(Like) Pulling Teeth

     My tooth was rotting, as in causing my root-canaled, crowned molar to simply drop off onto the car seat as I talked.  Yuck.  That's gotta go, my dentist told me; talking about the tooth; "you won't miss it."  But it was a part of me, I thought, the first body part (other than my wisdom teeth back when I was about to become a teen) to actually be removed from my body, never to be seen again.  No big deal, my friends told me; and indeed it was out and gone in about 10 minutes, sawed into 3 pieces and pulled our root by root (I was numbed up so there was nothing but a few bits of tugging and such to feel; the back molars have 3 roots which I didn't realize).  And as I ventured home, my tongue now exploring the space with a feeling of what-happened?, I couldn't help but think of 1) how much the world of such "operations" have changed; and 2) that having my tooth taken out was nothing when compared to being told that your leg or your breast had to be removed, a part of your body that would physically "heal," but one that would always stare back at you in the mirror.  

     For me, the decision to remove my tooth was primarily based on a sacrifice in a sense, removing the growing infection before it spread into my bone and blood stream, a choice likely similarly "justified" when a foot turns gangrenous or a cancer is on the brink of moving into the lymph system.  But the mental acceptance of other major operations was likely a hundred or a thousand times more difficult.  My brother had his first (and so far only) robotic surgery done, a successful one since he's now 2 years in and showing no trace of cancerous cells.  And perhaps it was that evening with our 2 medical guests talking so nonchalantly about operations and such that I had to marvel at how far we've come, even for something as "simple" as my tooth extraction.  But this was all first-world thinking since for so many in the world such options are either quite distant or nonexistent; the pliers or the string tied to a doorknob may prove to be uncomfortably real for removing an infected tooth.  But imagine surgically going into your body or cutting off an arm when all you have to work with are limited supplies or minimally trained personnel.

     Some of this was evident to Paul Salopek, a National Geographic Explorer who has (so far) trekked 11,000 miles on foot, crossing the world.  In a feature piece he wrote: No one knows precisely why, after knocking about Africa for roughly 240,000 years, anatomically modern humans began walking in earnest out of the maternal continent and conquered the world.  Our dominion was hardly fated. After all, as everyone knows, life is mostly accidental.  This question preoccupies me because for nearly nine years as part of a storytelling project, I’ve been trekking along our ancestors’ Stone Age trails of dispersal out of Africa.  I’ve reached Southeast Asia.  Eventually, the plan is to slog to the tip of South America, where Homo sapiens ran out of continental horizon.  My aim has been simple: to foot-brake my life, to slow down my thinking, my work, my hours.  Unfortunately, the world has had other ideas...For the longest time, archaic humans tottered at the cliff edge of extinction.  Our presence was vanishingly rare in antique lands.  Someone might invent, say, a new tool, yet that innovation became lost when her clan died out.  Advances never got disseminated, passed along.  And so it went for dreary millennia: discovery, loss, reinvention.  Call it a long rut.  Only when human populations grew large and stable enough to retain and build on breakthroughs did we at last unlock the planet’s door.  We remembered each other’s memories.  We won the battle against forgetting.  We advanced.

    The walker Salopnek continued his comments as he talked to Tony Hiss, a writer and public intellectual: What new trends should I keep an eye on, I asked Hiss, as I inch through an accelerating 21st century?  It was 2011, the year of the Arab Spring.  A tsunami had wiped out coastal Japan.  Goaded by bigots, America’s first Black president had released his birth certificate to prove citizenship.  “Anticipatory loss,” Hiss replied without hesitation.  By this he meant the growing anxiety of a privileged minority who by accident of race, gender, or nationality had inherited an inordinate share of power on Earth—wealth, jobs, property, social status rooted in settled hierarchies—and who now sensed their advantages inexorably ebbing away.  Hiss must have sensed my skepticism.  He squinted up to the shimmering steel ziggurats of Manhattan.  “Remember,” he grinned, removing and wiping his glasses matter-of-factly. “All this is temporary.”

     The irony of reading those words was that I had just finished Scott Raab's collection of pieces on the rebuilding of the World Trade Center (mentioned in an earlier post), a project that in itself took 10+ years.  Raab concluded with this: We Americans are an ornery, ignoble bunch, quick to take umbrage, quicker to incite it, ever fractured, never beyond healing.  The best of us under the worst of circumstances can maybe find a way short of mayhem and mass murder to get some healing done, but maybe only if and when we suffer enough to love our freaking neighbor.  Now --the eternal now, but especially today-- would be a lovely time for that healing grace...the stress of making a go of life in a world capital requires enough effort without paying a lot of attention to other folks' business, and because a vast majority of humans --in New York City and elsewhere-- are decent or better folk trying to get through the day with some measure of grace, and absence of friction.

     Decent folk.  The Sun pointed out that Carl Jung once said: The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook upon life.  That I feed the hungry, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ -- all these are undoubtedly great virtues...But what if I should discover that the least amongst them all, the poorest of all the beggars, the most impudent of all the offenders, the very enemy himself --that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness-- that I myself am the enemy who must be loved -- what then?  The London Review of Books' blog pointed out an immersive augmented reality presentation at the Museum of Austerity (in this case, one on the emotional and physical toll of the cutting of disability benefits in the UK), noting that: ... You were shown people in desperate and sometimes humiliating circumstances, but could choose whether to stop and listen at a respectful distance, or walk up close and nosily inspect them.  Peering over the shoulder of the woman filling in a form, you saw that she had written, in a box asking her reasons for failing to turn up to a Job centre appointment: ‘I was busy trying to kill myself.’

      Sometimes we decide not to face our demons, either as an individual or as a country.  Sometimes when searching we find that this is a lot of empty spaces, perhaps too much.  Edwin Hubble (yes, that Edwin Hubble) was born into a rather privileged life and with his keen observational prowess (and the aid of several newly built telescopes at obervatories) he used different theories* to scan the universe for other galaxies, asking how old and how big was the universe? This was a radical question at the time, even if it is now felt that as many as 200 billion such galaxies may exist: at the time Hubble posed the question there was only 1...our own Milky Way.  To watch the NOVA series on our expanding universe, one finds that our galaxy has been conveniently colliding and absorbing other smaller galaxies over the eons, only now our closest neighboring galaxy is heading towards us at 250,000 miles per hour...and it is 50% larger than our Milky Way (but also over 2 million light years away).  All of this is temporary, said Tony Hiss...

     We've gotten a lot of things wrong growing up, at least I did...and still do.  For one, I never realized that in the new World Trade Center there is not one cascading memorial pool but two, both built in the footprints of the Twin Towers.  I also didn't realize that our simplified version of the atom --a small nucleus being circled by protons, electrons and neutrons-- is totally inaccurate.  There is a lot of empty space in an atom...a lot.  Physicist and quantum chemist, William H. Cropper noted that if an atom were expanded to the size of a cathedral, the nucleus would only be about the size of a fly -- but a fly that was many thousands of times heavier than the cathedral itself.  What??  As to those other particles?  We'd never see them because they move so randomly and so quickly...in CERN's large hadron collider, atomic particles travel at a speed equivalent to circling the earth 7.5 times each second.

     So all of this is temporary, even my tooth (or teeth).  But rather than miss this part of me I can only appreciate it as being simply a part of life, and of being so fortunate to still be around to witness it all.  Discover wrote about the changing fall colors this way:  Gorgeous though it may be, autumn is certainly not all sunshine and roses.  In fact, the season is quite the opposite, often a stressful time of year for humans and trees alike.  Dipping temperatures and a disappearing sun make life difficult...In response to all sorts of external stress --extreme temperatures, drought, even scavenger and pathogen threats-- plants produce chemicals called anthocyanins, a class of pigment that absorbs green and yellow light and gives rise to fall’s mauve, scarlet, violet, and midnight-colored leaves...When chlorophyll-lacking leaves are exposed to UV radiation and light, anthocyanins function as a kind of proactive chemical sunscreen.  When leaves receive too much light for their photosynthetic capacity --which, in the fall, is significantly less-- plant cells create free radicals, or high-energy forms of oxygen that can ultimately kill cells and the plant.  Research has shown that anthocyanins work to divert and store excess light and UV radiation from excited electron transport chains.

    

     Atoms, wrote Bill Bryson, go on practically forever.  "When we die," wrote Bill Bryson, "our atoms will disassemble and move off to find new uses elsewhere -- a part of a leaf or other human being or drop of dew."   My tooth is somewhere, those atoms having moved on.  But if it's become a leaf, somewhere about to fall off of a tree, giving me a glimpses of beauty even as it shuts itself down for more than a few months, well then that's okay.  My tooth was temporary...just like me, just like our Milky Way.

*Credit a large part of Hubble's discoveries to two women, both of whom were and are relatively unacknowledged: Henrietta Swan Leavitt and Annie Jump Cannon...ever heard of them?  Exactly.  Said the non-profit AAVSO of Swan Leavitt's contribution to our understanding of the universe: One century ago, in 1912, an astronomer named Henrietta Swan Leavitt made a discovery that was to become one of the cornerstones of modern astronomical science.  And yet, during her lifetime she received neither plaudits, nor acclaim, nor even serious recognition from her peers.  Even today, she is little known, with not even a plaque hanging to commemorate her name at the Harvard College Observatory where she worked, and where her far-reaching breakthrough took place.  As if adding to the lack of recognition for these females, Hubble himself died of in 1953 due to complications from an earlier heart attack...his wife never held a funeral nor revealed where she buried the body (if it was buried at all).  To this day, the whereabouts of Edwin Hubble are unknown...