What do you think about tongues and teeth and saliva?
The answer is plenty.
I think plenty about them.
The other day I was walking down the street. I was listening to music feeling excited about myself. Then I noticed that my tongue was moving the whole time. Exploring my teeth, feeling around my gums, curling itself, always moving.
They say the tongue is the strongest muscle in the body. Proportionally, or something like that. It moves all the time, it never stops. Well, most of the time. And how strange tongues look. Even stranger, they are a whole complex of muscles in my head! Look!
Oh! The tongue! You wacky bastard. What is it that you do!?!?!
You like my teeth, you say?
I find that my tongue interacts with my teeth a lot. I'm very sensitive to the issue of teeth. I think about them.
Personally, I had a lot of dental incidents in my life. A cyst that caused me to lose some teeth, a fence that caused me to lose even more teeth. I spent a lot of time with dentists, orthodontists, and oral surgeons. Fuck that shit. It gave me a very strong sense of my teeth, what they should look like, what lengths we can go to to make them look a certain way, the money that can be spent on such a project!
I find it especially interesting because of a few historical anecdotes I know about teeth. Our sense of teeth, of course, is highly developed and historically situated. I think this is especially true in America. All this money on braces, retainers, dental work this and that.
We Americans, we love our straight ass teeth.
Interestingly, I heard once that during World War II one of the things that the Germans noticed about Americans was how incredibly straight and white our teeth were.
Love it. By which I mean hate it. Hate the way it gives us unreasonable expectations for our bodies, for our lives, for beauty and attraction.
For fuck's sake. Look at this celebrity:
Look at her fucking teeth. They are so white, so straight.
And you know what?
They are fake. Straight up. All of them. Veneers, son! VENEERS!
Or someone like Kanye West? Do you know about Kanye's teeth? If you don't, you best learn:
THEY ARE FUCKING DIAMONDS! HIS TEETH ARE DIAMONDS!
He literally had his bottom row of teeth replaced with diamonds.
Are you kidding me? Is this really what we want out of our world and our money?
Do you want a wet hole in your head to be filled with porcelain and diamonds?
Apparently we do here in America. The celebrities have spoken, and they want their mouths full of precious substances. To enhance their beauty. To brighten their appearance. To kill my soul.
Amazing. Amazing amazing amazing.
These are just holes filled with saliva, tongues, and teeth. And we spend so much time worrying about them. They are the point at which we use most of our language, where we feed ourselves, where we kiss people. We do so much with our mouths.
We want them to be beautiful.
There is something disturbing about mouths. They are on the cusp of abjection.
A famous example: Spit into a glass and try to drink it. You can't do it. It is disgusting.
Once saliva leaves your body it is no longer a part of you.
But right now my mouth feels good and full of saliva. In fact, it doesn't have enough saliva in it. I'm feeling a bit thirsty. I want my mouth to be wetter!
But once that saliva leaves my body it is no longer me. It is abject, caught in the space between subject and object.
Oh well. I don't want to give so much care to mouths. I still want to brush my teeth, and eat well, and all that. But I don't want to fret over the straightness or whiteness of my teeth. I don't want to worry about diamond bars or porcelain veneers.
I want to mock America's ridiculous oral culture. (lol play on phrase oral culture lol).
No comments:
Post a Comment