I’m out in the still-cool having walked the dog by 07:30 this morning. I’ve got my first  coffee nearly complete and I plan on reading Heaney today and editing/writing.  I’ll spend the afternoon in the cool with my foot up (doctor said elevate and ice).  And, yesterday I finally came to an agreement with myself about which journals to which to submit the next batch of ready-to-go poems. All I have to do now is the bio and cover letter, print and submit.

Shaping up to be a good day.

and here I am in another one today. Don’t know why except that I have developed a ganglion cyst on my left foot and the fucker makes my whole foot ache.

and this poem I’m writing is kicking my ass

and, and, and…I could probably whinge-around all day.

I’ll try to control my temper in future posts but I’m promising nothing.

On our rounds today we met a new cat that is probably less than a year old. Pretty, ginger. She was wary (tail tip twitching, shoulders tensed) as my (rather big) dog came bounding up to say hi. The cat didn’t run though and I have to say I have mixed feelings about that. There are some dogs that do not like cats, even if mine does.

I got thinking about the cat’s behaviour. Is the cat brave? Stupid? Probably something else of course, but what does one say about a creature that remains sitting against an oncoming potential danger?

When we made it home I went to my computer to find a clip of Neil deGrasse Tyson at a Beyond Belief conference. It’s the one where he talks about the 15% of scientists that still believe in a god and deGrass Tyson’s thinking about that. He uses Newton as an example: here is a super-duper smart dude, who (in his lunch break) created differential calculus so he could answer a question posed by another. But faced with a question he can’t (or doesn’t want to) face—it’s a Mystery. Essentially deGrass Tyson seems to think that, for some people, there is a place where they are willing to use any convenient answer – and often a god does the trick, but once we have the answer to the question, we push the god-frontier back. So there are far more atheist scientists than believer scientists, but those 15% exist and the chances of that number diminishing to 0% is probably remote.

Might be so. I hear a lot about the need for comfort, the need for a belief in a god to stave off the night terrors. I don’t deny the need for comfort. I love extremely high fat pasta dishes when I’m getting irritated or overwhelmed, for example — I totally get the need for comfort. It’s just that some comforts do more damage than good and one can learn to trade in one comforting activity for another. We are not stuck with the ones we’ve always used.

One thing I find interesting is that some of us also seem to need pain as much as comfort. My continual voluntary exposure to thinkers like  Charles Taylor is an example. My occasional attendance at my local Philosopher’s Cafe, is another. I go in knowing I’m at risk, and that nice friendly dog is going to come wagging its tail, but the teeth, dripping with doggy slobber, are going to arrive first. I’m not sure which is worse the gross-out facts of intellectual slobber or the (admittedly small) risk of an actual argument for the importance of continued religious belief in human society.

I suppose I do it because despite the slobber Taylor, like all brilliant thinkers, offers gifts. It is unfortunate that to get the insights, you have to go through the risk of being drenched in slime. So, like the cat, I await the dog’s arrival, but since I’m human I carry with me a metaphorical soapy wash cloth to clean up afterwards.

Today that is Brian Brett. I feel totally slimed (but no teeth) by The Malaise of Modernity, so I’m going to read Trauma Farm today. Here’s the opening sentence:

A farm is both theory and worms.

Hah! Wonderful. I bought it, and based on just that sentence, I have no regrets. I feel cleaner already.

Pre-surgery I would have said that there were times when I was not in pain, but now that I actually remember what being pain-free feels like, what was true is that there were times in the past two years when the pain just formed the background. One the scale of one to ten, my pain never really went below a “two.” I just got so used to it that it no longer registered as pain.

The thing about that is that my body knew better than my consciousness. I recognize that now, not only because I am actually pain free, but because suddenly a whole raft of behaviours no longer have any appeal.

Just one example: TV. I don’t actually own a TV but I do have the internet and so I can watch some shows online. For the last couple of years I have watched a whole range of dramas, mostly crime dramas. I would go to work and come home exhausted. On days when I didn’t have to go straight to bed (when the pain got above a “five” on the ten-point scale), or couldn’t read (need energy to think), I watched TV or other vids on the internet. When I came home from the hospital this last time, I couldn’t leave the house and I wasn’t yet mentally composed enough to read, so I started to watch one of the shows I hadn’t seen yet. And I couldn’t do it.

I started to watch it but the cruelty of it, the crime component of the drama, was suddenly so obvious, so egregious, that I couldn’t bear to attend to it. It turned out that nearly everything I watched so assiduously pre-surgery struck me the same way. I erased it all.

Depictions of human cruelty and their punishment was how I handled chronic pain. There is something very important about that, I think.

It made me wonder about other behaviours of mine and other situations that are painful, even if in a more emotional sense than the physicality of my recent distress. It occurs to me to question myself about how I was able to sustain myself in a job I loathed. What things did I do to make that cruelty possible? Were the crime dramas part of that pain? What about tolerating someone who speaks garbage and does it continuously? How do I make it possible to tolerate that person? Perhaps more importantly, why do I do it?

Partly I compensate for pain because sometimes pain is simply unavoidable and pain is something for which there is always a cost that must be paid. Socially, for example, one must follow politeness codes if one wants politeness codes applied to one’s own existence. So I don’t scream “shut the fuck up” because I don’t want to be screamed at by someone else. That seems to me to be a sensible give-and-take and worth the cost of ignoring a boor or a fool. But there is a difference between that and the continual coping-behaviours that become habit, especially when the pain is actually optional.

Now my physical pain wasn’t an option easily fixed, but other sorts are. I could have, for example, quit that job far sooner than I did. I could avoid people with verbal diarrhea more than I do. I could pay more attention to the ease and resilience my body craves and be more discerning about situations that require greater than average attention to politeness codes.

The thing about chronic pain, whether physical or emotional, is that coping with it seems to undermine one’s capacity to see past it, and therefore to get out from under the situation causing it. Nasty that.

The thing about being pain free is that I rather like it. In fact I like it so much that I might try to cultivate a kind of psychic pain free state more often now that I am physically pain free. Good idea don’t you think? I do think that achieving such a goal is going to require me to pay attention to how I behave and why. That might be a bit difficult, but it will probably have interesting results and so be worth the effort. Yes. Worth a try anyway.

crawled on hooked knees, feeling like a pregnancy gone wrong.

I went home, didn’t even stop at Starbucks and slept

four hours. Later and a latte: caffeine seems to clip pain’s claws.

Perhaps tomorrow will be better.

I read Siddhartha decades ago and its position on suffering seemed to me sensible since pain is always going to be present in life. Seeing suffering as distinct from pain allows one to, occasionally, put it down like a bit of matched luggage one doesn’t actually need for the trip.

I’ve been in a lot of pain in the last couple of years and I have to say it is starting to wear. I’ve just spent the last 6 months or so trying to squirm up from under the consequent heavy black blanket of depression. I’ve had some success at that, which is why I am back at work again, but what hasn’t stopped is the pain.

So then I read Lilian’s post and she asks her readers from what they needed a break. The word that popped was “pain.” I told her in the comments that I needed to think about that more, so I went away and did that.

When I first read Siddhartha, I had already gathered a childhood full of nightmares, but I was physically strong and apart from weird head-stuff (petite mal epilepsy, odd sensory cross-wiring, and migraines, etc), my body was a walking machine. I spent years on the road just wandering. I slept in barns, under boats on the beach, rolled under low hanging tree limbs in quiet areas of parks, and later in cars, tents and teepees. I never even got a cold. I could, in effect, walk away from the pain of mean and venal people. The consequence was that I didn’t suffer. Being cold, with a bloody great rock you can’t budge pressing into your hip might be uncomfortable, might even become painful around 4am, but wake up to the sun, a hot cup of tea and some left over bread and cheese and one’s lot is joy.

Now the pain is part of my body and I can’t walk much at all. It makes all the difference. The danger for me is the loss of joy. That’s what suffering is I think, the loss of joy. So my time now is spent learning how to manage unshiftable pain in a way that still allows me my contemporary equivalent of sun, tea and bread on a beach somewhere quiet.

Have I figured it out yet? Nope. Although I do get glimmers. I’m off to chase one now. See you later.

The pleasant burn of arms pushing over the head toward the ceiling, and the neck and back arcing back trying to crown against the floor, you realize just how carefully you have been carrying yourself all day. Like a hermit crab in a shell ready to crack, I have been hunched for three days, protecting the small twisted pain that so easily becomes a kind of phenomenological disembowelment.

Why now? I don’t know. I do know the pain will be back but for now it is taking a hiatus. Or I am inhabiting a temporary lacuna in which everything slides against each other easily.   I wonder what a hermit crab’s life would be like without that delicate abdomen, that vulnerability that requires its borrowed home? Doesn’t matter really, it is what is. And once the crab finds its safety it can go along just fine.

The sense of release is enormous.

I am in two minds about that. Katagiri says that if you expect something from your practice, essentially from your life, you will find despair. It’s the flickering shadow just at the edge of your vision. You know something is there and the pull to look there, to turn this way and that to find that thing is enormous. The only thing that can be done about it is to acknowledge that this flicker is there and beyond our ability to grasp, to see. It is a cruel thing Katagiri says, this knowledge of impermanence. There is nothing to be done about it except accept it for what it is and to stay with one’s eyes, ears and feet on the place where one actually is. Keep struggling after the flicker and all that happens is constant stumbling. It can be quite painful.

(Qunqun – if you’re reading this and disagree with my summary of what Katagiri says please say so in the comments.)

So here I am resisting the cold and the snow and I live in Canada. Pretty silly really. So how deal with that?  When things are in alignment with where I am it is easy and life is such fun. What I find difficult is bringing myself in alignment with the world when it is in disharmony with how I usually am. For example, I like walking but I have a damaged inner ear so I find it annoyingly easy to misstep; snow and ice does not help me stay on my feet and falling is frakking painful. Humans are coded to avoid pain. So in situations where pain is immanent I tense, trying to find a way to avoid it. That tension that precedes an event is what I think of as suffering. The fall is just pain. The odd thing is that suffering is far more debilitating than pain itself.

At this moment, at this place in my learning about what Katagiri has to teach, what I can do is understand this distinction between pain and suffering and try as much as is possible to attend to the moment and accept pain for what it is. By doing this, I find, suffering blows away like fog in a warm wind. So when the next cold bout comes, and it will, what I can do is not expect myself to be different but to say it is cold, slippery and I am afraid. OK. What of it? What is wrong with fear?

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.