Dead Tooth

Long story short - I've cracked a back tooth, not that there's much at all to see, it's died and I'm in the process of consulting with specialist dental surgeons to see if it can be saved or will need to come out. I'm finding the whole business rather frustrating and upsetting. So much for non-attachment!

After a meeting a work colleague asked me 'why are you so bothered about them taking a tooth out?' Well, I could answer in all sorts of ways about why anyone wouldn't want to loose a tooth and all that would be true. And I'm also aware that I've been particularly careful with my teeth and really want to get through to death at a reasonable age still with them in good condition. And now at 52 having spent most of my life looking young for my age (oh how that would make me uncomfortable in my youth) I now look middle aged. The tooth thing feeds into this and says MORTALITY! Even though anyone could crack a tooth at any age it feels like an age thing. Somehow the conversation got round to sex. (And of course this tooth issue feels like a loss of erotic capital...) I found myself discussing the different intentions behind sex and the places sex can come from, its relationship with where we're 'at' as individuals; head (mind / idea) sex, heart (emotional) sex, power dynamics in sex, awareness in sex, fetish, tantra, the nature of the little death of orgasm etc. etc... there were some confused looks... Driving to my next meeting after the above meeting I was struck by how glorious the day was. It was bright and after a period of intense cloud and gloom it felt alive and vital. Some music on the radio also felt alive and vital. The joint effect was to create in me a sense of the alive, creative natural desire to be which I feel to be at the very root of all there is; the void's fecundity, the erotic in its widest sense. And for a moment the feeling of the sun lit countryside, the music, the road passing beneath the car all seemed part of a continuum of erotic experience not so different from the sexual expression of the erotic. The prospect of loosing a tooth seems to say all this will collapse; it's back to the void, the bubbles dissipate, the dream passes... And with that arises a flicker of anxiety that as the dream passes perhaps there's only been very limited spiritual awakening, that the void barley saw anything and may even fail to glimpse its self.

Later in the evening I watched a YouTube video of an interview with one of DC's colleagues called Paul. The interview was in connection with Paul's work as a Jungian analyst looking at death and HIV. I was impressed (as I almost always am when listening to Paul) at the breadth and depth of his purview and subsequently it came to me in a txt exchange with Paul how death is at least as big as life and since life is potentially limitless and therefore unknowable in its extreme, death is unknowable not just because as Shakespeare's Hamlet asked 'what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil?' but because we don't fully know what it is that ceases at death's commencement. All of which brought me back to the erotic and the desire both to be and to return home to the Source or at least to know Source.

Last night DC and I went to see the movie 'The Two Popes'. We both enjoyed it and found it moving in parts. A line said by Anthony Hopkins as pope Benedict: 'I first sinned against God as a child when I hid away from his world and sought safety in books' struck a chord with me. Not that I hid in books but I knew the point; life seemed a dangerous and unpredictable affair. Peter Pan's comment that 'to die will be an awfully big adventure' is a reflection of a view of life as much as death. And whilst I dislike the word sin there is a wounding betrayal of the self  in not opening to life. Life and death are inseparable. And I couldn't but think as I watched parts of the movie, that even though I can see how it might be possible to experience the full vitality of the erotic (as perhaps glimpsed above) as a continuum between the obviously sexual and the non-sexual that it's few who might get to such a place.

And so I find my tooth seems to trigger the whole question of vitality.