II. PAIN CATEGORIES – IMAGE TABLEAUS
II.I POETIC DESCRIPTIONS OF THE TEN PAIN CATEGORIES
In the course of my literary research for this project, I generated 10 Pain Categories derived from poems, as well as philosophical and literary texts on pain. These categories differ profoundly from pain categories as they are found in common pain questionnaires. They refer to the existential dimension of pain, and do not differentiate between physical and mental pain, intending to overcome the ‘myth of two pains’, as identified by David B. Morris (see I. PREPARATIONS). All pains that may be gathered with common questionnaires can also be captured with the new categories I propose; but, more essentially, they open up the possibility of entirely new sensations and emotional qualities, allowing for a more profound and comprehensive evaluation of pain.
3 Pain as a Spatial Phenomenon
4 Pain as a Temporal Phenomenon
5 Pain as an Acoustic Phenomenon
A PAIN CALLED DOG
I have given a name to my pain, and call it 'dog'. Traits of the dog: faithful, importunate, shameless, entertaining, wise. (Friedrich Nietzsche)
THE BIRD(S) OF PAIN
It is a bird that no one wants, and who doesn't sing (Charles Bukowski)
The Pain Bird — der Vogel Schmerz — it rises, it is the poem (Reiner Kunz)
The Eagle Pain — like an eagle, out of the blue, is the pain, digging its claws abruptly into your flesh / But then on strong wings carries you over treetops and hills to the peaks of life. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
There are no trees or birds in this world, / There is only sourness. [...] On a black wall unidentifiable birds / Swivel their heads and cry. (Sylvia Plath)
PAIN ANIMALS
Damned pain animals – diese verdammten Schmerztiere (Björn Kuhligk)
PHANTOM PAIN
A phantom pain directs every hasty glance / every glance of the eye (Durs Grünbein)
PAIN AS DELUSION
Only delusion is this pain (Lord Byron)
SPIRITUAL PAIN
Spiritual pain is caused by too much expectation (Charles Bukowski)
3 Pain as a Spatial Phenomenon
THE LAND OF PAIN – where pain is everything (Alphonse Daudet)
THE HOUSE MADE OF PAIN – with no windows – pain buries us in it (Hilde Domin)
THE BORDER PAIN – from where we look back crying, from where we look forward shuddering (Ferdinand von Saar)
PAIN LIKE WATER
Pain, like the water of a lake, encloses you (Cesare Pavese)
THREE PAIN-INCHES
Take me within, within, / up there, / three Pain-Inches above / the floor (Paul Celan)
ARBOUR OF PAIN
The heart foams vast in its arbour of pain (Steffen Popp)
THE LOCK AND GATE OF PAINS
I am the lock and gate of pains (Dante Alighieri)
ROADS INTO PAIN
Country roads into the pain (Günter Eich)
4 Pain as a Temporal Phenomenon
PAIN EXPANDS TIME
Pain — expands the time — / Ages coil within / The minute circumference / Of a single brain — / Pain contracts — the time — /Occupied with shot / Gamuts of eternities /Are as they were not (Emily Dickinson)
THE HOUR OF PAIN
The hour of pure pain (Arthur Rimbaud)
It is the hour where pains and sorrow aggravate (Charles Baudelaire)
THE INFINITE REALMS OF PAIN
The infinite realms of pain: Pain — has an element of blank —/ […] It has no future but itself — / Its infinite realms contain / Its past — enlightened to perceive / New periods — of pain. (Emily Dickinson)
MEMORY PAINS
Memory pains (Oliver Mertins)
5 Pain as an Acoustic Phenomenon
SILENT PAINS
... For silent woes are greatest (William Wycherley)
Pain's the master, pain is silent (Charles Bukowski)
PAIN AS STRING MUSIC
String music is my pain – it sounds so deep, so wound (Robert Walser)
PAIN SOUNDS
Away, away, ye notes of woe! (Lord Byron)
From my great pains / I make my little songs (Heinrich Heine)
JOYFUL PAIN(S)
My dream, a joyful pain, comprising many chapters (Rose Ausländer)
Is it pain, is it pleasure — Ah, joy is only a deeper pain, / Life is a dark grave (J. L. Tieck)
Pain is the joy of knowing / the unkindest truth / that arrives without / warning. (Charles Bukowski)
PAIN, THE ULTIMATE HAPPINESS
– Oh, come back, / My unknown god! my pain! / My ultimate happiness! (Friedrich Nietzsche)
LOVELY AND SWEET PAIN(S)
Lovely and evil, a pain (Friedrich Hölderlin)
The sweetness caused by these eminently intense pains / was overly excessively profuse / that you wish it may never / ever stop. (Franzobel)
Who looks at the image of past times / like deep into an abyss / in which from all sides a sweet pain drags him downwards. (Novalis)
PAIN STARS
The beautifully coloured gentle stars / the pain stars (Wolfgang Hilbig)
PAIN LUST
And every pain / will once become a sting of lust (Novalis)
WILD PAINS
In wild pains (Novalis)
The wrath and thrust of pains (Novalis)
All the sick repressed / Griefs and humiliations of the years gone by (Charles Baudelaire)
A funeral dower of present woes and past (Lord George Gordon Byron)
I'm crying day and night / I sit in a thousand pains / and a thousand I still fear (Andreas Gryphius)
Your wild, hopeless pain (Charles Baudelaire)
Pain is a burning, rejecting itself (Jean-Luc Nancy)
The abyss of the pain discloses (Archim von Arnim)
It was, as if I felt apart in pain (Wladimir Majakowskij)
O wild death, merciless curse / Cruel father of all pains (Dante Alighieri)
DARK PAINS (NIGHT PAINS)
Their days of danger, and their nights of pain (Lord Byron)
The Pains of sleep — in anguish and in agony / […] Fantastic passions! maddening brawl! / And shame and terror over all! / […]So two nights passed (Samuel Taylor Coleridge )
The pain of spooky nights (Paul-Marie Verlaine)
8 Pain as Knowledge
But grief should be the instructor of the wise; / Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most / Must mourn the deepest o'er the fatal truth (LordGeorge Gordon Byron)
Adversity is the first path to truth. (LordGeorge Gordon Byron)
Pain, you must be everything for me […] you be my philosophy, my science (Alphonse Daudet)
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding (Khalil Gibran)
Pain is the joy of knowing / the unkindest truth / that arrives without / warning. (Charles Bukowski)
Regarding is pain research (Thomas Kling)
9 Pain beyond Words
Are words actually any use to describe what pain [...] really feels like? Words only come when everything is over, when things have calmed down. They refer only to memory, and are either powerless or untruthful. (Alphonse Daudet)
The syllable pain (Paul Celan)
Speaking wears down the congregation of pain (Steffen Popp)
Pain is a loanword of anatomy (Sebastian Unger)
A question mark is written in the perception of pain (Ivan Illich)
Unfathomable Pain! Grinding in the hours past, / now, with still bleeding wounds, / my heart praises and blesses you. (Christian Friedrich Hebbel)
Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it. (Elaine Scarry)
ABSURD PAIN
Pain is absurd because it exists, nothing more (Charles Bukowski)
The great object of life is sensation — to feel that we exist, even though in pain. (Lord George Gordon Byron)
We are so painfully infected gods (Gottfried Benn)
The pain he felt were dedicated to the one who he no longer was (Monika Rinck)
REAL PAIN
We are going to suffer, now; the sky /Throbs like a feverish forehead; pain is real (W. H. Auden)
TRUE PAIN
Life deceives us long, / you show unvarnished / the withered cheek of life / O pain, how true you are (Nikolaus Lenau)
What is true, sleep and death request from you / as if ingrained, advised by every pain (Ingeborg Bachmann)
PHYSICAL PAIN
Physical pain — the most present and constant thing in life; Physical pain is hard to explain (Charles Bukowski)
SELF CHOSEN PAIN
Much of your pain is self-chosen (Khalil Gibran)
PAIN AS A QUESTION
Pain is the sign for something not answered; it refers to something open, something that goes on the next moment to demand. What is wrong? How much longer? Why must I/ought I/should I/can I/suffer? (Ivan Illich)
No matter if the pain is my own experience or if I see the gestures of another telling me that he is in pain, a question mark is written into this perception. Such a query is as integral to physical pain as the loneliness. (Ivan Illich)
II.II THE IMAGE TABLEAUS – PICTORIAL DIMENSION OF THE 10 PAIN CATEGORIES
The Image Tableaus (collages/image plates) pictorially express the pain categories outlined above. They deepen understanding of these generated categories by providing further meaning — meaning that eludes the grasp of language, unfolding
beyond words.
Next section: III. FURTHER CONSIDERATIONS
