gravity’s rainbow

Sugarbutch asks “what’s in your box of darkness,” referring to this poem.  I was reminded of this passage from “Musing on Pain, Love, and Others” by Laura-Zoe Humphreys in Bisexual Women in the 21st Century.

Storyteller: Scrape of metal and a rustle as the white curtains close me in with them. One takes my hand in his, rolls the joints, pushes and prods. But my hand fails to speak. It is my turn to perform. “Could you describe to me your pain?” I have spent long, tossing nights preparing for this question. I have taken notes, I have begged my pain to be more clear with me. I have rehearsed my lines well. He nods, says to the others, “She describes it very well. She’s definitely describing joint pain.” I smile, tongue hanging, scratch behind my ear with my foot. Waving his magic pen and his diploma on the wall, he gives me a reference. Disappointed again. I am searching for the name, the word that will take this pain and ball it into a red-wrapped box of solutions, remedies, a course of action. I’m not searching for a Doctor. I’m searching for God.

Pain: Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of pain, I will fear no evil: for though art with me; thy forced smile and thy lab coat they comfort me. Thou preparest my body and my pain as you want them to be; thou anointest my head with drugs, my cup runneth over. Surely pain and desperation shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Doctor for ever.

Stage Notes: The problem is the medical system sees the body as object, as something separate from the self, from the whole person.

Pain: I am not one with this body, this pain taking over. Mind over matter, disassociation from this trap. It’s the only way to survive.

Stage Notes: Work with the pain, not against it. It is you.

Pain: Fuck your New Age holistic spiritualism! Next you’ll be telling me to make friends with my pain. Well I don’t want to take it out for a fucking coffee, fuck!

Stage Notes: Yet what about S/M? Pain is multifaceted, not always aversive but rather sometimes desirable. I’m not saying that a pain that chooses you and one you choose are the same, but could you not learn from this?

Blind Love: Once I asked him not to let me escape and he held me there. Asked him to make me take it and he did. And there was all my guilt and fear and obsessive questioning locked around my wrists and neck if only for a moment, my body tumbled free into feeling.

Storyteller: Sing that sweet sharp edge floating downwards darkly. Weed me stoned and I will fall into you as you rise into me coursing along our bright paths into tips of fingers, the eddy around a knuckle. Crawling into you, you free me. Buried under stones in hidden caves I swim in black pools. White pain glides fanged kisses over my naked skin, slides past my open, waiting lips, twines through me, becomes me.

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I also continue to find absolutely no meaning in the pain itself. (I find the Headache to be as profound as a malfunctioning car alarm that just won’t shut off…)

From All in My Head

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Trying to save the world, in your own particular way, is very important. But the world will not save you.

From All in My Head

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In general, headache sufferers are worse off than people who have arthritis, roughly similar to those who have congestive heart failure severe enough to interfere with walking up and down stairs and only slightly better than people with AIDS…

From All in My Head

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With headaches, you’re alienated from yourself because your pain is so bad, and you don’t want to be there. At the same time, you’re alienated from everybody else because you have headaches: “I don’t want to go and be with people.” If I’m on meds, then I’m kind of spacey and can’t quite communicate my ideas. So there’s this kind of way that it becomes very selfish and self-centered.

From All in My Head

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Thernstrom described chronic pain as “a pathology of the nervous system that produces abnormal changes in the brain and spinal cord,” meanwhile basically sucking up feel-good seratonin and leading to chemically induced depression and anxiety.

From All in My Head

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“I didn’t want to kill myself, but I wanted to die.” Dying sounded fine, just for a little while at least, to get some relief - but suicide was too drastic. After all, the desire for self destruction and the desire of wanting pain to end can be two different things.

From All in My Head

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“I am having a bad day,” she wrote me. “I realize that the past three years have been totally lost and the past ten years have been straight from hell. It seems like the smallest things throw me into disequilibrium. I am very depressed and exhausted.”

From All in My Head

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“The idea that I can make my body do anything I really want it to do, such as making the pain go away completely, is a form of the myth of control, a childish belief in the omnipotence of what I want…”

….

In reality, there are limits to how the mind can influence pain, with mental distractions and emotional cues sometimes working temporarily, but not able to endure over long periods of time.  The truth is that distraction and emotion can help relieve any problem in the short term, not just pain.  A soldier on the front lines can temporarily forget about his divorce or financial problems or gonorrhea - at least while a hand grenade is being lobbed in his direction.

From All in My Head

I have often been told to meditate to learn to control my pain.  It doesn’t help.

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I was thrilled and scared at the same time. I marveled at how everything in life was now so incredibly easy with this relief: returning phone calls, doing errands, cleaning up. I remember stopping in the middle of the aisle at the Jewel grocery store and feeling as if I would float away to the paper goods section because of the ease of my movement.

From All in My Head

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