The movie Precious starts on November 6 and I want to watch it. I just don’t know if it is a good idea.

Just the trailer is enough to open that jagged well of pain. It’s not that I went through anything nearly as bad as that character but how do different pains get weighed? How do my childhood memories of what some people will do match up to what some girls go through? There is no way to answer that, which leads me to believe it is really the wrong question.

So what is the right one? I think maybe it has something to do with the balance between being able to keep old wounds from festering and not ripping open healed scars. There is nothing, nothing that will make me what I would have been had all that shit not happened. That’s not even worth thinking about. But it’s also no good hiding from the pain if the pain is still working away infecting other parts of my life that still live, that still have functioning nerve endings, that can still grow, stretch, breathe. Scar tissue can’t do anything like that. What it does is protect what lies under it and around it. Scar tissue is not like normal skin, but it does have a function; it is necessary to the deeply wounded. The problem is I can’t tell whether what Precious triggers is a healed but still sensitive scar or one that hides infection, or at least, it is not at all easy to tell.

I watch that trailer and within seconds it is like my stomach has been sucked out of my back leaving only a hole with the bare bone spine glinting a greasy white. And so what? What’s wrong with pain? If it resolves into something else, like contractions resolve into a child, then all pain is — is pain. It’s not suffering. This thing, when I watch the trailer, that feels like suffering.

But I don’t know. Maybe if I watched it, felt the pain, it would resolve itself into understanding, and that, in my experience, would be good. It might not lessen the pain — I would have to feel it– but understanding usually lessens suffering.

Suffering is so much worse than pain, partly because it never really ends and it isn’t generally productive of anything other than more suffering. So to decide whether to watch the movie I need to answer the question of whether Precious will just be painful or will it just be suffering.

I think maybe this is the same question as to whether this old haunt is just a scar or if it is a scab covering something that could be exorcised. And I still don’t know. So I have come in a circle.

What would happen if Precious wins through? Wins through what? The abuse? Wins through where? To health? By whose definition? No one who is so vilely treated can ever be anything close to what would normally be defined as “healthy.” Not that someone like that can’t be happy. They can. I can. I am. But I have my limits. There are places I simply cannot go. I don’t have the sensitivity any longer, the scar tissue is just too deep and wide.

Once, when I was 17, I went to see a movie. I didn’t know what it was about, but it turned out to about the Indian wars and have a scene of horrific “trophy taking” by soldiers, from the living bodies of Native American women and men. The knife came out, I flashed on what was about to happen….the next thing I remember I was puking outside the theatre.

I have a lot of Native American family. I know a lot about the interactions between Europeans and Indians. I have not lived trying to avoid this knowledge. In fact I have sought it willfully. (I have a couple of degrees in Anthropology, for example). But I will not go see movies, or read stories that focus on the murders, tortures, degradation and deep inhumanity that such situations seem to breed in those with power and fear. I cannot. My body and mind rebel.

Let me be clear, it is not that I don’t see the value in presenting this awful truth about human history. I think it is essential, especially in the ahistorical U.S. It is important to face up to where we have come from and give up the whole ridiculous notion of a just-gone-by golden age. But I don’t need to learn about the pain we are willing to inflict upon each other. I know a lot about that.

But I don’t know about seeing Precious. I am not a person who needs to come to understand the effects of poverty on society. I have lived with it most of my life in one form or another. I am not a person who needs to come to understand that we are responsible for the fact that we have permitted such things to go on unabated. What I am is a person who has survived. I am also damaged. This damage: I need to take it into consideration. I have limits other people may not have.

So I don’t know. I just don’t know.