away my ultimate power to choose and I decided to spy on them by reaching up with my hand, which took all my concentration, and unplugging my headphones. It was a mighty effort, but when I concentrated everything I could on that one motion, I was able to unplug the headphones and discover the great secrets that they were holding back from me as the world continued on without me. However, when their voices came back into focus after a brief rest, I was disappointed to hear that they were just talking about Von coaching his little girl’s soccer team. And after a little while of listening to the boring conversation, I mustered all my strength and plugged the Beatles back in, and that’s when I got to the end of Hey, Jude, the part that I normally hate, where the singer is screaming and the music is ugly. But this time I was glad that it was there because it showed me that someone was alive and I understood why murderers say that they have to commit a crime just so see that they’re alive because they’re so past feeling that the only way they can sense that they’re human is by taking another life because it gives them a temporary sense of being alive. And I comprehended in a moment this great secret: that in the end raw power is the law of the universe unless it’s mitigated by our higher sensibilities of beauty and truth and justice; that without those concepts, which we DO feel in the deepest parts of our being even when everything else is gone, the universe would just be raw power. But it’s not, because no matter what they take away, they can’t take away the yearning of the human soul for truth, justice, and beauty. And that’s how I came up with my formula: P = J x T (beauty and truth are the same thing, as we know from Yeats) and that the only way that we can have justice or beauty is when raw power allows itself to be tempered by the other countervailing force.

At one point, I remember the dental assistant coming in and talking to me, but I don’t remember much of what she said, except when she said my name I could focus for a minute. I remember at the beginning she asked if I wanted eye protection, and I said, “No, you can just leave my glasses on,” and she laughed because I didn’t have any glasses on. At one point she came in to do something and I was only vaguely aware of her presence and the only way I could communicate was to write with my finger, but I didn’t know her name, so I just wrote “What is your name?” with my finger. She ignored me, even though this was really important. Sometimes I think crazy people and Alzheimers patients are trying to tell us something with their spastic movements and crazy chanting. When she leaned over to take a picture of my mouth, I draped my arm around her waist just to be anchored to another human being. When I started waking up, I felt really bad and said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry” and she said something back to me, but I don’t remember what it was. I could have been asleep for two hours or two days, I don’t really know. If they had come to me and said, “Tom, we just need to reach in your pockets so we can get your credit cards so we can make some online purchases for ourselves,” I wouldn’t have said anything. If they had asked me to sign a contract selling my house for one dollar, I would happily have done so.

I also realized that music is very powerful. Because when you’re in an altered state, if you can only focus on one thing, if that thing is music, the music becomes the definition of your whole existence: you literally are music.

I’ve never been a drug user or been addicted to any chemical substances, but I can understand now some of what they must feel. Every few minutes, I would get the urge to rip off the gas and stand up, but it was so much more comfortable to just let the experience wash over me, and I realized that I was passing up decision points and that soon I would not have the ability of my own free will to make that decision anymore. When you strip everything else away to the essence of who you really are, you’re left with a few basic elements that are probably the building blocks of the soul. Those are: truth, beauty, love, and being connected with other people. When you have no power, nothing else matters.

The end.