Two of the most dreaded words in the English language are "root canal." They rank with "jury duty," "Pia Zadora," "IRS audit" and "tractor pull" in my two-word pantheon of tortures. (Send me your nominations).

I had my fifth root canal last week. I don't actually mind the procedure. If I could afford it, I'd run the table now and have every nerve from every tooth canal removed and sent in nano-cuffs to Guantanamo.

The English preacher John Donne (1572-1631), straining to explain to his urban London audience what hell must really be like, said to imagine a toothache that will be with you not only for the rest of your life, but for eternity.

On the two occasions when I have had a seriously abscessed tooth, before I got my hands on painkillers, I popped aspirin into my mouth, first two at a time, then four at a time, every hour and eventually every half hour, until my blood was the consistency of Tabasco sauce. If I had nicked my finger, I would have bled to death in less than half a minute. The cumulative effect of that many aspirin did little to quench the pain, but it made my head ring like London on V-E Day.

I can remember a toothache so excruciating that I literally had to put my whole head down on the surface of a desk. It didn't help at all, but I suppose it was some sort of primitive form of unconditional surrender.

My dental appointment last week started with a thorough teeth cleaning, my first in several years.

I've never known a dental hygienist I didn't like. They tend to be young. They are always spotlessly dressed in bright Easter-color smocks. They are often comely and they are always friendly. They must, by nature, be optimists - think how often they deliver the "floss or die" sermon with a cheerful straight face. They leap in and scrape and scour and scrub down your mouth as if they were prepping the house for their son's graduation party. All while chatting about the late spring.

One of the many humiliations of a dental visit is that you know your breath is bad - if only from the anxiety - even if you have over the last 24 hours flossed, gargled and multi-brushed in a cover-up as transparent as the Nixon White House. Then, once the hygienist starts plucking fossil food particles out of those back teeth, it's hard to differentiate the smell of shame from the odor of half-digested walleye. "Have you by chance recently eaten any veal cutlets?" she asks in her most agreeable voice. "Yes, two months ago," I confess like a serial killer, "on a cruise in Panama." Note to self: purchase floss immediately.

Once the hygienist has me flat on my back in the rare "head below the level of the feet" position, exposed belly-up like the most abject gamma dog of the pack, with a bib on my chest, a suction device thrust toward the back of my throat 1 millimeter from the gag nerve, a mirror and a sharp probe and about two thirds of her hand inside my mouth, it occurs to her to begin a conversation. "Is it your opinion," Mr. Jenkinson, "that Luther or Melanchthon best understood the particular grace of consubstantiation?" The minute the word "counter-reformation," accompanied by about an ounce of drool, spills out of my mouth, she gives me a patient but firm look that says, "Hey, I'm cleaning your teeth here!" So, without moving my head one iota, I try to pantomime the influence of Romans 6:14-15 on the Augsburg Confession.

But she has moved on to the lateral incisors. She never says, "Give me a thumbs-up if you think the Vikings have a shot this year." It's always, "What do you think Leibniz's influence was on the development of differential calculus?" I take the bait every time and wind up biting the dental probe in a way that produces the only genuine pain of the entire visit.

Eventually, I decide to regard these as purely rhetorical questions.

There is nothing painful about a root canal. The novocaines of our time are so good that I cannot remember the last time I really felt pain in a dental chair. The prick of the anesthetic needle doesn't really hurt, but there is of course that moment when the pain-meter starts to flutter, and you wonder what it would be like for that pain to increase at the same rate for, say, 30 seconds. Your mind flashes to the Lawrence Olivier film "Marathon Man" (1976), with its famous dental torture scene. "Tell me if you wish me to slow down," says my dentist, and through my novocaine coma, I think he pronounces it "vish."

I hate three things about a root canal. First, I cannot stand the sawing rasp of the little micro-files as the dentist clears out and slightly widens the canal. The files are teeny, but as the dentist bends his whole upper body into the project, it feels as if he is sawing your jaw into cordwood.

Second, abscess means infection, the expansion of which has transformed the enamel-sealed tooth into a kind of miniature pressure cooker. That's why it feels as if the top of your head is going to blow off, and why - at a certain point - you wouldn't really mind. The minute the dentist drills through the tooth, the pressure hisses out and the pain begins to ebb. All that is good. But the odor that is released by this operation is not the odor of bad breath. It is the smell of death. Dentistry reminds us in the most disturbing way that we are creatures who will die, and that some parts of us will die before the final light goes out.

But what I hate most about root canal is the arraignment. Eventually, the dentist extracts the offending nerve and holds it up for your inspection, as if he had just hauled in a marlin off the Mexican coast. It's the size of the vein on an undersized salad shrimp. That pathetic little quarter-inch-long filament, which is to linguini what linguini is to a lasagna noodle, is the sum total of what for 72 hours brought you to your knees, and made you feel like Job and curse the day you were born. As he displays it with all the pride of a big game hunter, it seems still to quiver and throb like Satan's tuning fork.

And you know that if hadn't numbed you up to within an inch of your life, the mere touching of that nerve with those tweezers would have blown you off that chair and into geosynchronous orbit and that you would never, ever have recovered from the pain.

As I walk toward the front desk with my credit cards splayed out like a poker hand, I hear the hygienist warming up her next patient: "Do you have a sense, Mr. Hoffman, of what Brahms was trying to get at in the Paganini Variations?"

(Clay Jenkinson is the Theodore Roosevelt scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Jenkinson at Jeffysage@aol.com.)