The Father of Teeth

Text for today: II Canines clxxxvii-cciv

Why something rather than nothing, you ask, said the Father of Teeth unasked; well, it depends what you mean by something, of course, since what counts as something for some may be something closer to nothing for somebody else. The Creator of the universe is everlasting and eternal, so this whole unfortunate business of time and space and their associated misunderstandings barely registers on His attention. To be sure, He was amused enough when He first churned it all out, and for some while afterwards He even poked around a little and made a few minor adjustments, such as killing off all the trilobites. If you ask me, said the Father of Teeth unasked, I can't say I thought much of that particular improvement. But one of the many considerations that count for very little when you're outside time and space is whether any given sequel is up to the standard of its predecessor.

Of course, none of that helps much when time and space are pressing on you. I once had occasion, don't ask me how, said the Father of Teeth unasked, to dispense spiritual comfort to a self-proclaimed devotee of the Creator who was wavering in his faith. At the time, this favourite's bowels were being drawn out in a rather leisurely fashion by means of a device consisting of sharp metal hooks and squeaky cogwheels, and the squeaking was truly dystopian and set on edge my most cosily coated molars; I could have sworn I felt the plaque going crack. The people in charge of drawing out the bowels regarded almost all machinery as conducive to sloth and sinful worldliness, so that even their instruments of torture were considered infernal devices and kept only just functional and not in the best repair; and in the preliminary stages of persuasion the bowels had to be secured by hand with the most complicated ritual knots before anyone was allowed even to consider turning that squeaky labour-saving crank.

Anyway, said the Father of Teeth, I approached the needy disembowellee in a vision and reminded him that, from the perspective of eternity, his sufferings were really not all that significant, and that the Creator of the universe doubtless had other things on His mind, and that even from a temporal perspective the drawing out of a given individual's bowels, no matter how leisurely, must give way relatively soon to a condition in which pain and bowels were transcended, or at least irrelevant, and that there were many other people in the world whose bowels were not being drawn out at all, and wasn't that something? Sir, he replied, it is a most inefficient consolation, and if you ask me, said the Father of Teeth unasked, he did have a point. But then again, from outside space and time it's possible to see an end even to inefficiency, though not necessarily with a consoling sequel to follow.