(1) Chronic pain can make even a masochist feel trapped in her body.
(2) It’s just like the way my ex-dom and I felt locked in a miserable relationship.
I may even have gotten all of my mixed metaphors into this tweet:
I am SO GRATEFUL I’m finally in good enough shape to be angry with the pain. Go and die, you battering bastard! No more excuses for you!
â Yingtai (@yingt_) June 25, 2014
Please let me be clear that despite all this talk of battering, that’s not what my husband was doing to me. We were being bad for each other.
My body, on the other hand, was most definitely whumping me. But then again, maybe that was mutual too. The body and soul can do awful non-consensual things to each other. They knew that even in the 17th century.
A Dialogue between the Soul and the Body
SOUL
O who shall, from this dungeon, raise
A soul enslavâd so many ways?
With bolts of bones, that fetterâd stands
In feet, and manacled in hands;
Here blinded with an eye, and there
Deaf with the drumming of an ear;
A soul hung up, as âtwere, in chains
Of nerves, and arteries, and veins;
Torturâd, besides each other part,
In a vain head, and double heart.BODY
O who shall me deliver whole
From bonds of this tyrannic soul?
Which, stretchâd upright, impales me so
That mine own precipice I go;
And warms and moves this needless frame,
(A fever could but do the same)
And, wanting where its spite to try,
Has made me live to let me die.
A body that could never rest,
Since this ill spirit it possest.SOUL
What magic could me thus confine
Within anotherâs grief to pine?
Where whatsoever it complain,
I feel, that cannot feel, the pain;
And all my care itself employs;
That to preserve which me destroys;
Constrainâd not only to endure
Diseases, but, whatâs worse, the cure;
And ready oft the port to gain,
Am shipwreckâd into health again.BODY
But physic yet could never reach
The maladies thou me dost teach;
Whom first the cramp of hope does tear,
And then the palsy shakes of fear;
The pestilence of love does heat,
Or hatredâs hidden ulcer eat;
Joyâs cheerful madness does perplex,
Or sorrowâs other madness vex;
Which knowledge forces me to know,
And memory will not forego.
What but a soul could have the wit
To build me up for sin so fit?
So architects do square and hew
Green trees that in the forest grew.
Yep, that was me. My body’s best trick was making me physically unable to read half of my books for months. Gave me shooting pains in the wrists. And my depression retaliated by wrecking my tailbone and ribs and knees and feet. Before I knew it, I was just as depressed about the pain as the breakup, and the resulting positive feedback loop was … not positive.
I can tell you, I really wanted out of my body. Or my life.
But according to the visionary writer Ursula Le Guin, there is an alternative to walking away from the pain. You can simply go through.
âSufÂferÂing is a misÂunÂderÂstandÂing …. It exÂists. Itâs real. I can call it a misÂunÂderÂstandÂing, but I canât preÂtend that it doesnât exist, or will ever cease to exist. SufÂferÂing is the conÂdiÂtion on which we live. And when it comes, you know it. You know it as the truth. Of course itâs right to cure disÂeases, to preÂvent hunger and inÂjusÂtice, as the soÂcial orÂganÂism does. But no soÂciÂety can change the naÂture of exÂisÂtence. We canât preÂvent sufÂferÂing. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A soÂciÂety can only reÂlieve soÂcial sufÂferÂing, unÂnecÂesÂsary sufÂferÂing. The rest reÂmains. The root, the reÂalÂity.
“All of us here are going to know grief; if we live fifty years, weâll have known pain for fifty years. And in the end weâll die. Thatâs the conÂdiÂtion weâre born on. Iâm afraid of life! There are times I â I am very frightÂened. Any hapÂpiÂness seems trivÂial.
“And yet, I wonÂder if it isnât all a misÂunÂderÂstandÂing â this graspÂing after hapÂpiÂness, this fear of pain …. If inÂstead of fearÂing it and runÂning from it, one could … get through it, go beÂyond it. There is someÂthing beÂyond it. Itâs the self that sufÂfers, and thereâs a place where the self â ceases. I donât know how to say it. But I beÂlieve that the reÂalÂity â the truth that I recÂogÂnize in sufÂferÂing as I donât in comÂfort and hapÂpiÂness â that the reÂalÂity of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can enÂdure it all the way.â
My initial reaction to this was: Bullshit. Been sick, been well. Well is better. We don’t need pain.
Unless you want to believe in something higher, that is. According to my religious history professor, the greatest blow ever struck to religion was effective painkillers. Suddenly you didn’t need a reason for your suffering. You could leave that battering bastard behind.
But sometimes, of course, you don’t want to get away. As sadists and masochists, we know that pain can be delicious, thrilling, beguiling. And I have come to believe that every kink is rooted in some experience that feels good for vanillas too. So what is this about pain that can make us feel like we have touched the hand of God?
It turns out that Ursula Le Guin has the answer to that, too. It comes at the end of the same conversation I quoted above. They’re talking about a man dying from full-body burns.
“You couldnât do anyÂthing for him. There was no aid to give. Maybe he knew we were there, I donât know. It didnât do him any good. You couldnât do anyÂthing for him. Then I saw … you see … I saw that you canât do anyÂthing for anyÂbody. We canât save each other. Or ourÂselves.â
âWhat have you left, then? IsoÂlaÂtion and deÂspair! Youâre denyÂing brothÂerÂhood, Shevek!â the tall girl cried.
âNo â no, Iâm not. Iâm tryÂing to say what I think brothÂerÂhood reÂally is. It beÂgins â it beÂgins in shared pain.â
I think Ursula Le Guin is right, at least about me. My pain is getting better because of all the people helping me. Their professional knowledge of alternative medicine helps, but the moral support is what makes the difference between depression and progress. You could say my body and I are in marriage counselling.
And I think Ursula Le Guin is right about BDSM, too. She’s just described my price for offering up my body and soul as your plaything: that you make the journey with me. Your focus in exchange for my everything else. Know my pain carnally, as I know your pleasures.
That’s how we come to live in each other’s minds. That’s how pain turns into magic, holiness, love.
I wonder, can I turn this around and make it into my metric for when to get out of a relationship? God knows I need something. Because it is really, really hard to know your breaking point when you’re tuned to abject submission. For me it’s not just the body, not just the heart, not just the soul – all of me just wants to take it.
I do have a lot of ego and willpower. But none of that tells you when to stop. It just keeps everyone on the rack for longer.
So here’s what I will tell myself next time. The red flag is when the pain stops being shared – whatever kind it is. When the power exchange starts becoming a reservoir of misery, and before it becomes an oubliette of all feeling.
That’s when it’s time for the black hole to go wormhole.
See you on the other side? Perhaps we will find something to share.
Wow! “Your focus in exchange for my everything else”, so strongly resonates. I love Le Guin’s writing in general, I think I’ll read it differently now you’ve suggested that interpretation!
Thank you! It always makes me happy when the last-minute additions work well! And I love Ursula Le Guin too. Delighted to find another admirer.
I recommend Andrew Marvell’s “The Gallery”, if you don’t already know it. It’s about the ways he pictures (images and imagines) his lover, Clora.
He sees her in various Dommelike guises, as a cruel Venus who devises pains and pleasures for him. But also as a gentle “milky-thighed” woman who consoles him.
Some critics say that Marvell is parodying the masochistic vein that runs through a lot of love-poetry. Maybe. I think it’s more likely that he’s writing it more intensely because it’s what he feels.
Anyway, the poem’s on-line in various places. It’s very much from a male point of view, and I suppose male-submissive, so I recommend it for the writing, and not necessarily because it expresses things that you feel. (I’m “outside” that poem too, as a non-masochist, and I still like it very much.)
Thank you for the reference! It definitely doesn’t do anything for my kink, but it’s certainly clever. I actually don’t see it as masochistic at all, but perhaps that’s because I don’t know anybody who actually wants to be murdered or gutted. I guess I see it more as commenting on the love-hate extremes of the effects of lust (er, I mean, love)?
Well, the vision of Clora as a creature who’s ripped him limb from limb is only one of a number of the images he has of her, and it’s a metaphor for her emotionally tearing him apart, not actually physically gutting him.
And I do think there’s a human tendency to gain pleasure from emotional suffering: that whole turn up the torch songs, get drunk and howl along thing that people do, after they’ve been dumped or they think their lover is off with someone else.
Some people enjoy that pleasure more and take it further than others. People who enjoy some kind of pleasure more and take it further than average get called kinky.
So I think that image illustrates one kind of emotional masochism.
I definitely wasn’t applying the poem to you, personally. That’d be stupid, as well as presumptuous and a bunch of other dumb and rude things.
I meant it as something interesting that you might enjoy from “outside” the emotions he expresses, in the same way that it’s not a set of things that I’d be likely to feel or say about a woman, but I also appreciate the poem from “outside” the poet’s emotional world.
That is, sexualised appreciation of a woman who gives both pain and pleasure is not my kink either, but I do think that kink is going on. In a terribly civilised way, of course.
You are very very far from dumb or rude, and literary appreciation is of course notoriously subjective. I’m grateful you led me to a new poem!