Since the reading of Amis' Experience, everytime I go to the dentist I can't help a mute literary reminder of Nabokov and Joyce, and Amis himself, so to speak. Three writers with a common feature - frequent visitors of dentists and firmly acquainted with toothache. Three completely renovated mouths, down to the smallest molar.
Today's been one of these days. I had my first tooth extracted ever and now all I can feel is a huge emptiness, dramatically emphasized after my tongue's scary pioneer approach to the darkest place of my mouth where the excavation just took place. The extraction itself has been really something. The memories I had from my closest experience - the trivial removal of an additional wisdom tooth I had, back in my early twenties - have been entirely useless and, if anything, misleading: that was a piece of cake, a back of the envelope procedure for any dentist, a mere little pull. On the contrary, today's powerful series of pulls have been in another plane altogether, the energy and stress involved increased by a good many e-folds. The situation was well beyond my control at times. It even seemed as if my entire jaw was leaving me, going behind the rotten tooth as if unable to stand its departure.
One thing I've learned (the hard, and only, way) is how deep and strong the roots of our teeth are. Extracting them is a demanding business which leaves both, the patient and the dentist exhausted and, at the same time, sort of intimately connected as well, as in the odd aftermath of some kind of bizarre sexual practice, so to speak once again. The worst thing of the whole procedure is the painful realization of how bloody sensitive teeth are, how harmful the operation may become despite the anaesthesia, how shameful and disgusting it is to be explored so closely with so many unfriendly-looking tools, open-mouthed, groaning, the teeth aching, spitting every now and then a loathsome mixture of blood and slobber into the little sink on your left, with a numb mouth and a truly sedated wit, praying for the damn thing to be over and go home, nevermind the empty mouth and empty wallet. And enjoying the taste of the piece of gauze and cotton which the dentist's assistant sneaked in the big hole opened between two sound teeth which still remain.
Today's been one of these days. I had my first tooth extracted ever and now all I can feel is a huge emptiness, dramatically emphasized after my tongue's scary pioneer approach to the darkest place of my mouth where the excavation just took place. The extraction itself has been really something. The memories I had from my closest experience - the trivial removal of an additional wisdom tooth I had, back in my early twenties - have been entirely useless and, if anything, misleading: that was a piece of cake, a back of the envelope procedure for any dentist, a mere little pull. On the contrary, today's powerful series of pulls have been in another plane altogether, the energy and stress involved increased by a good many e-folds. The situation was well beyond my control at times. It even seemed as if my entire jaw was leaving me, going behind the rotten tooth as if unable to stand its departure.
One thing I've learned (the hard, and only, way) is how deep and strong the roots of our teeth are. Extracting them is a demanding business which leaves both, the patient and the dentist exhausted and, at the same time, sort of intimately connected as well, as in the odd aftermath of some kind of bizarre sexual practice, so to speak once again. The worst thing of the whole procedure is the painful realization of how bloody sensitive teeth are, how harmful the operation may become despite the anaesthesia, how shameful and disgusting it is to be explored so closely with so many unfriendly-looking tools, open-mouthed, groaning, the teeth aching, spitting every now and then a loathsome mixture of blood and slobber into the little sink on your left, with a numb mouth and a truly sedated wit, praying for the damn thing to be over and go home, nevermind the empty mouth and empty wallet. And enjoying the taste of the piece of gauze and cotton which the dentist's assistant sneaked in the big hole opened between two sound teeth which still remain.
[My mouth] was about to suffer an intrusion; over time, my enemy would come to feel like my enemy's enemy: my enemy would feel like my friend. The gadget was borne into the room, and shyly awaited its introduction. Here it came, my ticket to good looks and fine dining, to the head thrown back in vivid laughter, to nuzzling and honeying, to goopy kisses.
But wait. This wasn't the grinning jaw of a perfect stranger. Nothing could have been more hideously familiar. This was me, myself: this was my old bridge, my bridge of sighs with its weight of gold, ear-to-ear under the great pink saddle of the palate. In it went. I lay there flattened, utterly decked, by the sheer mass of the prosthesis. [...]
People walk out of doctor's offices with a quietly satisfied spring in their step or, alternatively, in a meek and burdened shuffle. It was in the latter style that I introduced myself to Madison Avenue. Isabel offered me a sip of orange juice: the flavour took several seconds to get to the back of my throat, and was followed by a catarat of saliva. Smoking a cigarette was no piece of cake either. Smoking a cigarette was no picnic. But imagine a piece of cake. Imagine a picnic ... Gulping, gagging, trying to smoke and trying to swear, I leant heavily on Isabel's arm.
(Excerpt from Martin Amis' Experience (Vintage, ISBN 0-999-42208-5). Amis had all his jaw eventually removed and substituted).
Tremendous!
ReplyDelete(the experience and the entry --your prose is good match for that of Amis himself)