A Violent Blossom of Time
On Pain, Mind and Oneness.
Pain,
Allopathic medicine sees it as a problem, in and of itself, and treats it directly.
Alternative medicines likens it to a signal or message from the body, and tries to interpret it.
Fictional medicines have come to understand it as being the body itself.1
It was the weekend of the coronal mass ejection and I was in pain. I walked to the top of Mont Royal, hoping to rise out of the city’s glow just enough to see the Aurora borealis: nothing. I walked there 1:15 hrs, and back as well. I was so drained, but there was something therapeutic about moving my legs.
The language of an Octopus is colour. Like our breath, they can modulate it consciously for intended aims—as in camouflage or conflict—but it operates autonomically too. When their guard slips their skin can betray the shades of their emotional lives, like our own frightened gasps, or our breath when dreaming; their’s is a swaying chromatic sleep-talk.
Staring up at the sky that night, I wondered if what we were all looking at was something similar; an electromagnetic breath of earth. Was this surge of energy, visible to us as coloured light, our perceivable image of her tumultuous dreaming? Or perhaps an uncontrolled gasp? The startled response to the sun's lashing outburst? Is man the only one who somaticizes?
What did this, which looks from here like northern lights, feel like to her? A gasp is a shock, and the metaphor is apt, for the feel has that same tinge as when you shock yourself on a car door. The electrical metaphor continues into the scientific model—the central nervous system through which the pain itself flows being electrically operant—all the way to the diaphragm, who’s pre-conscious sudden-drop occurs through musculoskeletal bioelectric forces as well.
Sweet earth, are you in pain also? Are you in pain with me, or are we both inside of pain? Where did it all come from? I was just so surprised that so much hurt could come out of me. It seemed endless, certain, original.
That night, I could see nothing in the sky but light pollution and yet within myself I could newly observe a cruel irony :
Where I had once found myself in a situation which caused me to feel a tremendous amount of pain, I now, after relieving myself from it, felt a homelessness and nakedness of heart, that caused me to feel a tremendous amount of pain.
Either way, whatever I did it was there, unconditionally; pain. Not all the time, but the outbursts seem regular, even if this one felt particularly exaggerated. And so with this all the reasoning became mere words. The case that I had attributed my pain to, seemed abruptly like nothing but a futile device.
Breath is very old. For life, respiration is a necessary constant; we must re-spirit ourselves endlessly, or rather till the end. And though we are always breathing, it is only with a certain intention of breath that we make of it a voice. A word is not breath itself, and man has almost severed language completely from the human body. Ripping it out of the air and displaying it, taxidermic, inside of books. Or making electronic cuttings from it, it can be grafted in a manner that appears living, onto silicone rootstock. If this is language trying to escape such a sensuous host, I don’t blame it.
Pain too is old. The sympathetic nervous system, which sparks fight-or-flight, predates the parasympathetic in the evolution of chordates. We have been increasingly sensitive for that which we wish to avert, through millions of years of complexification. Expanding all the ways to experience a single cue; pain—or that which can later be ‘encoded’ as ‘noxious stimuli’ by higher poles of the nervous system.
“The history of the evolution of the nervous system is the of the evolution of nociception and nothing more, the cerebrospinal system just a way for cunning pain—creeping into the insensate clod—to feel itself, to ramify, perpetuate, exaggerate itself.”2
That night when I eventually got home, I was too exhausted to put my mind at rest. When I looked at my step-count for the day and it seemed desperately high, I hadn’t eaten much. I knew my physical weakness only made me a more ready conduit for what I was experiencing. I jotted down, “God, I am hurting so badly, please help me. Why does any of it need to happen, I’m tired. I have been loosing my hair. I want to get back to joy. Why do I always loose contact with love?” I fell asleep as best I could, assuming with the conventional wisdom, that I would feel better in the morning.
But I did not. Pain awoke me.
I got up and wrote : words, words, words.
Why couldn’t I just say the pain, just speak it out of me? Maybe that is barely possible for a mind, all I could speak to was what the pain could mean. “because meaning is being as far as the mind is concerned.”3 Reading these attempts now they are nothing, just circuitous delusions, but under them the body spoke, crushingly loud.
“‘Every such layer of the character structure is a piece of history’, and therefore traumata persist within the present ‘insofar as they are anchored in a rigid armor’ The body is an encrustation of pain. Spirit’s scab.”4
Deep within all the warmest thickets of my intimacy, and their spreading memories also, there lay something fearful. And from it forms the most elaborate fugue; all touch as pain, the kiss of the world. This deep heritage swells beneath our feet, as out feet, our tensions, whatever gathers to itself all this matter, forming itself so intricately, into hazel eyes, ready to engulf. A ‘regarding modeled by regard’,5 and hurt by it, but by the lack of it also. Deeper still, pain is our only pathway; not a corruption of love, but love as it can be known.
“The more complex our world-model becomes, the more we must fold into our own systems. Yet for the living, each gyre of life’s egress into its own parameter space is experienced as a painful departure from immersion… The more conversant you are with time—that is to say, the more time inhabits you—the more painful life is going to be.”6
I don’t know what a sun is, nor a solar flare either, but I am sure that it had rendered me armor-less, unveiled as naught but a throbbing bruise of time. A tender spot on the intimate field, clamoring against the root myself and hopeful to participate in something that would redeem.
I wrote down: I am real. I am one.
I’d like to somehow put down the words. Either/Or. I am a pain body, and knowing this so absolutely, frees me from acting only in senseless aversion to it.
I know what I am, who I am is free.
“Plato calls love something bitter, because whoever loves, dies. Orpheus calls it bitter-sweet, because love is voluntary death.”7
Some earlier thoughts on the topic:
These anachronistic theories or outright fabrications are chronicled in the text Spinal Catastrophism by Thomas Moynihan (2019).
Moynihan, Spinal Catastrophism, 44.
Interview with David Bohm: https://contexting.net/extras/bohm-a-change-of-meaning-is-a-change-of-being
Moynihan, Spinal Catastrophism, 134.
A Sloterdjikianism. Full quote: "The birth of the face from the interfacial space… For human faces are themselves creations of a unique field of intimacy in which the regarding is modeled by the regard." from Bubbles.
Moynihan, Spinal Catastrophism, 241.
Ficino, Commentary of Plato’s Symposium.