When the symptom archetypal arrived, it was during an uncharacteristically temperate Chicago summertime much than a decennary ago. First arsenic a flimsy tingling successful my close jaw, hardly noticeable, which I could fundamentally disregard arsenic I walked past the red-bricked municipality homes of Hyde Park portion spending a summertime seminar astatine the University of Chicago. Only successful the greeting aft the archetypal time that I noticed this sensation successful my teeth which I couldn’t rather localize did the existent symptom commence. Awakened by the crushing, burning agony that present radiated on each 1 of my precocious and little lateral incisors, canines, and molars, it felt to maine arsenic if idiosyncratic had heated an robust rod and pierced the soma connected my cervix conscionable down my receptor and pushed it done my jaw until it burst retired done my close cheek.
That representation was 1 that’s travel to maine successful consequent years, but during the symptom itself, determination was nary imaginativeness oregon metaphor, lone the piercing, heightened, exemplary feeling itself which had expanded to obliterate each different concerns. For astir 36 sleepless hours, I slathered thick, viscous glops of Benzidine connected my teeth and gums, erroneously assuming that the root of the symptom was dental.
If I’d been a quality from Kevin Brockmeir’s caller The Illumination, wherein immoderate mysterious, supernatural displacement successful the beingness abruptly rendered everyone’s symptom disposable arsenic a benignant of agleam glow, past astatine this infinitesimal my caput would person been awash with blinding light. Without dental security my anguished caput didn’t conscionable assume, but accepted, that the symptom would beryllium never-ending, that is until connected the 2nd time I came retired of my exhausted and lingering half-sleep to find that astatine immoderate constituent adjacent the dawn the uninvited impermanent had simply left, astatine which point—lacking the connection to encompass what it had felt like—I mostly forgot the feeling. That is until it would return.
We grasp towards our meager and incomplete descriptions of ineffable pain, we inevitably autumn short, and yet similar thing our words inactive service us, adjacent if lone arsenic a half-measure.
“It is the aggravated symptom that destroys a person’s aforesaid and world,” writes philosopher Elaine Scarry successful The Body successful Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, “a demolition experienced spatially arsenic either the contraction of the beingness down to the contiguous vicinity of the assemblage oregon arsenic the assemblage swelling to capable the full universe,” or, paradoxically, sometimes both. Scarry’s publication remains the top theoretical attraction of the unintelligible acquisition of pain; not its carnal symptoms oregon its biologic etiology, but the existent subjective feeling, for she writes that symptom “does not simply defy connection but actively destroys it.”
That sentiment, I believe, is universal. Is your symptom burning oregon aching, throbbing oregon cutting, stabbing oregon radiating? Pain makes mediocre poets retired of each of us, arsenic we madly motion towards immoderate inadequate metaphors should service successful the infinitesimal successful an effort to convey severity to anyone who mightiness beryllium equipped to help. Just deliberation of the anemic Numerical Rating Scale for patients to fertile their symptom from 1-10, arsenic if the suffering were giving Rolling Stone magazine medium evaluations, oregon the Wong-Baker FACES Scale whereby the afflicted lucifer their agony to abstracted faces ranging from a beaming and unconcerned cartoon done to a grimacing and afflicted individual, with discrete iterations successful that large in-between from champion to worst. How tin 1 easy impressment upon others George Orwell’s reflection from Nineteen Eighty-Four that “nothing was truthful atrocious successful the satellite arsenic carnal pain” if you haven’t been to Room 101 yourself? Has anyone ever recovered that the representation of the small frowning antheral is ever commensurate with the feeling of an robust rod being jabbed done your head?
Such methods talk not to a nonaccomplishment of medicine, but alternatively the acold larger nonaccomplishment of language. So exemplary is the acquisition of pain, whether it beryllium the bubbling itch of a sunburn oregon the sick slick portion of a insubstantial cut, that the tools of statement people flounder erstwhile faced with the singularity of specified sensations. Nevertheless, arsenic Scarry argues, erstwhile symptom subsides, that it “begins to archer a story.” Halting, incomplete, and tentative though it whitethorn be, the realm of narrative—of making meaning—attempts its return.
My ain mode of remembering the Chicago pain, with that representation of my tender caput punctured by a metallic spear, has been molded implicit clip arsenic the impermanent itself would periodically return. This is the play of the “Element of Blank,” arsenic Emily Dickinson calls it, however successful symptom we “cannot recollect / When it begun—or if determination were / A clip erstwhile it was not.” Strangely it’s lone pain’s corollary and near-twin of ecstasy that’s likewise ineffable. What the 16th-century mystic and Spanish nun Teresa of Ávila described her excruciating theophany whereby an angel penetrated her psyche with a “long spear of gold… thrusting it astatine clip into my heart…to pierce my precise entrails,” truthful that she is connected occurrence with the emotion of God, the “pain was truthful great, that it made maine moan,” truthful that the enactment betwixt the abjection of symptom and the transcendence of orgasm are seemingly rather permeable. Ecstasy, however, is each excessively often fleeting, portion symptom prefers to enactment for a while.
Fallible animals though we are, incapable to ever comprehend that this excessively shall pass, we construe some misery and bliss arsenic eternal states. My adjacent gathering with my impermanent was portion surviving successful Washington DC, wherever I recovered an exigency dentist who seemed genuinely frightened to pass maine that the pain’s root was neither an impacted bony oregon a basal infection; aboriginal successful Pittsburgh the symptom spiked my humor unit to implicit 200 and I ended up calling an ambulance. At the exigency room, resisting morphine offers due to the fact that of my recovering alcoholic fearfulness of addiction, I yet relented to the opium reverie (successful lone aft the 2nd administering), a sensation which requires its ain poetics, whereby Mikhail Bulgakov, a doc himself, described symptom arsenic having vanished “without a hint arsenic though it had ne'er been.” I besides felt a lukewarm floating, and wondered if I had pissed myself, though successful specified a authorities I was incapable of thing arsenic mundane arsenic interest (though arsenic Bulgakov, an addict himself, would enactment successful Morphine, “Then comes pain, horror, darkness”). Pain comes successful galore varieties, sometimes disguised arsenic pleasure.
Various diagnoses person been proffered for my occasional jaw pain, with my GP yet concluding that I astir apt endure from a saltation of trigeminal neuralgia, a benignant of nervus condition, not dissimilar to migraine pain, that’s been nicknamed the “suicide disease.” Ironically it was different wellness exigency that gave maine an incomplete solution to these periodic but protracted incidences of pain, erstwhile a late-night vagal effect owed to dehydration and humor unit medicine triggered a seizure, and I was hospitalized for a week. During that time, I kicked java acold turkey, its ain unspeakable symptom for idiosyncratic that utilized to devour astir two-to-three pots of the achromatic worldly each day, truthful that (surprise of surprises!) I discovered that I nary longer had precocious humor pressure.
Consequently, the agelong periods of jaw symptom disappeared erstwhile I nary longer bathed my tense strategy successful caffeine (well, I inactive shotgun achromatic tea, but it’s not the same), but the trigeminal neuralgia didn’t disappear. Now, usually astatine slightest erstwhile a day, though sometimes more, if my humor unit spikes enough, I mightiness consciousness that aged acquainted robust rod being javelined done my little skull, a genuinely indescribable symptom that would beryllium unsurvivable if not for the information that—normally—I cognize that it’s duration volition lone beryllium for a minute. My little sojourns successful hell.
How fortunate past are we to person metaphor, incomplete though it is, to crook symptom into words, alternatively than transmuting our words into pain.
“Whereof 1 cannot speak,” the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote successful his Tractatus, “thereof 1 indispensable beryllium silent,” and though helium was making an statement astir the presumption of metaphysical claims, it’s applicable to the failures of statement erstwhile facing symptom arsenic well, though admittedly literal soundlessness is often not the result. Rather determination tin beryllium screaming and shrieking, gasping and gritting, the abstract poesy of pain, what Scarry describes arsenic an “immediate reversion to a authorities anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a quality being makes earlier connection is learned.” Maybe due to the fact that of this determination are precious fewer large literate works astir the topic. Virginia Woolf said of lit that it tin “express the thoughts of Hamlet and the calamity of Lear, [but it] has nary words for the shiver oregon the headache.”
Violence for sure; from The Iliad to Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried literature has explored that cosmopolitan taxable which by explanation requires symptom and gives a benignant of after-the-fact descriptive signifier to its results, but the existent subjectivity of the experience, the aloneness of the full thing, is approached obliquely. David Budbill, successful a 2017 poem from his postulation Tumbling toward the End, flits astir “When the symptom you’re successful // is truthful large you can’t deliberation astir oregon wage attraction to thing / but your ain pain,” and portion his is simply a bully poem, the taxable isn’t astir symptom truthful overmuch arsenic it is the occlusions of statement (which of people has to beryllium the case). We tin lone convey symptom by the shadows that it casts upon the wall.
Nonetheless, the charged value of literature, as opposed to the stick-figures of the Wong-Baker FACES Scale, is that if it cannot suture the chasm betwixt acquisition and description, that it tin astatine slightest motion crossed that chasm. Not having a uterus, I can’t ideate the symptom of endometriosis, yet Sally Rooney gives immoderate signifier to that unwellness successful Conversations with Friends; being unafflicted by lupus, I can’t rather visualize the acquisition of that disease, of an immune strategy successful rebellion, but successful Megan Cummins’s If the Body Allows It: Stories, there is an invitation to the world of however “joints were swollen,” erstwhile her cardinal quality Marie “woke feeling arsenic if her insides were swollen, too, acceptable to burst done her skin.” Fortunately I’ve ne'er been imprisoned by a deranged fan, had my ft severed from my breached limb with an axe and the coiled cauterized with a blowtorch, and yet I excessively wince successful fearfulness erstwhile speechmaking Stephen King’s statement successful Misery of the “blade squeal against bone” arsenic his captor wrenches the axe free.
While successful pain, we instrumentality to an animality; possibly much accurately we go specified materiality—we alteration simply into stuff. We are nutrient that “must devour and respire aerial and sleep,” arsenic Polish writer Wisława Szymborska writes, we are creatures with “think tegument and humor close underneath, / an capable banal of teeth and nails, / its bones are breakable, its joints are stretchable.” To beryllium tortured, whether by a situation defender oregon our ain bodies, is to beryllium successful that null-point of existence, whereby we each go Job scraping boils from his cankered soma with broken, filthy pottery shards.
When it comes to descriptions of symptom and sickness, Susan Sontag infamously implored successful her effort “Illness arsenic a Metaphor” that “We are not being invaded. The assemblage is not a battlefield. The sick are neither unavoidable casualties nor the enemy,” and portion her constituent astir the risks of rhetoric is good taken, determination is besides a necessity to our metaphors, fragmentary though they whitethorn be. We grasp towards our meager and incomplete descriptions of ineffable pain, we inevitably autumn short, and yet similar thing our words inactive service us, adjacent if lone arsenic a half-measure.
Before the incommensurability of our ain connection and pain, we indispensable astatine slightest beryllium thankful that we’re not arsenic the condemned from Franz Kafka’s communicative “In the Penal Colony,” whereby the punished are strapped into a instrumentality of alloy needles and harrows which portion into the flesh, rendering successful tegument and humor the words which picture the information of the punished, truthful that what’s hard to construe with the mind, tin present beryllium “deciphered with his wounds.”
How fortunate past are we to person metaphor, incomplete though it is, to crook symptom into words, alternatively than transmuting our words into pain. Our hopeless and indispensable effort astatine formulating an look of a chapped, crinkled, and poorly chopped cuticle’s sour ache, of the ripping of a calcite nodule crossed the tendons of the knee, oregon the blooming, radiating, electrical daze of trigeminal neuralgia. The poesy of symptom is simply a failure, yet it’s poesy regardless.
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