It has often fascinated me to consider that what I take to be connected, consecutive moments strung together to make up seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, millennia, epochs, and ages may not be the only valid system operating. There may be such a thing as a juncture where what I consider a moment intersects with the moment of a starfish, a housefly, a bacterium, or something that operates on an entirely different schedule.
I have visited my dentist twice a year for the past ten years. I have seen the same hygienist for the last three of those years. I allow no one else to probe the depths of my oral cavity with lights and mirrors except my dentist and his hygienist. She knows things about me I don’t know about myself. I may say that in the three years we have been seeing each other we have shared intimate secrets. That would impart a misleading impression of our relationship. I have only met her half a dozen times. I can’t even remember her name.
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She leads me into a room. We pass a plastic sign with her name on it. That’s it. Lynn.
The blond hairs form a downy halo along the edge of her cheek. The hair on her head is cut short and molded into one of those severe styles; it stays rigid as she moves. Gelled ruts where a comb has passed hours before still glisten in the brightness of the room. Back and forth she bobs, selecting instruments to scratch across my teeth.
“Uhuuana erraw unah oooh,” I say with no particular meaning in mind.
I remember watching a Nova show about Dr. Edgerton. He was an inventor and a teacher at MIT. He developed stroboscopic photography during the Second World War for reconnaissance photos. Later he invented cameras that shot movie film at thousands of frames per second. He made the camera so he could look at stuff like hummingbird wings and falling droplets of milk and nuclear explosions. When the film from these cameras is projected at the normal rate of 24 frames per second, you can see things happen that would normally happen too fast to see.
