Monday, November 22, 2004

Pain

Pain is a strange thing, isn't it? It is indescribable, but you immediately know what it is if you feel it. Mental pain is a whole different issue of course. It's more elusive, fickle, hard to track down, even hard to feel.We use bodily pain as a metaphor but that does not necessarily mean that the two are in any way connected. The connection arises when we induce bodily pain to represent it. I do now understand girls who carve their arms and legs with knives. If you can create a representation of what you feel inside on your bodily surface, the pain becomes embodied in your scars, more concrete but also localized and less ambiguous. As in Kafkas "Strafkolonie" the law is written into you, into your body, because one cannot reach out and touch the mind in the same way.
I feel like being consumed by a fever. The heat rises inside, but my body is contained, disconnected from the outside world. I don't sweat, I feel swelled, filled with rising heat impossible to cool. But the point where the body reconnects to the world and you break out into sweat and feel it on your surface (how soothing it is!) and you can let it all out, this point I can't seem to reach. As if my tears were running down my face on the inside.