Painful Truths

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 Right off the bat, I’ve got to disagree with Scarry: in my experience (having never been tortured), pain doesn’t disconnect you from reality, but anchors you to it. For example, I tend to pick at my lips as a nervous habit, because even if they start bleeding and are always chapped, cracked, and as my ex once told me, “kinda unkissable” (fuck you, Lark), being able to feel something that’s really, physically there, even if it’s painful, helps ground me and get me ‘out of my own head.’

It's weird to think about how touch (specifically pain and, like Melzack proved, pleasure) is used in metaphors ‘both ways,’ so that mental experiences are phrased in terms of physical experiences (Glucklich mentions chewing, swallowing, and digesting ideas), while physical experiences like pain and pleasure are phrased in emotional or mental terms (tiring, punishing, torturing). Also interesting how pain metaphors consistently don’t refer to the actual sensation of, say, being shot, burnt, or gnawed at by rats, but rather the things people would associate with the sensation of being shot, burnt, or gnawed at by rats: for shooting specifically, “the temporal form of starting suddenly and ending abruptly, while being limited spatially to a small region.”

As someone who (unfortunately regularly and completely unintentionally, mind) has mild hallucinations and experiences varyingly sensory deprivation and sensory overload whenever I start overdosing on caffeine, this was pretty interesting: also pretty interesting how pain is subjectively experienced based on whether the pain is ‘necessary’ or ‘unnecessary,’ based on what one assumes to be the system which is being spared, but that’s something I don’t have experience with (fortunately or not, is the question).

Another weird song for this week: “Jesus Wept,” by Demon Hunter, a Christian metal band. Now I know what you’re thinking and yes, this is partially just an excuse to subject y’all to my shitty taste in music, but metal (and this song in particular) is a sort of sacred pain, if you think about it. Nobody listens to metal quietly: its appeal is, in part, playing it so loud you can wake the dead, give the folks on the International Space Station a migraine, and basically just fucking up your eardrums as badly as possible in order to really live the song, instead of 'merely' listening. In this case, the lyrics talk about their own brand of sacred pain, so it's a sort of suffering through words about suffering. Pretty fitting, no?



Comments

  1. Jonathan Brumberg-KrausApril 28, 2022 at 10:54 AM

    One of my my favorite "Jesus songs" is System of a Down's Chop Suey, so I think heavy metal sometimes strikes just the right chord, especially for sacred pain. And I totally agree with your disagreement with Scarry, as does Glucklich.

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  2. Liv GregoryMay 5, 2022 at 7:24 PM

    I absolutely agree with this point, and couldn't have said it better myself. I feel that this is often why people use methods of inflicting pain on themselves as sacrifices or tributes to gods, because our mortality and pain is a grounding experience unique to humans as opposed to gods.

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