EXTRACTION

I hate moving.

Dr. Ludgero Gomez was a big man. He had been a mountain trooper in the Army and did not look like a man who was often insulted. He was a delightful person with many virtues but what impressed me most about him, and what lodges in my memory, was how much brute force he applied as he bent over me with a pair of pliers in my mouth.

Dr. Gomez was extracting two wisdom teeth. It was not an elegant or subtle operation. It required a basic gripping tool, an artist’s deft experience, and muscle. In simple terms, Ludgero was pulling out a pair of four-rooted bone processes firmly grown into my jawbone. The mandible is a formidable hunk of material. He was muscling against living bone, tightly clinging tissue, and ripping out perfectly fine wiring in the case of multiple nerve fibers connecting teeth that had expected to stay in place and bite things.

It was a struggle. Dr. Gomez and dental science won. The aftermath was grisly, painful, disorienting, bloody and unpleasant for me and everyone around me. The only person who dealt with it well was my mentor, Dr. Matt Finn. I walked unsteadily from the Gomez Dental Office down the Main Street of Wareham, and stepped from Town Dock onto Matt’s Tartan 36 for a sailing cruise out to the Vineyard and Nantucket. Matt handed me a very naval tot of rum. “It’s an old anaesthetic but it still works,” he said. I told him I was already taking some opiate pain killer. “You bet,” he said, “get that rum down, now.”

Logically, we don’t expect to retain our wisdom teeth past a given age. But your jaw doesn’t know that. It needs opiates and rum to realign its reality.

Logically, we don’t expect to live in the same place for the balance of our lives. But your emotions don’t know that. Your indwelling, heedless heart’s logic balks at the insane ripping out of perfectly good wiring and the foolhardy destruction of comfortable navigation ordinals: this is where my jacket hangs, here is my spoon, there is my favorite chair, I look out this window to Mt. Burdell’s golden slope. all is well.

You only think you’re a logical being. In your picayune life you make decisions based on what you want to happen, on self-interest, on ethical principles, on goals. Yet in retrospect your life is most likely a surprising series of mistaken premises that you can now see were often self-destructive. “Why did I sign up for that?” or “What was I doing with that dame?” Your emotional life isn’t practically accessible but hidden behind camouflage all of us are childishly willing to accept.

“Yes, but I’m older and wiser, now. I’ve got my ducks in a row and I’m on top of the game.” Good luck with that. Your ducks are sniggering at you, and you’re once again convincing yourself that will and sense will overawe deep needs. We do our best, which is all we can do, but the real truth is that we aren’t completely in control of that world of feelings and hurt and wishes beneath the concrete pavement of our street life. What changed the twentieth century as much as electricity was the revelation that the unconscious – the hidden awareness beneath conscious thought – not only exists but exerts more powerful leverage than daily decisions.

I’m reminded of marine architects designing sea vessels, strong and powerful, proof against anything. Once offshore, logical engineering and strength of materials are subjected to primally limitless forces, stresses and loads no one can foresee. In the early 60’s a Royal Navy cruiser more than 600 feet on deck plunged into one of the freak troughs the Agulhaus Current produces and went down. To the bottom. All hands lost. The ship was a marvel of modern engineering and enlightened understanding. To the bottom. Is your life as well engineered as a Royal Navy cruiser? Perhaps yours is; mine isn’t. Facing the brute forces of Life, I can expect to be battered even when my ducks seem lined up in Prussian precision.

My point is that moving is emotionally dangerous and shouldn’t be lightly regarded by you or by your friends. “You’re going to love the new place!” one says, certain that your discomfort is mostly indulgence in illogical thinking. Heartily patronizing, friends tell you that moving is healthy and you shouldn’t sweat it. Why worry about it? Look on the bright side! You’re getting yourself in a lather over nothing!

Anglo-Saxon epithets don’t have the punch they had before HBO and can’t really address this kind of puffed-up posturing. Thinly disguised behind a friend’s “assurance” is the self- aggrandizing pity: “Poor Adkins. He believes in faeries and UFOs and global warming. Of course a person of such weak mind will crack under the mild stress of simply moving.”

Recollect the lares. For the Romans these were household gods. (The singular is lar.) They differed from the great gods in that their influence was localized, operating only with a given household. Each family home had its own chosen lares. Beyond the home, there were local lares for glens and brooks and waterfalls, shops, bridges, and streets. These were short-range deities but powerful, and they were intensely important to the families or the artisans that acknowledged them. Later lares were the Scottish brownies and the Anglo-Saxon elves, localized spirits caring for homes and inhabitants.

Strange territory for a science reporter but lately I’ve been confronting the idea that principles of the heart and feelings are not incompatible with scientific principles. Do I believe in brownies? I do not. But I believe that they may be a cipher for important emotions and ideas about home and hearth and the holiness of places. Any scientist who has sat in a redwood grove for more than a few minutes will admit to a feeling beyond simple observation.

It’s possible that we disturb the household gods at our peril. They don’t have the power to curse us but they are avatars of ideas important in our human development – this is a significant place, a home, a small place of safety and calm my heart knows well.

I’m moving. I would do so gently and without Ludgero Gomez’s massive strength of demolition. My heart is sore and my emotions are flighty. I am probably the Wimp of the World, and yet I believe that moving one’s heart is perilous and painful.

BRAXINOSO SPEAKS           

You would not credit the mumbling, rapid breathing, lower tract distress and angst Himself has invested in this cross-continental endeavour. Even I, as the voice of reason within the home, caution him to pay attention to these intense feelings and not to throw himself too rashly at the game. Beyond the emotions raised like dust around the moving, both of us look forward to being part of a sweet family with boys and the new little girl. I’ll have new challenges to meet with those little Adkins/Burger larvae. Both of us are excited. Half way across the Great Southwestern Desert, we may begin to rejoice.