A PAIN IN THE HEAD

I never told you about the time I was in Tara Jane O’Neill’s kitchen:

“It’s not the doubt that lets you know you’re alive. It’s the constant and perpetual affirmation and re-affirmation or disavowal and re-disavowalling of such doubt that lets you know that. Your eyes, ears, mouth, nose, senses, fourth fifth sixth or seventh are all in thrall to doubt but not for doubt’s sake but for the ridding of the doubt that they crave. You live in a systematic opening and closing, re-opening and re-closing of doubt.

This all happens on an infinitesimal scale, everyday as you walk into the strip mall or wash your hair or tickle an infant you’re doubting and swallowing that doubt millisecond after millisecond. Say we draw it out into a larger scale or we magnify the smaller captions, you see that in the space where doubt reigns there’s no self-concept, you can’t sit comfortable with anything that you tell yourself or that the world tells you [a tinkle in her eye as she thinks about South Africa’s Truth & Reconciliation committee and their, admittedly multifarious, reasons for offering amnesty not punishment] – it’s only when that gap is closed can you sit 'comfortable'. Erase, re-wind, replay. Cup of tea or a Pain Killer?”