Philosopher Elaine Scarry writes that pain resists speech and expression; a person in pain is certain of the pain, but anyone hearing about the pain has only doubt or questions: “unseeable classes of objects such as subterranean plates, Seyfert galaxies, and the pains occurring in other people’s bodies flicker before the mind, then disappear.”
One adjective will not do for pain. Sometimes when I watch pain in my body, it feels very disaggregated, like one of those lumpy casseroles from my Midwestern childhood with chunks of meat and green beans, held in place with a coating of viscous cream of mushroom soup, topped with the fried onions that are sold in a paper can.
This sense of pain as an aggregate comforts me; I see it as part of my job of being in pain to let the pain itself come into focus, to pay attention to it so its strands and colors become distinct and therefore less overwhelming. I am kind of a park ranger of pain. I throw metaphors at it. I gesture-draw rapid sketches, because pain hungers for representation of itself.
“Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it,” Scarry writes, “bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned.” One of Scarry’s subjects is the horrific and specific pain of torture, the aim of which is to dehumanize, to render nonverbal and insensate. My pain is thankfully not this severe, so I am sometimes in the gray zone between language and non-language. Yet, although pain sometimes makes me nonverbal, it does not reduce me to a state before image. I see solid objects and colors when I am in pain, as if pain longs for form. As I was transcribing quotes from Scarry’s book, my husband asked me a question, and it took work to formulate an answer. What I saw was a large clear block, something like a huge old television, and I had to climb laboriously up onto it in my mind in order to gain access to language. It was tiring, but I opened my mouth and made sentences. But even in those few seconds where I was technically, momentarily non-verbal, I had image and color, the building blocks in children’s minds that are even older than speech and that represent the world.
Pain is sometimes a muting firewall that separates me from the files and scripts of my personality. I have the directory remaining but none of the contents. Sometimes pain blunts my memory of myself. On those days I reach into the toolbox of my head blindly, grasping and hoping I can make “Sonya” do what is expected of “Sonya” in social situations. Even in those moments, I look for the texture of the muting. I pay attention to the way my muted mental fingers grasp toward the memory of small talk.
In old Taoist and Zen texts, the stuff of reality was referred to as the “ten-thousand things.” If you imagine the world—all of its crazy bits and pieces and gears and butterfly wings and catalytic converters, each interacting in subtle ways with everything else—you get the sense of a vast net. Touch one point, and the whole thing ripples. This is the Buddhist concept of the interconnected nature of reality. The word Tathata in Sanskrit is often translated as “suchness,” the textured “this-ness” of the world. This textured net also connects to the idea of karma, because it follows that one action would affect the whole net.
Before I needed the net and the metaphors, pain from a skinned knee or a pulled muscle radiated along nerve signals to my brain, from periphery to center. I could ice the skin, rub the muscle, and wince at the world’s incursion on my body. Even depression had a location; I could feel it swirling in my brain. Rheumatoid arthritis is systemic, so it hurts all over. The pain is everywhere, and therefore in a strange way it is in danger of being a nothing, background noise, expanding like space to envelop me.
My pain began in my joints, those tiny saltwater fishbowls of synovial fluid meant to buffer our movement, the fantastic invention of the earthbound mammals. I believe our joints are the pockets of memories from our underwater life. I remember distinctly the moment when I gripped the steering wheel in my car and had to admit that something was wrong with mine; it should not have been so hard to move those digits, the five-splayed mark of humankind. Within me a barely-understood autoimmune process had caused my body to attack itself, beginning with those synovial pockets. The pain then can spread: to connective tissue, to permanently aggravated nerves, and to various weakened organs. Pain compounds health problems because it tempts the sufferer to move as little as possible, as if to allow the beast to sleep.
Chronic pain comes in two flavors. Hyperalgesia is an exaggerated response to something that hurts, so a pinprick feels like a hammer blow. Allodynia is a pain feeling caused by something that wouldn’t normally hurt, like the touch of a bed sheet. Different nerve cells function to relay these pain-versus-non-pain signals, but it’s believed that both types are sensitized to repeated pain signals, essentially getting better at their jobs in response to increased information. Think about this: our neural networks branch out beautifully in response to stimuli, and our brains’ real estate expands to encompass what we are good at. This is a problem for chronic pain patients, whose nervous systems become shaped into balls of fire that attempt, over and over, to interpret an internal sensation as an external threat.
Because my pain has no external expression yet other than a few gently twisting knuckles, it depends upon me for expression and metaphor. In fact, if I don’t feed it metaphor every day, my pain devours me in a psychic sense. It may gobble me up anyway, through disease process, inflammation, and mental decline associated with the stress of chronic pain. But I have this belief, based upon five years of experience, that the more metaphor I can feed my pain, the better chance I have of maintaining the thread of lucid thought as I navigate within it and it navigates within me.
Scarry, again: “The only state that is as anomalous as pain is the imagination. While pain is a state remarkable for being wholly without objects, the imagination is remarkable for being the only state that is wholly its objects.” By objects, Scarry means that pain is a completely internal and invisible experience; imagination is the finding of internal representations so that the imagined can be expressed to one’s self or others.
My pain digs up the most colorful, garish analogies. Its 1970s taste is all polyester, Day-Glo, and black-lit space opera. It wants purple eye shadow…or else it wants to be every muscled beast. In fact, it seems to want everything I can’t be anymore: racing, screaming, go-go dancing, raving. It is terrained, one metaphor after another, metaphors inside metaphors, bubbles of worlds that develop and pop. But each is free, none requires a co-pay, and if they are addictive then so be it. Let my pain shape itself into worlds. It fancies itself quite wild, many-eyed, but somehow bluish and gentle, living where the wild things are yet waiting for comfort and visits from children in jammies. My pain digs up the dregs of me, the way-back scraps from childhood stories and the rawest threads of self, in order to make signals and tell me what it is. It wants nothing more than to speak.
But why give this pain voice or consciousness, and why imagine it as a character? Pain once was mere impulse within me, flashes of functional telegraph signals. But when it became chronic, it began to live a continued existence. Who cannot say that it has found a kind of consciousness within me purely because its presence has become sustained through inflammation and the way that chronic pain feeds on itself? Pain finds itself alive in me, born without asking to have been conceived. In my personal mythology I believe pain is searching for a way to harm me as little as possible, asking for language and image to minimize its impact, hoping that interpretation will lead to ease and a kind of coexistence.
Now as I lie on the couch with the laptop on my lap, pain throbs within my second row of knuckles like a clacking of castanets, while the cradle of my hips hums a bass throb. My knees whine a sharp minor note, which echoes back to my hips, and my shoulders want somehow to push outward from this carapace in a clear oboe call, paralleled by the trill of my cervical spine, just a touched note. And in response to these sharp notes there’s the soft burr of a headache, the hurt I don’t really even sense immediately, the background white noise of muscle groups tensing in response to the nerve signals from the joints. Some of the hip pain is probably lower back muscles, and if I were to get very careful, push through the loud chords of knee and hip, I would be able to sense the softer aches in the hamstring, the calves. I check in with the ankles and for a moment find them silent, my toes happily mute.
I absorb solace in podcasts on Buddhist philosophy and meditation that I listen on the drive to work. I learn about the net of interdependence and the way in which solidifying concepts leads to pain. As I watch the shifting pain inside me, I know that pain will continue to shift and flow rather than solidify. It if waxes, it will wane, and that is hope. If it moves, it is not an anvil crushing me. It is not a demon with a consistent texture. Its shiftiness requires the kinds of metaphors that stress its aggregate nature. Its aggregate nature keeps me sane, because it is not a battle of me verses pain as an abstract presence but instead me very much alive watching what pain does, what it really is from moment to moment. Pain drapes uneasily over my skeleton, or maybe even easily some days, like it loves me. It is me, after all, just not in the form I would like my components to take.
Scarry writes that pain can be a “wholly passive and helpless occurrence,” until a person in pain actively engages the imagination in relation to the pain. At this point pain becomes “an intentional state” that can be “self-modifying and, when most successful, self-eliminating.”
As a writer I have been slowly trained to love the details of the world as a key to technical and narrative excellence, so it is not surprising that such a view would also become a spiritual priority and a way to manage physical discomfort. In his writing George Orwell drew observed details into sharp focus, steering away from the abstractions he saw as connected to the dulling effects of political double-speak. A review of a volume of Orwell’s diaries noted his devotion to the “thinginess” of life.
✶
The ancient Greek word for “ten thousand” is mu, represented by M, and the word root in Greek is connected to the word for “myriad” in English.
On some mornings, the very word “thingness” makes me misty-eyed with reverence. I am here, in the thinginess itself, when I used to be away in the ocean of abstraction, of concepts and would and when and then. Pain is purely in the present, like a Buddhist koan. Memories of pain are dulled or blotted out, signified in red ink in the brain rather than recreated. When we are in pain, we are most alive, so the net I live inside is the essence of life as it is happening.
This does not make me “grateful” for the pain—though honestly I do not know any more, because of its ubiquity and commercialization, what anyone means by “gratitude.” Pain requires me to be present in order to track it, so that is my job description. Pain has an edge and a clear danger. Mentally it triggers fear and the gray mist of depression. I must uncover and pursue pain to the pale roots before sadness lodges in and grows, before I forget that pain is the source of this doom, the cause of my distrust of people and the day itself. Pain tricks me, urges me to stay in bed, which weakens the body and its ability to connect with others and withstand pain.
✶
Pain is not a Jesus that wants anything from me. It doesn’t scold or wag its finger, doesn’t judge, and doesn’t give a shit how its human handles itself. It just is, like the Grand Canyon, not as a concept or a postcard but the square inches that together find themselves a crater without specific consciousness of their outline. Sometimes my metaphors collide; in this one, pain doesn’t understand itself.
Sosan, the Third Japanese Zen Patriarch, 606 CE, wrote in The Book of True Faith that meditation is a state in which the subject and the object are not separated; “Each contains itself and the ten thousand things.”
Pain is a windshield with nerves, and I have to scrape it raw to see beyond myself. Trees and buildings smudge behind the ice sheet of pain. I miss so much of what is said, and the sky seems lowered like an eyelid. Or pain is the weather itself, a crashing, raining thing, soaking me so completely that I can’t even figure out its source. Again it is something like having a sieve on my head, pain fragments my vision and makes the sound tinny. The images proliferate and shift.
According to Scarry, we are all living between the bookends of pain and imagination, which are the “framing events” of life. Between them, “all other perceptual, somatic, and emotional events occur; thus, between the two extremes can be mapped the whole terrain of the human psyche.”
The experimental musician John Cage, who was also heavily influenced by Zen, composed an experimental piece called “The Ten Thousand Things.” In a letter to a friend, he described this piece as “a large work which will always be in progress and will never be finished; at the same time any part of it will be able to be performed once I have begun. It will include tape and any other time actions, not excluding violins and whatever else I put my attention to…” He envisioned the song as a composite of multiple pieces, with instructions for sampling them in specific intervals, creating a new composition with each hearing. This morning, with pain ebbing in a crest across my shoulder bones, fluted like a piecrust or the frill of a ceratopsian dinosaur, tears prick in my ducts at the thought of John Cage creating and naming a work that will never be done. Pain is not a project or a product. I try to simplify and manage it, underestimating it, taking off slices and opening it up. I try to wrap it up and it soaks through the wrapping.
Pain is a screaming infant I must attend to before anything else. To assess the cause of discomfort I must collect the details of a harsh cry and reddened face or thrashing limbs, even as I navigate around the tension of the noise and the confusion, exhaustion, and frustration. Parenting this pain is the act of steering myself back from the future, the abstract fears over whether I will be able to handle it, to raise it, or to let it go. Pain, like parenting, is strung together from the tiny million moments that make up the whole.
My mind wants easy divisions: me versus it, good versus bad. I push against the binary because that is my job. This pain is not bad; it just is. I return to the neutral place at the middle of the web between bouts of intense struggle with the sticky threads of the ten thousand things.
I made a sketch a few years ago that hung above my desk at work, one of those concept bubble charts where ideas appear in circles and you draw lines to connect ideas that seem to resonate with each other. The “ten thousand things” appeared in a bubble and also seemed to describe the web itself.
Each neuron in the brain is supposed to be connected to ten thousand others.
There’s no telling exactly what sparked this disease. Some say that autoimmune diseases increase based on childhood stresses, and those childhood stresses ripple backward through their own causes in my family tree. If exposure to chemical contamination has sparked the pain, which chemical and which open pore of contact? Or maybe it is partly the messages of genetics. I am a wild and inscrutable process, an expression of the fiery universe itself with supernovas. My cells have received garbled instructions, unhelpful directives, and who among us has not been charged by an employer with an irrational task? My cells are doing the best they can.
Scarry writes that when a person makes images out of her pain, she creates “not the shape of the skeleton, the shape of the body weight, nor even the shape of pain-perceived, but the shape of perceived-pain-wished-gone.” Only in this regard to I disagree with her. While I long for my pain to be gone, the pain-shapes in my mind are not hateful. At least so far as I continue to be curious about it, and I feel almost as though I must watch it carefully to continue to know it, to collect data, to stay as strong as it is, to track it and see what it turns into next. I am curious about this overlapping pain body, which is still a part of my internal universe. The metaphors I choose for pain are never violent, which may be part of the imagination working to transform inchoate suffering into the humble and mundane objects of the world.
These days “me” is quite permeable. I used to see this as weakness. Without help in the form of doctors, supplements, medications, family members, and supportive friends, I might disintegrate rapidly, so “me” is loose and expansive. My body requires a net of ten thousand things and is no longer contained within its own skin. When I get ready to go to sleep, I take four or five pills. I turn on an air filter for my allergies and bite down on a clear hard plastic mouth guard to soothe my jaw joint pain. I put an ear plug in each ear to shore up my shallow pool of sleep, smooth moisturizer on my hands, lip balm on my lips, and lavender essential oil on my wrists and temples. I lean my head back on a squishy pillow that supports my cervical spine and place another a pillow between my knees. I covet sleep because it works better than any drug to help the body rebound from pain.
Coming into contact with pain is not leaving myself but instead knowing that I’m part of it and everything else. The great Master Dogen said, “To study the Buddha Way is to study the self, to study the self is to forget the self, and to forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things.”
In another story from the T’ang dynasty, a government official and a Zen master named Nansen strolled together in a garden. The official quoted the Zen monk Sosan, who said, “The ten-thousand things and I are of one substance.” Nansen pointed at a garden where they were strolling and replied, “People look at these flowers as if they were in a dream.” In other words (I think) we mull over the beauty of the flowers, but we are trapped in a bad dream, one in which we are separate from those flowers.
I don’t always actively hate this existence. It’s me. I like me. Some people run marathons, searching for the extensive mental and physical challenge that I get by lying on the couch. They get to wear numbers on their chests, and they affix stickers on the back of their car with numbers describing the length of a marathon. I do the same physical, creative, adaptive, non-verbal, focused, deep-breathing, minute-to-minute practice every single day. I cannot stop moving, so instead this exercise comes with me, wherever I go.
Coming into communion with pain can be scary, because it requires me to open my skull. Sometimes I’d rather avoid it with candy and Facebook, and I’d rather stay in control. The first few minutes of letting go are free-fall. I lie down and close my eyes. I must orient myself in deep space. When I tumble into it, there’s a sense of falling into pain’s well, a hitch of fear. Then I regain a sense of my body’s map, three-dimensional and intelligible. I know this landscape.
Some nights the pain is like the thumb of God right on me. There is no managing pain when it gets to this point of being a starry sky, and the only choice I have is supplication. The passion is the exact location where one’s boundaries dissolve, like the loneliness of camping on an ice field along with the grandeur. I am a Buddhist and yet I feel God in that faceless contact, as if I am standing below the expanse of the Milky Way, beneath the lit array, in awe of something vast, universal, other than human.
What did it feel like to not be in pain? I can’t say I remember.
Philosopher Elaine Scarry writes that pain resists speech and expression; a person in pain is certain of the pain, but anyone hearing about the pain has only doubt or questions: “unseeable classes of objects such as subterranean plates, Seyfert galaxies, and the pains occurring in other people’s bodies flicker before the mind, then disappear.”
One adjective will not do for pain. Sometimes when I watch pain in my body, it feels very disaggregated, like one of those lumpy casseroles from my Midwestern childhood with chunks of meat and green beans, held in place with a coating of viscous cream of mushroom soup, topped with the fried onions that are sold in a paper can.
This sense of pain as an aggregate comforts me; I see it as part of my job of being in pain to let the pain itself come into focus, to pay attention to it so its strands and colors become distinct and therefore less overwhelming. I am kind of a park ranger of pain. I throw metaphors at it. I gesture-draw rapid sketches, because pain hungers for representation of itself.
“Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it,” Scarry writes, “bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned.” One of Scarry’s subjects is the horrific and specific pain of torture, the aim of which is to dehumanize, to render nonverbal and insensate. My pain is thankfully not this severe, so I am sometimes in the gray zone between language and non-language. Yet, although pain sometimes makes me nonverbal, it does not reduce me to a state before image. I see solid objects and colors when I am in pain, as if pain longs for form. As I was transcribing quotes from Scarry’s book, my husband asked me a question, and it took work to formulate an answer. What I saw was a large clear block, something like a huge old television, and I had to climb laboriously up onto it in my mind in order to gain access to language. It was tiring, but I opened my mouth and made sentences. But even in those few seconds where I was technically, momentarily non-verbal, I had image and color, the building blocks in children’s minds that are even older than speech and that represent the world.
✶
Pain is sometimes a muting firewall that separates me from the files and scripts of my personality. I have the directory remaining but none of the contents. Sometimes pain blunts my memory of myself. On those days I reach into the toolbox of my head blindly, grasping and hoping I can make “Sonya” do what is expected of “Sonya” in social situations. Even in those moments, I look for the texture of the muting. I pay attention to the way my muted mental fingers grasp toward the memory of small talk.
In old Taoist and Zen texts, the stuff of reality was referred to as the “ten-thousand things.” If you imagine the world—all of its crazy bits and pieces and gears and butterfly wings and catalytic converters, each interacting in subtle ways with everything else—you get the sense of a vast net. Touch one point, and the whole thing ripples. This is the Buddhist concept of the interconnected nature of reality. The word Tathata in Sanskrit is often translated as “suchness,” the textured “this-ness” of the world. This textured net also connects to the idea of karma, because it follows that one action would affect the whole net.
Before I needed the net and the metaphors, pain from a skinned knee or a pulled muscle radiated along nerve signals to my brain, from periphery to center. I could ice the skin, rub the muscle, and wince at the world’s incursion on my body. Even depression had a location; I could feel it swirling in my brain. Rheumatoid arthritis is systemic, so it hurts all over. The pain is everywhere, and therefore in a strange way it is in danger of being a nothing, background noise, expanding like space to envelop me.
My pain began in my joints, those tiny saltwater fishbowls of synovial fluid meant to buffer our movement, the fantastic invention of the earthbound mammals. I believe our joints are the pockets of memories from our underwater life. I remember distinctly the moment when I gripped the steering wheel in my car and had to admit that something was wrong with mine; it should not have been so hard to move those digits, the five-splayed mark of humankind. Within me a barely-understood autoimmune process had caused my body to attack itself, beginning with those synovial pockets. The pain then can spread: to connective tissue, to permanently aggravated nerves, and to various weakened organs. Pain compounds health problems because it tempts the sufferer to move as little as possible, as if to allow the beast to sleep.
Chronic pain comes in two flavors. Hyperalgesia is an exaggerated response to something that hurts, so a pinprick feels like a hammer blow. Allodynia is a pain feeling caused by something that wouldn’t normally hurt, like the touch of a bed sheet. Different nerve cells function to relay these pain-versus-non-pain signals, but it’s believed that both types are sensitized to repeated pain signals, essentially getting better at their jobs in response to increased information. Think about this: our neural networks branch out beautifully in response to stimuli, and our brains’ real estate expands to encompass what we are good at. This is a problem for chronic pain patients, whose nervous systems become shaped into balls of fire that attempt, over and over, to interpret an internal sensation as an external threat.
Because my pain has no external expression yet other than a few gently twisting knuckles, it depends upon me for expression and metaphor. In fact, if I don’t feed it metaphor every day, my pain devours me in a psychic sense. It may gobble me up anyway, through disease process, inflammation, and mental decline associated with the stress of chronic pain. But I have this belief, based upon five years of experience, that the more metaphor I can feed my pain, the better chance I have of maintaining the thread of lucid thought as I navigate within it and it navigates within me.
Scarry, again: “The only state that is as anomalous as pain is the imagination. While pain is a state remarkable for being wholly without objects, the imagination is remarkable for being the only state that is wholly its objects.” By objects, Scarry means that pain is a completely internal and invisible experience; imagination is the finding of internal representations so that the imagined can be expressed to one’s self or others.
My pain digs up the most colorful, garish analogies. Its 1970s taste is all polyester, Day-Glo, and black-lit space opera. It wants purple eye shadow…or else it wants to be every muscled beast. In fact, it seems to want everything I can’t be anymore: racing, screaming, go-go dancing, raving. It is terrained, one metaphor after another, metaphors inside metaphors, bubbles of worlds that develop and pop. But each is free, none requires a co-pay, and if they are addictive then so be it. Let my pain shape itself into worlds. It fancies itself quite wild, many-eyed, but somehow bluish and gentle, living where the wild things are yet waiting for comfort and visits from children in jammies. My pain digs up the dregs of me, the way-back scraps from childhood stories and the rawest threads of self, in order to make signals and tell me what it is. It wants nothing more than to speak.
But why give this pain voice or consciousness, and why imagine it as a character? Pain once was mere impulse within me, flashes of functional telegraph signals. But when it became chronic, it began to live a continued existence. Who cannot say that it has found a kind of consciousness within me purely because its presence has become sustained through inflammation and the way that chronic pain feeds on itself? Pain finds itself alive in me, born without asking to have been conceived. In my personal mythology I believe pain is searching for a way to harm me as little as possible, asking for language and image to minimize its impact, hoping that interpretation will lead to ease and a kind of coexistence.
Now as I lie on the couch with the laptop on my lap, pain throbs within my second row of knuckles like a clacking of castanets, while the cradle of my hips hums a bass throb. My knees whine a sharp minor note, which echoes back to my hips, and my shoulders want somehow to push outward from this carapace in a clear oboe call, paralleled by the trill of my cervical spine, just a touched note. And in response to these sharp notes there’s the soft burr of a headache, the hurt I don’t really even sense immediately, the background white noise of muscle groups tensing in response to the nerve signals from the joints. Some of the hip pain is probably lower back muscles, and if I were to get very careful, push through the loud chords of knee and hip, I would be able to sense the softer aches in the hamstring, the calves. I check in with the ankles and for a moment find them silent, my toes happily mute.
I absorb solace in podcasts on Buddhist philosophy and meditation that I listen on the drive to work. I learn about the net of interdependence and the way in which solidifying concepts leads to pain. As I watch the shifting pain inside me, I know that pain will continue to shift and flow rather than solidify. It if waxes, it will wane, and that is hope. If it moves, it is not an anvil crushing me. It is not a demon with a consistent texture. Its shiftiness requires the kinds of metaphors that stress its aggregate nature. Its aggregate nature keeps me sane, because it is not a battle of me verses pain as an abstract presence but instead me very much alive watching what pain does, what it really is from moment to moment. Pain drapes uneasily over my skeleton, or maybe even easily some days, like it loves me. It is me, after all, just not in the form I would like my components to take.
Scarry writes that pain can be a “wholly passive and helpless occurrence,” until a person in pain actively engages the imagination in relation to the pain. At this point pain becomes “an intentional state” that can be “self-modifying and, when most successful, self-eliminating.”
As a writer I have been slowly trained to love the details of the world as a key to technical and narrative excellence, so it is not surprising that such a view would also become a spiritual priority and a way to manage physical discomfort. In his writing George Orwell drew observed details into sharp focus, steering away from the abstractions he saw as connected to the dulling effects of political double-speak. A review of a volume of Orwell’s diaries noted his devotion to the “thinginess” of life.
✶
The ancient Greek word for “ten thousand” is mu, represented by M, and the word root in Greek is connected to the word for “myriad” in English.
On some mornings, the very word “thingness” makes me misty-eyed with reverence. I am here, in the thinginess itself, when I used to be away in the ocean of abstraction, of concepts and would and when and then. Pain is purely in the present, like a Buddhist koan. Memories of pain are dulled or blotted out, signified in red ink in the brain rather than recreated. When we are in pain, we are most alive, so the net I live inside is the essence of life as it is happening.
This does not make me “grateful” for the pain—though honestly I do not know any more, because of its ubiquity and commercialization, what anyone means by “gratitude.” Pain requires me to be present in order to track it, so that is my job description. Pain has an edge and a clear danger. Mentally it triggers fear and the gray mist of depression. I must uncover and pursue pain to the pale roots before sadness lodges in and grows, before I forget that pain is the source of this doom, the cause of my distrust of people and the day itself. Pain tricks me, urges me to stay in bed, which weakens the body and its ability to connect with others and withstand pain.
✶
Pain is not a Jesus that wants anything from me. It doesn’t scold or wag its finger, doesn’t judge, and doesn’t give a shit how its human handles itself. It just is, like the Grand Canyon, not as a concept or a postcard but the square inches that together find themselves a crater without specific consciousness of their outline. Sometimes my metaphors collide; in this one, pain doesn’t understand itself.
Sosan, the Third Japanese Zen Patriarch, 606 CE, wrote in The Book of True Faith that meditation is a state in which the subject and the object are not separated; “Each contains itself and the ten thousand things.”
Pain is a windshield with nerves, and I have to scrape it raw to see beyond myself. Trees and buildings smudge behind the ice sheet of pain. I miss so much of what is said, and the sky seems lowered like an eyelid. Or pain is the weather itself, a crashing, raining thing, soaking me so completely that I can’t even figure out its source. Again it is something like having a sieve on my head, pain fragments my vision and makes the sound tinny. The images proliferate and shift.
According to Scarry, we are all living between the bookends of pain and imagination, which are the “framing events” of life. Between them, “all other perceptual, somatic, and emotional events occur; thus, between the two extremes can be mapped the whole terrain of the human psyche.”
The experimental musician John Cage, who was also heavily influenced by Zen, composed an experimental piece called “The Ten Thousand Things.” In a letter to a friend, he described this piece as “a large work which will always be in progress and will never be finished; at the same time any part of it will be able to be performed once I have begun. It will include tape and any other time actions, not excluding violins and whatever else I put my attention to…” He envisioned the song as a composite of multiple pieces, with instructions for sampling them in specific intervals, creating a new composition with each hearing. This morning, with pain ebbing in a crest across my shoulder bones, fluted like a piecrust or the frill of a ceratopsian dinosaur, tears prick in my ducts at the thought of John Cage creating and naming a work that will never be done. Pain is not a project or a product. I try to simplify and manage it, underestimating it, taking off slices and opening it up. I try to wrap it up and it soaks through the wrapping.
Pain is a screaming infant I must attend to before anything else. To assess the cause of discomfort I must collect the details of a harsh cry and reddened face or thrashing limbs, even as I navigate around the tension of the noise and the confusion, exhaustion, and frustration. Parenting this pain is the act of steering myself back from the future, the abstract fears over whether I will be able to handle it, to raise it, or to let it go. Pain, like parenting, is strung together from the tiny million moments that make up the whole.
My mind wants easy divisions: me versus it, good versus bad. I push against the binary because that is my job. This pain is not bad; it just is. I return to the neutral place at the middle of the web between bouts of intense struggle with the sticky threads of the ten thousand things.
I made a sketch a few years ago that hung above my desk at work, one of those concept bubble charts where ideas appear in circles and you draw lines to connect ideas that seem to resonate with each other. The “ten thousand things” appeared in a bubble and also seemed to describe the web itself.
Each neuron in the brain is supposed to be connected to ten thousand others.
There’s no telling exactly what sparked this disease. Some say that autoimmune diseases increase based on childhood stresses, and those childhood stresses ripple backward through their own causes in my family tree. If exposure to chemical contamination has sparked the pain, which chemical and which open pore of contact? Or maybe it is partly the messages of genetics. I am a wild and inscrutable process, an expression of the fiery universe itself with supernovas. My cells have received garbled instructions, unhelpful directives, and who among us has not been charged by an employer with an irrational task? My cells are doing the best they can.
Scarry writes that when a person makes images out of her pain, she creates “not the shape of the skeleton, the shape of the body weight, nor even the shape of pain-perceived, but the shape of perceived-pain-wished-gone.” Only in this regard to I disagree with her. While I long for my pain to be gone, the pain-shapes in my mind are not hateful. At least so far as I continue to be curious about it, and I feel almost as though I must watch it carefully to continue to know it, to collect data, to stay as strong as it is, to track it and see what it turns into next. I am curious about this overlapping pain body, which is still a part of my internal universe. The metaphors I choose for pain are never violent, which may be part of the imagination working to transform inchoate suffering into the humble and mundane objects of the world.
These days “me” is quite permeable. I used to see this as weakness. Without help in the form of doctors, supplements, medications, family members, and supportive friends, I might disintegrate rapidly, so “me” is loose and expansive. My body requires a net of ten thousand things and is no longer contained within its own skin. When I get ready to go to sleep, I take four or five pills. I turn on an air filter for my allergies and bite down on a clear hard plastic mouth guard to soothe my jaw joint pain. I put an ear plug in each ear to shore up my shallow pool of sleep, smooth moisturizer on my hands, lip balm on my lips, and lavender essential oil on my wrists and temples. I lean my head back on a squishy pillow that supports my cervical spine and place another a pillow between my knees. I covet sleep because it works better than any drug to help the body rebound from pain.
Coming into contact with pain is not leaving myself but instead knowing that I’m part of it and everything else. The great Master Dogen said, “To study the Buddha Way is to study the self, to study the self is to forget the self, and to forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things.”
In another story from the T’ang dynasty, a government official and a Zen master named Nansen strolled together in a garden. The official quoted the Zen monk Sosan, who said, “The ten-thousand things and I are of one substance.” Nansen pointed at a garden where they were strolling and replied, “People look at these flowers as if they were in a dream.” In other words (I think) we mull over the beauty of the flowers, but we are trapped in a bad dream, one in which we are separate from those flowers.
I don’t always actively hate this existence. It’s me. I like me. Some people run marathons, searching for the extensive mental and physical challenge that I get by lying on the couch. They get to wear numbers on their chests, and they affix stickers on the back of their car with numbers describing the length of a marathon. I do the same physical, creative, adaptive, non-verbal, focused, deep-breathing, minute-to-minute practice every single day. I cannot stop moving, so instead this exercise comes with me, wherever I go.
Coming into communion with pain can be scary, because it requires me to open my skull. Sometimes I’d rather avoid it with candy and Facebook, and I’d rather stay in control. The first few minutes of letting go are free-fall. I lie down and close my eyes. I must orient myself in deep space. When I tumble into it, there’s a sense of falling into pain’s well, a hitch of fear. Then I regain a sense of my body’s map, three-dimensional and intelligible. I know this landscape.
Some nights the pain is like the thumb of God right on me. There is no managing pain when it gets to this point of being a starry sky, and the only choice I have is supplication. The passion is the exact location where one’s boundaries dissolve, like the loneliness of camping on an ice field along with the grandeur. I am a Buddhist and yet I feel God in that faceless contact, as if I am standing below the expanse of the Milky Way, beneath the lit array, in awe of something vast, universal, other than human.
What did it feel like to not be in pain? I can’t say I remember.
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