the relationship of pain and language

The concept of pain being a physical before a mental sensation is to, the chicken came before the egg. I’ve always resented that age-old “chicken before the egg” riddle, for it’s a poor attempt of provoking thought. (My apologies for the poor analogy.) Point being they are innately intertwined, continuously informing and perpetuating each other. The exceeding effort to compartmentalize one from another has stagnating results, as far as progress to an actualized understanding of pain. This binary myth is just as malnutritous as the myth that pain is completely individually experienced and not overwhelmingly mediated by society.

Pain is subjective. I am informed of this by my recognition of pain as mental experience, something I’ve learned I can silence, just like any other experience of emotion.

“Don’t your feet hurt?”

I look down at my naked feet on the smudged tile floor;

the thermostat is kept at 62. I shrug my shoulders nonchalantly

as I become increasingly aware of how cold the floor’s transaction is to my flesh.

“My feet hurt just looking at yours.”

“If you pretend it’s not happening, it doesn’t hurt,” (Huser, Sunday)

Language in this context has a funny way of shifting my perception to acknowledging my repressed sensation of cold feet connecting to social/collective pain with evoking the connotations of pain that I have processed previously. Pain is a mental process expressed through the social medium: language. Can you just feel and express sadness in words without the bombarding herds of previous social associations that mull over a wholly isolated experience of that emotion? Every sob story breakup song lyric, informing you that you are not alone in your sadness, that you have the right to be sad and should downright dwell in it, for it can be fueled into art and be continued to be dwelled on. So we all know how to properly dwell on it, that is to express ourselves in socially perpetuated ways. And the loudest perpetuated ways are the ones supporting the status quo. You don’t believe your N’Sync song could have political undertones, maybe supporting white supremacist patriarchal capitalism? I would say absolutely yes. Why would pain not be thought of the same? Is it too frightening the thought that our everyday language exchanges are electric power exchanges?

Maybe my repressed sensation of pain from cold feet was not repressed at all. I will never know. The social exchange has replaced my memory of what I was feeling, with what I should have been feeling. Language, robust with it’s social authority, imposed itself and altered my body’s physical and mental being to feel what my friend felt I should feel, pain. Wow, that’s just frightening. Please let’s stop and really acknowledge the overwhelming authority and power of language. I just internalized an utterance from an individual who unknowingly altered my personal experience mentally and physically.

What is more interesting here: Language is RESTRICTIVE. I want to believe that my friend had no motives in his utterance. But culturally there are motives. I don’t have a degree in medical science but I don’t think my feet were unable to handle the temperature of the tiled floor if the room temperature was 62. But, by our culture’s 21st century, middle to upper class standards: 62 degrees is “awfully low for February” in Chicago. Every other interior my friend and I enter is closer to 70. Should I feel pain because mentally I should recognize that my feet could be damaged by the cold, or am I conditioned to learn what our socially constructed “cold” is and keep pumping that People’s Gas into my home to prevent my body from “pain”? My friend’s response is to roll his eyes and so simply state that I could just put socks on and then revolt from People’s Gas hegemony. But what if I want to feel the tiles on my feet just for myself no mediation. I’m not convinced anymore that it really is painful.

Works Cited

Huser, Nicole. “I’m trying to learn how my life and thoughts have authority too” Eggstentialism and Eggistence. Coming               soon… maybe.

dis-ease.

“Verbally I don’t learn anything definite.” –Kafka

 

Around fifth grade for me, my mother was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Her dad and stepmother flew from Florida when they heard. Since my father had recently left my mother, sister and I, we were accepting of the offer to be pitied for a couple weeks. What I remember most was that I didn’t really treat my mother any differently throughout the whole ordeal. I’d ask her every now and then if she was scared and what they were going to do to her. She told me it was a normal procedure and not to worry. So I didn’t. Maybe I was too preoccupied with the grieving of my father. We had all silently accepted his absence, as we began to construct our newfound victim-hood to the abuses we never were allowed to acknowledge or articulate. When I dropped the word cancer though outside of my house the reactions were jarring. I discovered the incredible power of the word Cancer. Cancer usually repeated by the listening party, accompanied with a wider opened mouth and longer eye contact than was initially instated before you dropped the almighty word, revealed it also had another social existence. This is where I began my understanding that power of the word cancer was to invoke a different set of emotions than extracting a tooth. My mother, I learned later in life, was not unaware, immune or even outside of the social meanings of cancer. She admitted to me years ago how upset she was at how I treated her, that I didn’t sympathize more, or act very concerned. When she came back from the hospital I remember I treated her as if nothing happened, apart from shriveling in my chair when I first saw the scar across the entire front of her neck. She presented the illness as “nothing out of the ordinary” but felt otherwise, to be strong for me? Because I was somehow already expected to know that Cancer is a very social big deal and immediately start to treat her as a victim. Because she didn’t want to come home had have my sister and I also perpetuating the terror of the social existence of Cancer? Then how could she resent me because I was unsure how to act or what it all really meant. Questions now I’m uneasy about even provoking with her today. I’ve always been resentful of accepting or treating anyone as soley victim in any sense. Now my mother seeks to rationalize the cause of her illness on her own terms, because the doctors could not point directly to any one element to blame. And while the causes she constructed varied over time, a comfortable one she resides with has been “it was from the x-rays from the dentist’s office.” They never pulled the heavy body suit over her neck to protect it from radiation. She was a victim of poor procedures in the dentist’s office. Her thyroid cancer was not caused by the pack of cigarettes she’s smoked every day since she was 13, or her diet of heresy bars secretly munched on throughout the day. Do I know which is the actual causes of her cancer? Certainly not. But I am interested in why she likes to speak so openly of the one cause that deems her victim in society’s eyes as the major cause of her endurance of cancer. My understanding of illness is still something “other” to me. Even though I’ve watched my mother, grandfathers and grandmother all experience cancer, is it still something I feel no connection to. I can’t conjure the tears when I’m supposed to like the movie Stepmother would show me I should. I try not to respond outwardly at all.

molestation.rape.sexualharrassment.

 

every try to articulate to another, but find words inadequate to convey meaning?  

words ever fail you when you are needing them most?

 

what does constitute as a significant enough violation of someone’s boundaries to be taken seriously?  

molestation is explicitly in reference to a child and an adult context.

rape is defined as forced intercourse… penetration.

sexual harassment is unwanted attention that is illegal in the work setting.

 

Well, no wonder my 17 year old sister calls me frantically at loss of words to explain to me how she was 

unwantedly touched by a 23 year old and how it made her feel.  wheres the word for it?

 

if there is not one, does that encourage the silence

As a child the most magical memory i have was playing in the dirt. focused on the beauty in being immersed in present objects

holding a handful of the most round objects i sifted out of the dried dirt.  holding dearly all my hoarded pebbles available until i either deemed them to be the right amount by the way it felt -or- my little hand could comfortably hold no more.  with no warning i would throw them into the air to watch how they fell.to descend freely by the force of gravity  after they had all landed on the ground i’d bend down to examine how they had all landed.  i would marvel at the spaces between each one.  the sides that were exposed.  i would sit and try to recreate this beauty, of the random pull of gravity.  but when i looked at my construction they were too thought induced and artifical, with even spaces between strategically placed rocks.  i found i could never recreate the magic of the fall.

tell me something true.

There was a period I went through in school where I actually believed my nose was crooked.  I would before bed secretly construct a scotch taped remedy to position my nose straight.