The Undying

by Anne Boyer

  2. Pain is an ugly gathering of adjectives.

  3. Any word for pain is always in a language we cannot yet understand.

  A widely held notion about pain seems to be that it “destroys language.”1 But pain doesn’t destroy language: it changes it. What is difficult is not impossible. That English lacks an adequate lexicon for all that hurts doesn’t mean it always will, just that the poets and marketplaces that have invented our dictionaries have not—when it comes to suffering—done the necessary work.

  Suppose for a moment the claims about pain’s ineffability are historically specific and ideological, that pain is widely declared inarticulate for the reason that we are not supposed to share a language for how we really feel.

  An example of this assertion about the ineffability of pain is found in Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, in which she describes pain as “the most private and least communicable” of all experience. She goes on to write that pain is “the true borderline experience between life as ‘being among men’ … and death,” claiming that its subjectivity is so intense that pain has no appearance. Contrast this philosophical truism about pain’s lack of communicability with your own experience of witnessing another living creature in pain. The howls, cries, screams, shrieks, and whimpers of another in pain are unequivocal. The words “that hurts!” or “I am in pain” or “that burns” or “this aches,” and various exclamations like “ow!” and “ouch!” and “motherfucker!” are also generally undeniable communications of pain. A dog or cat in pain is equally communicative. The look of a face in pain—even a nonhuman face—cannot be mistaken for a look of contentment. Winces, agonized expressions, leaking tears, and gnashed teeth are so communicative, for example, that “a pained expression” is a common turn of phrase.

  The drive to stop the pain of others because pain is so loud, so vividly expressed, often takes the form of wanting to do anything at all to end the pain of another precisely because of the way that this pain inflicts the experience of an impossible-to-bear sympathetic discomfort—sometimes in the form of annoyance, sometimes in the form of anxiety, sometimes in the form of pity—upon one’s self. This drive to end the immediate pain of another creature in one’s own proximity is so strong that it can sometimes compel the witness to pain to inflict greater pain upon the sufferer, as when adults threaten to give children “something to cry about” in order to make them quiet. Pain is so communicative, in fact, that the source of much violence could well be found in reaction to pain’s hyperexpressivity. It is the clearness of pain that gives sadists their reward. If pain were silent and hidden, there would be no incentive for its infliction. Pain, indeed, is a condition that creates excessive appearance. Pain is a fluorescent feeling.

  That pain is incommunicable is a lie in the face of the near-constant, trans-species, and universal communicability of pain. So the question, finally, is not whether pain has a voice or appearance: the question is whether those people who insist that it does not are interested in what pain has to say, and whose bodies are doing the talking. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed that “commiseration must be so much the more energetic, the more intimately the animal” part of human nature, theorized that a lack of response to those in pain is a characteristic unique to philosophers. “It is philosophy,” he writes in A Discourse Upon the Origin and the Foundation of Equality, “that destroys [a person’s] communications with other men; it is in consequence of her dictates that he mutters to himself at the sight of another in distress, ‘You may perish for aught I care, nothing can hurt me.’ Nothing less than those evils, which threaten the whole species, can disturb the calm sleep of the philosopher.”

  On the Internet, pain is a series of bulletin board posts about hermeneutics and time.

  Julian Teppe began his pain-positive Dolorist movement with his 1935 Apologie pour l’anormal, or “Dolorist Manifesto.” Teppe argues against the tyranny of the healthy, and makes an argument for pain as an education, liberating a person from materiality and providing an opportunity for clarity. “I consider extreme anguish,” wrote Teppe, “particularly that of somatic origin, as the perfect incitement for developing pure idealism.”2

  Sometimes to make a hero of one’s pain is pain’s only course, but even so, pain’s education should be in more than in pain’s valorization.

  I imagined a body-tourism or soma-exchange support system in which a person could temporarily inhabit the sensorium of a person in pain. On a scale of 1 to 10 you could feel

    1. the delicate raw and anxious pain of fingernails and toenails lifting away from their beds

    2. the dense agonizing pain of bones expanding as they fill up with artificially stimulated blood cells

    3. the pillowy congested pain of the inflamed body in contact with the mattress

    4. the heavy exhausted pain of the clothes that hang on the pathologically sensate body

    5. the inside-out surprise pain of needles puncturing arms, chest, fatty thigh, outside hand, inside wrist, also of IVs

    6. the searing spreading pain of painful drugs dispersing

    7. the alien to-do-list pain of subdermally implanted devices against the muscle and skin

    8. or the zapping electrical apocalypse of dying-nerve-ending pain

    9. or the raw openness of mouth-sores pain; the patient, etiologically blank-faced hurting pain of poison-swollen ligaments, teeth, tendons, joints, and muscles; the corrosive pain of drug-induced cellular suicide; the expansive aching itching pain of dying hair follicles, etc. etc. etc.

  10. the panicking inadequacies of all genres, a new crisis of transmission—

  To invite you to my body in pain might have been more like an invitation to a seminar in dimensional shift. In pain, the spatial becomes temporal, as in pain is the experience of a location that exists only as desperation for its end.

  It was easy to get caught up in seeing the world as a scheme to discipline the senses and the feelings and thoughts brought around by them, to think the world is a boiling pot, kept down only by a great lie’s lid, to hope, too, that the answer is to learn to feel differently, sense otherwise, think in a new way, and the lid will pop off, the water of truth overrun its container of ideology: oh there, I guess, like we could critique ourselves free.

  But I believed in the dirt, having never put my hands in the ether: blood up, not stars down, also limbic materialism, lacrimonial feminism, violence as the negative education of the senses, herds, the arrangement of the earth its materials and substances environments and objects, what is ours and how to get it, transmutation—seepage, anti-enlightenment enlightenmentarians, under-histories, reading wrong, everything that is but that is barely perceptible as such, black dresses on broomsticks, violability, literature as it allows for maximum epistemological possibility …

  We can’t think ourselves free, but that’s no reason not to get an education.

  I wanted to make a clinic fable, and then to make it monumental, as if a lesson in having a body could be installed on a government lawn.

  First there’s the needle everyone knows hurts, but everyone in charge says doesn’t. Then there’s the needle everyone knows can’t hurt, but someone who has been through some stuff still feels.

  the first needle:

  People in chemotherapy are often prescribed anesthetic cream to apply over their chemotherapy ports. The numbing cream is intended to make the insertion of the large needle into a patient’s chest bearable. Perhaps the numbing cream insures that the insertion hurts less, but the insertion still hurts. “It hurts,” I’d tell the nurses when they would always tell me otherwise, they who have put their faith in a cream. “It really does,” I’d say. “You put a large needle into my chest,” I’d remind them as they would tell me the needle was painless (or “a pressure”) while my body reacted visibly with pain. The chemotherapy room in which I began treatment was open: all the sick and all who attended to them could stare at each other with the sick becoming s
icker and therefore, in the perverse logic of cancer treatment, better. “You’re right,” said a fellow patient, a woman, watching. “It really does hurt,” said a man surrounded by his adult children, all of us in the infusion room then all joining together to say what appears to hurt actually does hurt so that no one would ever again say while they were hurting us that what really hurt us—hurt all of us—never did.

  the second needle:

  I tried to believe in science, but I could still feel the pain. I closed my eyes, asked the nurse not to tell me when, but each time the skin over my chest was punctured by the needle, my body startled and I yelped. Tissue-expander breast reconstruction is widely regarded as very painful, the kind of process that requires you to sign consent forms for your future opiate addiction. But the known pain of breast reconstruction is a long, tedious pain, felt less at the clinic than outside of it a day or two after each expansion procedure intended to stretch muscle and skin. The particular pain I was feeling, the one of the needle going into the subdermal metal ports of the hard plastic expanders that had been surgically implanted after my double mastectomy under my splayed-open pectoral muscles, was an immediate kind that was supposed to be impossible. The nerves in my chest had been cut during the mastectomy: the ones near my skin should have been dead, were dead, the doctors told me, in 99 percent of everyone else. The doctors and other workers in the office believed my pain because they could see it, having me close my eyes to test it, trying to trick me about the puncture of each needle. No one could explain it, having never seen an impossible and unscientific pain like it before. Medical students came in to watch my expanders being filled, watched an impossible pain (my impossible pain) in action, to see my pain for themselves. The pain I felt in my chest each weekly session was a clever ghost, I guess, a phantom sensation with a memory so thorough that it could react to unfelt infliction with total precision in matters of space and time.

  Every amputation is subject to the same ghostly way of living ever after, the potential feeling of the nevermore of the phantom “I miss.” My lost body parts were invisible sites of sympathy with the visible world. Acts of violence, representations of acts of violence, a wince, or a hurt look on someone else’s face created the mirror sensation in the parts of me that no longer existed. In what wasn’t anymore, I felt anyone else’s. A comic pratfall could do it, filmic shoot-outs, a student with disgruntled feelings, a person complaining on Twitter, an exhausted worker, someone stubbing her toes, news of ISIS, news of drones, news of the police.3

  My version of being a thinker then was although my right arm hurt and I didn’t know why, my chest hurt and I did. My pain had its reasons when I was sick; that is, pain was my body being reasonable. I’d been cut into, poisoned, harvested, amputated, implanted, punctured, weakened, and severely infected, often all at once. And for this reason of the reasonableness of my pain, I knew I should distinguish my life in pain from the pain life of the tortured. But torture has its reasons, too, like the existence of the metaphor “the body politic” and the perniciousness of that figure when it has extracting information as its cure. Torturers always claim that torture itself is reasonable, torturing out security or freedom or god or righteousness or other suspicious rhetorics, but I can’t imagine that when torturers mean something by inflicting pain it reduces the feeling in the tortured of being maximally hurt. A cancer patient can tell herself why what is done to her must be done, but this does not often fix the feeling that she has been cut up, poisoned, harvested, amputated, implanted, punctured, weakened, and infected, often all at once. And as torture is pain instrumentalized by an extra-distortion of time—part of torture’s effectiveness is the lie that it might never end—cancer treatment is so often pain de-instrumentalized inside the extra-distortion of time that is called “dying.” Cancer treatment sometimes ends well, of course, as mine did, so sometimes it only feels unending, but it also has a stubborn chronicity, since for so many people it can go on forever, which means at least until they are dead.

  Every time I was asked to give pain a number, my friends and I made plans to sneak pamphlets with alternate vocabularies of pain into the waiting rooms. These guides to the new language of pain would consist mostly of the poems of Emily Dickinson. How does your pain feel on a scale of 1 to 10?

  341 After Great Pain—A Formal Feeling comes x

  477 No man can compass despair x

  584 It ceased to hurt me x

  599 There is a pain so utter x

  650 Pain has an Element of Blank x

  761 From Blank to Blank x

  1049 Pain has but one acquaintance and that is death

  In this dream, I was at a therapist’s office for people who had parts of corpses in them. The therapy was not for the person with the corpse inside her, but for the corpse itself. The corpse in me had been through a lot: her chest had been used as a radiator, parts of her had traveled on the back of a truck, she had been in some seedy places, she was played with like a toy. I only had a few square inches of her in me, but the pain and swelling in my body made it clear what I was rejecting. LifeCell (corporate vision: “surgery without complications”) brands the sterilized cadaver skin4 used as a sling for breast implants as “Alloderm,” but hygienic nominalism could do nothing to afford how this fraction of a dead person implanted in me filled the dream life of April 2015 with a wide and recurring version of a cadaver’s terror.

  Sometimes I would call myself a “sick person,” and I would think of everyone else, if they weren’t sick, as “future sick persons.” I would also sometimes think of the arrangement of the world as those who were currently sick and those who thought they were well, but to place each person in these categories wasn’t so easy. I had been, I am sure, sick before I knew it. If disease is a space, and if pain is a duration, neither could be an identity.

  Chemotherapy is death-against-death modernism. Surgery is the Enlightenment. Reconstruction is the phase that escapes periodization—medicine against absence—not growing crops but the appearance of crops on recently salted fields. Disability is whatever isn’t history, a battleground turned into a 7-Eleven on which someone has graffitied PAIN WITHOUT VICTORY.5

  The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas wrote that the least one could say about suffering was that it is “for nothing.” That it is “for nothing” is also what people say about poetry.

  If suffering is like a poem, I want mine to be lurid, righteous, and goth.

  When asked to draw pain, my students make mostly inchoate scribbles, derivative diagrams learned from aspirin ads, or punctuation marks.

  An exclamation point is useful, but pain can also be described by its duration, its magnitude, its locations, its relations, its variations, its disruptions, its histories, its temperatures, its haptics, its memories, its patterns, its pressures, its sympathies, its forms, its purposes, its references, its causes, its economics, its forgettings, its dimensions, its categories, its effects.

  Amnesia is vice-president to pain and the mother of philosophy. What philosophy often forgets is this: that few of us exist most of the time as just one person. This un-oneness can hurt, just like any oneness can hurt, too.

  We move in and out of each other’s holes or make new ones. We cut each other open, leave wasted bits of DNA around, leave shards of evolutionary codices discarded in our lovers and our mothers and our children. Many of us have bodies that other people have sometimes lived or died in, too. It can hurt that we enter and exit, are entered and left, that we are born into another sentient other’s hands and into the environment more sentient others built around us, born into the rest in the world, all capable of pain, too, which will make us hurt even more.

  A reminder of our un-oneness is at least one counterpurpose of literature. This is why I tried to write down pain’s leaky democracies, the shared vistas of the terribly felt.

  Before my education in it, pain had been local, the simple pain of a simple life, that humble pain of the partial, the kind of ordinary pain of the minor
that would lead a person to believe that there are such things as organs or limbs or identities.

  My new calamity meant it was possible to feel every cell at once and, in these, every mitochondrion, and that it was possible, too, to have a millionfold shitshow of sensations in locations newly realized, and that also these sensations were conspiring toward the knowledge that something called something like an “arm” is a lie to obscure its actuality as a city or a war or an avalanche and something called an “armpit” is a misprision of all that crumbles or a coral reef drying and something called “a body” does not end at the end of its flesh and that this disproves Europe and the Enlightenment and that something called a “metaphor” was too narrow a technique to describe the diversity and number of agonies that could now be acutely and all at once perceived.

  I wanted to learn to draw maps so I could chart this. I’d publish a distinguished atlas of the infernal geographies of the interior of the body in multiple forms of pain and the cities, wars, agricultural innovations, and topological eruptions happening there.

  But it would be wrong to present pain as if it were a property—as wrong as presenting pain as a metaphysics. In pain, there is always something to explore, but never anything to conquer. There’s no empire in a nerve.

  My education in pain was a radical materialization of sensation that some mistake for magic, to feel other people’s suffering in the space of what is no longer there. That we are always alone in pain is a lie, I think: that language fails it, another. It is history that fails pain, as it also fails language, but the truth of history is also the truth of language and this is that everything will always change and soon. Every sensate body is a reminder that tomorrow is not today. Maybe suffering pain is not for nothing, or is for nothing-plus: pain’s education is an education in everything and a reminder of nothing’s all.