painfully aware
pain is phenomenally subjective. even in our own solipsism we can barely differentiate it ourselves. a doctor asks is it a shooting pain a throbbing pain a stabbing pain is it sore is it sharp. how to iterate which exactly it is unless all have been felt all have been understood all have been identified past the point of knowing that it just hurts. “pain doesn’t destroy language: it changes it”. it expands our understanding of language through the inability of language to expand on the pain.
unable to unwilling to describe to a professional sometimes we regurgitate words and experiences into search engines into forums waiting hoping that even one other person might recognize the words might use the same words might know the feeling. but is their tingling yours.
after working with phantom limb pain in the 1950s, Dr. Roland Melzack began a collection of 'pain words' which led to the creation of the McGill Pain Questionnaire. piecing together adjectives of rhythm movement feel pressure type; pulsing jumping boring crushing spreading. pain develops character, it becomes annoying miserable intense. pain develops a motive; punishing. pain becomes cruel or vicious. pain becomes fearful frightful terrifying.
collage by marina manoukian
more often than not it just hurts a feeling only communicable by your inability to communicate anything else. a refraction of an orgasm, equally tucked away. during there is little-to-no memory of what came before no conception of what might come after. the present is never so present as through pain a continual reminder of a body the body your body. “But why do we say: "I can't imagine the opposite"? Why not: "I can't imagine the thing itself"?” it feels like it’s not supposed to feel but what did it feel like when nothing was felt.
like when hiccups disappear and every breath comes with the lingering anticipation of disruption.
the medieval polymath Ibn Sina called pain relief ‘taskeen of pain’ which literally means ‘making pain quiet. now we seek to kill pain in the belief that silence isn’t enough, leaving us wondering how to kill the silence.
some studies claim that “simply viewing the body reduces the reported intensity of acute physical pain”, concrete identification serving as justification for our own comprehension. visual information flows to the brain just as sensory so it serves to reason that the more information we give ourselves the more we thin the focus of our understanding. “pain that gets performed is still pain.” the performance of the wound becomes less about the wound than the audience but one cannot exist without the other. pain requires a body to feel it to externalize it. we actualize our pain just as often as we sterilize it.
but how does one manifest the fear of the manifestable. the fear of pain hurts more with its temporal indeterminacy rising above and flooding below every instant any memory any possibility with the reminder of what might. pain leaves behind a shade of itself, a memory that pervades membranes, nothing felt in the nerves and yet every motion begins with a brace finding the future before it comes. pain distracts while the fear of pain inhibits and both serve in the destruction of the self, rendering it a component rather than exponent.
the denial of pain as well as the denial of its fear becomes a badge of honor, an ability to disambiguate oneself into a force of strength, a bastardization of the nietzschean ‘that which does not kill me, makes me stronger’, reflective of endurance rather than expansion, an ability to acknowledge but unwilling to confront.
how to move beyond not only the abstraction of pain but the esotericism of fear. neither imaginary nor real yet wholly authentic. despite our ever increasing vocabulary we still contort pain into a singular mass an obstacle to move past rather than information to incorporate. we fear the anomaly of not feeling like ourselves when that pain as well as that fear is only ever ourselves.
the belief that you’re supposed to feel nothing. it’s often not so much the fear of pain but the fear of feeling. it’s not the pain you want to stop but the awareness of feeling a part of you that you didn’t feel before. there is too much of a connection to the body when there’s pain. we say too much because often there is the desire to deny our most fundamental existence in favor of that which we have the illusion of control.
it seems simpler to let one or the other triumph. an all or nothing contest between mind and body. one conquers the other ignoring that neither may suffice without the other. why seek to establish a hierarchy when coexistence necessitates existence.
how to manufacture a learned balance that acknowledges fear acknowledges the grotesque acknowledges the body without letting it overwhelm recognition overwhelm the restrained overwhelm the mind. perhaps the scariest thing of all is the requisition of control of ability but how can it be a requisition when there was none to be had in the first place.
Further Play:
The Undying by Anne Boyer
Kore by Andrzej Szczeklik and translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Notes Made While Falling by Jenn Ashworth
Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain By Leslie Jamison
Moving Beyond Pain by bell hooks
marina manoukian is a reader and writer and collage artist. she currently resides in berlin while she studies and works. she likes honey and she loves bees. you can find more of her words and images at marinamanoukian.com or twitter/instagram at @crimeiscommon.