CATEGORY 118 AUSTRALASIAN DENTIST REALITY BITES Jade Richardson Dragon Dental Fire-breathing, gold hording, fang-spangled, and moody, it takes a special kind of dentist to care for the last remaining Dragons on Earth. Once upon a time, the world was known to be inhabited by Monsters. There were edges to the navigable oceans, where explorers could be sucked into terrifying voids at the brink of a flat Earth, boiling with leviathan. Sea devils, sirens, great beasts full of spume and bother patrolled these limits, while their cousins on land defended hordes of stolen treasure, wild places, goddesses and holy lands with their inferno breathe, lashing tails, fangs of terror, and cravings for glittery things, gentle maidens and hapless knights as human kingdoms encroached and raided the last lairs of wilderness and mystery. Dragons burned forests, villages, kingdoms, wizards, peasants, kings and treasure thieves. Dragons had very big teeth. They feasted on questing knights, princesses and, in the inner realms of the human experience, they still bite, burn and menace us, according to brilliant late Neo Jungian Psychiatrist, Dr Robert Moore, who dedicated his life to understanding the perils and treasure of the inner life, and wrote brilliant books on male psychology including Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity, and The King Within. In his view, dragon symbolizes inner power, latent energy, the destructive impulse, and massive, instinctive forces of the psyche, which can burn us alive with anxiety, addiction, rage and depression, maul us with greed, vanity, grandiosity and fear – leaving the best of us; the feeling, loving, protective, energetic dignity of the human being in shreds, or possessed, by the ferocious power of the wild beast within. You know the feeling. You know the type. They’re good books. Careful, wise work which might only be coming of age now, in times when dragon stuff seems to be abroad, within and around our personal, professional, family, political, financial, ecological and global lives. Global warming is dragon mythology writ large. Forest fires, cities under siege, inflation, wealth redistribution, war, gender chaos, fearful prospects, anxiety, By Jade Richardson vast profits, sudden change, addiction, instinct, chaos, revenge and power are all dragon themes. As are wisdom, discipline, protection, success, self-knowledge, joy and authority. Dragons are king of animals, and close companions of the Goddess of Mercy, she who hears the cries of the world, and carries the nectar of goodness, and the willow of unbreakable strength, depicted over Centuries, riding like a dewdrop on a ripple upon the back of the most ferocious beast in all the world. In Asia, snaky dragons bare their jaws at the entrance to every shrine, temple, village, and even airports, police stations, government offices and households keep dragons in full view. Reminders of ancestral wisdom/ common sense about respect for primal forces, the need for a certain ferocity around kindness, and how fierce and fast should be the dread guardians of the good and true around and within us all. The goddess Kuan Yin is the polar opposite of anything dragon-like. Goddess of Mercy, she symbolizes total virtue in the inner life, and outer world, and tends to turn up softly, robed in pastels, reminding the world of gentleness, compassion and tenderness. Her spirit animal, best friend, and constant companion is the fiercesome Asiatic dragon. Her temples squirm and writhe with towering, creeping, snarling dragons, breathing fire and whipping athletically around every stairway, column, footstall, ceiling, doorstep and slippered foot, just itching for an excuse to defend their merciful goddess. At the beautiful, Kuan Yin Temple I visited on the remote hillside of tiny Ko Phangan Island in Thailand, seeking solace from the ‘real’ world, and increasing hordes of tantra vampires, soldiers, sex coaches and waxy yogis in the ‘surreal’ world, I was surprised to see the goddess outnumbered, out-sized and outwardly at peace with her horde of dragon companions: the very opposite of the demure vibes at the House of Mercy. The dragon dentist was there too. I found him dangling precariously from an 18-foot portable scaffold that had seen better days, gingerly tending the bared gums and thirsty jaws of a roaring golden monster that must have measured more than 30-foot, uncoiled. The dragon dentist was barefoot, football-shirted and covered in a slather of gold, hot pink, sweat, and serpentlime green paint which he was delicately applying, with a tender kind of clinical love, to the giant rearing up toward his ragged little dragon dentist rig.
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