Smells and Bells

                 I tend to be awkward with touch, because I don’t want to risk making anyone else uncomfortable, and I was even more so as a little girl. Especially at elementary school age, certain rituals of touch are necessary to preserve friendships: if such things as hugs, cuddles, hair braiding, the physical exchange of friendship bracelets, or painting others’ nails don’t come naturally to you, you will be at risk of failing a good many social interactions.    Some friends are touchier than others, which likely starts in the home somewhat. Certain cultures are known for being more touchy and physically affectionate, and It’s usually parents that are the first people to be with us in painful situations to teach us how to react and how afraid to be. It would make sense that my mother and I were able to have a conversation agreeing completely about how much it peeves us when someone is talking to us and gives us a little li...

  Pain and Suffering;  Why We Celebrate the Hurt and the Martyred One thing I find incredibly interesting about religion is the pain we so heavily associate with it. So many religious figures seem to have to have encountered some sort of pain to “deserve” their position as an “important” figure. I think one significant, particularly universal example is Christ, especially with Easter occurring so recently. For some reason pain appears to be a necessary, however, I don’t understand this. Why must one suffer to deserve something and would we feel these figures less deserving if they hadn’t suffered?  “A successful explanation of sacred pain needs to account for this phenomenon,  that is, the experiential contours of pain and how these contribute to the pervasiveness of voluntary pain in the religions of the world,” - Glucklich, 391 We celebrate and romanticize the pain that our figures experience and we look at how they experience pain for us. I guess for me it is a qu...

 Narcissus & His Lack of Touch By Ava Barry Last year I was offered the opportunity to study abroad in Athens Greece for a semester. And you know us study abroad kids will take any chance to tell talk about it, so here is me doing just that! During this experience, I was able to learn about stories I never would have known being a sociology major. Greek mythology rings true in our everyday lives, and we can heed many lessons from them if we listen close enough.  When learning the unit on touch, my mind was drawn back to those days sitting in the warm Athen's air listening to my professor tell us of the story of Narcissus. I will spare you the details if the story and give just the important points. Narcissus was a beautiful young man, yet throughout his life he was never allowed to look at himself, and therefore did not know his true reflection. One day he stumbled upon a puddle and was completely enthralled with the reflection in it. He fell madly in love. He was driven c...

One interesting discussion that Glucklich brings up in his article, “Sacred Pain and the Phenomenal Self” is about language’s (specifically English) insufficiency in communicating descriptions of types of pain to another person. This interested me because I tried to think about the times that I had tried to describe a painful sensation that I was experiencing where I felt that the language I used adequately and accurately represented what I was feeling. Most often, it is usually a metaphor that is used to best describe a painful sensation. Glucklich refers to Ronald Melzack’s questionnaire that offers a number of specific descriptors that patients can use to communicate the sensation that they are experiencing. Many of the descriptors, such as piercing, gnawing, drilling, or burning are metaphorical. What the individual is experiencing is like these things, but it’s obviously not actually what is happening. Glucklich makes an interesting commentary about how these things are approxima...

My mom did not see things way, and she saw pain in a very permanent way, like if I was hurt physically for 2 seconds I would be hurt forever. A very dramatic viewing of things. She kind of feels that way about emotional pain too- but something that really struck out to me is the extreme difference she saw in physical vs emotional pain. She only really validated physical pain, emotional pain could never possibly be as intense. I enjoy the way Glucklich said it- they could be equally as gruesome. I have never had physical pain as pressing as emotional ones, the metaphors created from this idea make the most sense to me. Emotional pain, especially for women, is so stigmatized- like if you cry you're just sensitive, and your outburst makes you violent or crazy. No attention is paid to the hurt behind the tears or the anger. Men have the other end of this stick where they are denied the freedom to feel emotional pain outwardly.  Phantom- limb pain is something that I heard about a lot f...

  When I think of touch as a sense, pain is often not what comes to mind. Pain has such a negative correlation in my mind and the mind of most people in western cultures, and the senses to me are positive and powerful features that allow you to connect with the world around you. Glucklich makes the connection of sports to pain. Many sports to this day are about how long one can endure pain in some form, and this has become completely normalized. What even is the end goal of boxing? Two people just beat eachother up until one of them gives in to exhaustion and we encourage and idolize those who can make it to the end without getting knocked out. In many cases, athletes are cheered on when they injure themselves and continue to play with their injury, seeing them as true devoted athletes who just love their sport. Why does one's ability to endure pain make them “strong” and “devoted”? Why seek out pain and torture? Glucklich talks quite a lot about how many religious cultures have co...

When I was seven years old, I nearly bit off part of my tongue. Since this is not a terribly common experience, allow me to set the scene (don’t worry, I won’t get too descriptive): There is a little girl sitting in the back of her mother’s car. They are driving home from a dentist appointment. It was a cavity filling, her first one, and it’s the first time she has been given Novocain. Being naturally anxious, the little girl has many tics that she does to try to keep herself comfortable. One of these is biting her tongue. Unfortunately, with the Novocain, she can’t feel when she’s biting down too hard.  The boy next to her – a kid who her mother often babysits – says “Miss Jen, Jordyn’s mouth is bleeding.” Initially, her mother brushes it off, but the boy informs her “It’s bleeding a lot.” So she has the little girl open her mouth and looks in the rear view mirror to examine the damage. There is a rough slice through part of her tongue. When they get home, she jams a rag in her da...

  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 gna...