Dentists and suffering

The dental industry, in its aim to keep things clean and dry and healthy before dealing with taking impressions of a mouthful of teeth (or the lack of them), or in its aim to do other terrifying things to their patients, seem to forget that these things can actually be very traumatic to the people receiving them.  

I don't normally have a great deal of problem with going to the dentist.  I've had so many things done to me over the years that I'm fairly composed, normally, when it comes to sitting in a dentist's chair.  However, over the last few months I've made several visits to the Dental School here in Dunedin, because, as a pensioner, it doesn't cost me an arm and a leg to have my teeth attended to when I go there.  I'm very happy that Dunedin has the Dental School - don't get me wrong about that.   But I'm getting a crown replaced - it broke off a couple of months ago due to wear and tear, I guess.  It's taking longer than it would to have it done by a private practice dentist, of course.  That's the way things go at the Dental School.  And the young fellow who's looking after me is doing pretty well, all things considered - he's a fourth year student.  

But today, prior to taking an impression so that the technicians could make a new crown, he did something I don't remember having had done before: to dry the area between the gum and what's left of the tooth (what the crown will hang onto, along with a couple of pins that have been inserted in it) he inserted a tiny tubular-type material in under the gum, like a very small rubber band.  Poking this up into the gum was like having something poked under your fingernail.  I'd had an anaesthetic, so it shouldn't have been sore, but it was very sore.  Worse, two of these tubulars have to be inserted: the first does one thing, the second something else.  (I was a bit brainless by this time, so found it hard to take in what they were actually doing.)   I guess the first kind of expands the gum area so the second one can be held in place to keep things dry.  I'm not sure. 

Anyway, after this had happened, I had the impression-taking device stuffed up into my upper set of teeth for around five minutes; apparently the material that takes the impression doesn't dry quickly.  That was okay - survivable.  

Finally, relief when the impression thingee was removed, and then the two tubular bits.  Except that that supervisor felt that the impression wasn't quite good enough because there was extraneous gum getting in the way.  So...believe it or not...we went through the whole process again after the offending gum was removed - burnt off, in fact.  You could smell the burning flesh.  By this time I'd had two more injections, and being injections into the area that was already sore they were very painful in themselves.   (Perhaps it wasn't coincidental that our church house group last night was looking at suffering!)  I've always tried to avoid anaesthetics if I can when at the dentist; I find they leave your mouth more sore afterwards than if you don't have them.  The pain of the moment is of the moment; when you recover from being anaesthetized, you still have the pain that you didn't experience so much of earlier on.  If that makes sense. 

Anyway, the process started all over, and I was offered still more anaesthetic, but I just wanted every over and done with - Get on with it!  So up into the gum went two more rubber bands, and then the impression thingee was stuffed up again for another five minutes (and if you think I'm exaggerating about the 'five minutes', I'm not).  By this time I was very desperate to get out of that chair and out of the building.  

Why do they need to use these bands?  In the past, as far as I'm aware, they've always cleaned very thoroughly around the area before sticking anything like a crown or a temporary (I'm onto my third temporary for this series) onto what's remaining of the tooth, and that's always been effective.  I've rarely had any problems in terms of infection.  This current idea of stuffing stuff up inside your gum verges on torture that Torquemada would have enjoyed applying.  Even with an anaesthetic, it's painful, and what makes it more painful is having someone tell you to sit still because moving about makes it harder to work.  Okay, mate, let's swap places for a few minutes!  

Anyway, I'm still alive.  I have another temporary stuck in which hasn't fallen out while I was having a meal with some friends tonight.  (Though I was being cautious...)   I could have had the tooth taken right out and be faced with yet another addition to my denture plate, as happened last time something along these lines occurred.  

Count it all joy, my friends, when suffering comes along...says James, though I think he was referring more to people being persecuted for their Christian faith.  One of my questions at the study group last night was, how do we be joyful in the middle of suffering?  If I was supposed to learn how to do it today, I missed the boat, I'm afraid. 

Cloudstreet

I've known of Tim Winton's book, Cloudstreet, for some years, and even have an idea I began to read it at one point, but I can't have got very far if I did as I have no memory of the story whatsoever.

Last week while in the Library I picked up a DVD of the 2011 mini-series produced from the book.  It remains very faithful to the original story, perhaps helped in part by Winton's own involvement in the script. And from what I can gather, if it hadn't remained faithful, there would have been an uproar, as this book is very highly regarded in Australia as a classic, and is one of their all-time top books.

The three episodes each have their own flavour: the first details the gradual coming together of the Pickles and Lamb families after tragedy has struck both families in different ways: father of three, Sam Pickles, has had all four fingers and part of a thumb chopped off in a work accident, and 'Fish' Lamb has been drowned - and revived in a miracle that turns out to be an enormous test of both families' faith - not just religious faith, but faith in life itself.   As Winton, as narrator, notes in the book: “Life was something you didn't argue with, because when it came down to it, whether you barracked for God or nothing at all, life was all there was. And death.”

Winton is a Christian - check this interview for more information on that - and while his characters struggle with Christianity in any traditional sense, the book and the series are infused with an understanding that there is much more to this world than many modern people are willing to believe.  

This first episode also introduces us to the House around which the remainder of the story is centred.  This House has a past - and also an aboriginal man mysteriously connected to it - though not all the characters meet him face to face.  The House (I capitalise it because it is a character in its own right) is possibly haunted because of what has happened in the past, and makes moanings and peculiar grindings and creakings throughout the story.  

The second episode is rather more sombre in tone, even though several of the younger characters have sexual relationships with other young people during the course of it.  In this episode the nine children have almost all grown up, though Fish remains a child to all intents and purposes because of the brain damage he suffered in his drowning.  His gentle big brother 'Quick' (we're told in the book, but not in the drama, that he wasn't actually quick - it was a mocking kind of nickname; Fish was the quicker, the more intelligent of the two), continues to look after his handicapped brother until he can't take it any more and escapes the family. 

The last episode winds up some of the corners of the plot, reveals some things that make a difference to how we view the characters, and ends spectacularly with a wedding and a birth on the same night. 

The series is superbly acted, in particular by the four actors playing the parents: Essie Davis as the almost perpetually drunk Dolly Pickles, Stephen Curry as the laconic Sam, always on the lookout for luck; New Zealand's Kerry Fox as Oriel Lamb, sporting a broad Australian accent, and gritting her teeth in the face of what life has thrown at her, and Geoff Morrell as her husband, Lester, the man who never quite manages to please his wife in spite of supporting her, loving her and letting her find her own way through her problems over two long decades. 

Lara Robinson and Emma Booth play the older and younger Rose Pickles, both of them bringing an intensity and inner rage to their acting.  Todd Lasance and Callan McAuliffe play the quiet, sincere Quick, who more than once finds himself in a fantastic situation because of his slightly otherworldly brother.  Hugo Johnstone-Burt and Tom Russell play Fish Lamb: both are marvellous in their depiction of someone who has been oxygen-starved and brought back into a world from which he had died.  Johnstone-Burt in particular gets to grips with showing us the frustrations of a life lived only partly as it should be, alongside the joy of being a child in a man's garb and the belief that all things are possible: a talking pig, a dog rescued from the middle of nowhere in a 'boat' that's actually only a box and which is nowhere near water, being able to hear the sounds of the house and know its pain, plucking stars from the sky.  In this story, many strange things happen, and curiously, some of the more prosaic characters actually experience them or see the consequences of them.  It isn't just Fish Lamb who's attuned to a different world.  Winton's universe is one which requires us to realise that however 'natural' or 'scientific' this world may be, it often exposes itself as something much more mysterious. 

The production values in this series are top-notch: the photography captures the beauty of the world, and the strangeness of the house, and the people inhabiting it.  The cast are uniformly excellent, with not a weak performance in sight.  The world of the late forties and fifties are visible in every costume, prop and set.  In fact, so evocative was it, that I was continually reminded of my own childhood, not just because of the settings but because of the behaviour of the people.  Time and again I was reminded of the way my uncles and aunts and cousins behaved, the stance, the postures, the gritty faces, the expressions that came out of their mouths, the sounds that came out of their mouths, the perpetual cigarettes, that freedom of life we enjoyed in that time, when children could go off on their own for hours and no one would be troubled about where they were.  

This was a treat to watch.  

Writing about writing

It sometimes seems that writers like to take the joy out of writing and make it sound like an unbearably miserable process. As a writer I know the feeling of not having got the words right, and that no amount of rethinking, reshuffling, editing, adding, and re-punctuating will actually elicit what was in the mind originally. The same applies to writing music: the dream I have in my head of something that zips along with elan gets lost in the very difficult process of writing notes on a page.

Nevertheless, in spite of what gloomy writers tell you, writing (or composing) is one of the great joys of life; it can be so absorbing you lose all track of time, it can be interrupted again and again and still survive, and still come out at the end making some sense. It can be reworked (something that's difficult with conversation) and remade; it can be thrown out and rediscovered.

A writer who says there's no joy in writing is a fool. He or she has become so concerned about the difficulties and despairs that he/she has forgotten why writing is such an exciting process. And such a joyful one when things come right. (As they do.)

Anyway, all this by way of introduction to an interesting post by Ben Myers on the Faith and Theology blog. He presents 13 theses relating to writing. Make sure you get past the first particularly gloomy one. And if you have time check out the related posts at the bottom of this post; there's some good stuff there too, especially Flannery O'Connor's acid response.

Gilead - again

I'm reading Marilynne Robinson's Gilead again. I keep wanting to mark something on virtually every page; the book just seems full of quotable material. And it's not the clever laying out of words so much as wisdom. This is one of the few novels I've ever read that is wise.
Don't ask me how she does it; probably Robinson is no wiser a writer than many other great writers. But something in this book has brought out the wisdom in her, and it shows time and time again.
Probably quoting from it wouldn't work that well, because you need to have read what's gone before and to have felt the tone of the thing. The apparent meandering, conversational tone of the writing (an old man writing to his very young son) seems almost as if Robinson had sat down, from day to day, and just let the thing pour out. But I suspect it's far better constructed, and structured, than that. And the writing is frequently vivid. There's nothing 'casual' about the way this book is put together, even though on the surface that may seem to be the case.
I'm about half way through it again (I first read it in 2006, I think, when it was relatively new) and it moves me as much as it did the first time; maybe even more. I've just been reading it at a cafe and kept feeling emotional about one thing or another in it.
Perhaps it's the whole father/son thing that appeals to me particularly. Because of my own history I've always been a sucker for books that deal with that subject. Perhaps it's the fact that the main character is a good man; there are very few really good characters in fiction - or in life, if it comes to that. Perhaps it's the fact that in the last couple of months or so I've had more concerns about death and ill-health than I've needed to have in a long time. The main character in the book knows he's going to die fairly soon, which is why he's trying to lay out his life and history for his son. But he doesn't dwell on the dying; he's constantly talking about life, and creation, and joy and celebration and the extraordinary things that make up the day to day. Death comes into it, of course, but it isn't the focus.
As he says in a page (126 in my edition) I've just read again today:
I have not been writing to you for a day or two. I have passed some fairly difficult nights. Discomfort, a little trouble breathing. I have decided the two choices open to me are (1) to torment myself or (2) to trust the Lord. There is no earhtly solution to the problems that confront me. But I can add to my problems, as I believe I had done, by dwelling on them.
This speaks very strongly to me at the moment, when the discomfort I'm dealing with day to day tends either to get right in the way of things or be put to one side as something I will endure without great anxiety. Trusting in the Lord is an element of it, but not necessarily the easiest path to take.
Anyway, I'm sure I'll write more about this wonderful book as I go on.

Where's the Joy?

Slight variation on an old saying:

All play and no joy makes Jack a dull boy.

And not at all apropos of the above:

In recent months it’s struck me how much Christian music has lost its sense of joy. Listen to one of Radio Rhema’s various outlets and you’ll hear singer after singer injecting a kind of melancholy into their songs, even songs that have a perfectly good ‘uplift’ otherwise.
I spoke to a guy who was running a retreat I was at a couple of months ago: he didn’t seem to be hearing this melancholy, even though one of the songs he played was an oldie which was being sung as though it was a dirge.
And at the South Island Pastors’ Conference, I spoke to the guy who was doing most of the worship leading. He didn’t seem to be hearing this melancholy either, and kind of brushed off what I was saying.
However, my wife agrees with me, and if she hears it, then it’s definitely there.
It’s as if the singers have got it into their heads that God is only pleased when we come with a kind of apologetic tone. Gone are the days – it appears – when people sang with full hearts and lots of energy. Not it’s all ‘boo hoo, how sad am I’. A weird state of affairs for Christians, of all people.