Painful Truths

By -

 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.

    ReplyDelete
  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.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The most primitive sense

By -
Image
Smell the Flowers by Kirsten Star Smell, to me, is the most primitive sense. When most mammals are born, they immediately can recognize their mother’s smell and form an attachment to that smell. Mammals like puppies are almost entirely limited to only the sense of smell until they develop more of their other senses. The sense of smell also becomes the most primitive when considering humans and the phenomenon of perfume. For years, humans hunted certain animals for the purpose of obtaining the musk produced in the anal gland. This musk in small doses can act as an aphrodisiac when put into a perfume even though it has incredibly primitive origins. Though most of Western culture has an aversion to smells considered gross or undesirable, the wealthiest of women are still willing to pay heavy prices to spray a smell once obtained from the anal glands of other animals. The sense of smell is not something that humans can control and adjust but rather it is only changed by evolution over
Read more

Cannibalism and Symbolism

By -
Symbolism plays an important role in religious ceremonies because people cannot have the divine being where they want him all the time. So they start creating ways to be in touch with God. Such as in Christianity, eating bread is symbolized to be eating God-made flesh. There are similar rituals in Judaism where they eat the food of God. A big difference between taste and the other senses is that the object that is being sensed is internalized, whereas all the other senses use an external sensation. Taste cannot extend anywhere like the other senses can. This allows the humans to have no barrier between the divine (symbolized as food) and themselves. This is the closest they can get to God, but internalizing Him.  This thought of getting the closest they can to someone by ingesting and gaining power from it led my mind to wander to the thought of serial killers that also happen to be cannibals. I know that it might be a stretch, but there are some similarities. I als
Read more

Wrap-Up Post

By -
Image
Alright, let’s tie this up in a nice little bow. I genuinely did not know what to expect coming into this class. The extent of my knowledge of the senses comes from elementary school when we had to make it a little song to get the information through our tiny heads. Beyond that, everything seemed pretty cut and dry. We have five senses. We need to use all of them to survive. It’s as simple as that. I did not know how there was enough to talk about the senses to fill an entire college course, especially one specifically regarding the relationship between the senses and religion. But the fact that we were barely able to fit all the content in before the semester ended proves just how wrong I was. Let’s talk about why that is and what some of the things I learned were. First off, even the most basic assumption about the senses, that there are five of them, was questioned immediately. The sixth sense may not have been as clearly defined as the other senses, but there was certainly a lot to
Read more