A Body in Pain

“Pain always occurs in the singular.”

Before pain comes the body.

Through subjectivation we objectify the impossible¹, the unnameable: the other, another and death². In other words, first there is the body and only afterwards does the world come into being.

Not long ago I underwent surgery for a small tumour that had kept me from falling asleep for months and months, even years. Throughout that time I came to savour sleeplessness: never quite falling asleep, being exhausted, tired and desperate to sleep and at last be able to rest. Rest became an impossible dream. Pain kept me awake, in a wakefulness without sleep.

During all those waking hours, awake between night and day, I was able to observe my body in states that had until then eluded me. An endless night, a duel at dawn with pain that would not cease. Pain, that disruptive and strange element of existence in which one becomes disoriented and relocates oneself, warns us, predisposes us and also helps us to remember. Pain is difficult to forget. Pain makes us think.

Perhaps it is good to know something of pain.

Those who have tried to think through the temporality of chronic pain agree that, once it settles in as a condition of life, time ceases to be experienced as continuity. The body disengages from time and folds in on itself, opening onto a vast inner temporal space, deep and apparently eternal. Pain, as Marcela Queiróz Luna rightly reminds us,³ organises experience and activates the fear of one’s own dissolution. Fear is made to contain the body. We stop before what frightens us. Because fear overcomes us, it reaches every corner of our bodies, of the entire world, when panic spreads. No one escapes feeling fear at some point.

Perhaps that is why bad governments that do not listen to the people instil fear and amplify it among the population. Friedrich Nietzsche knew how to locate the organ of fear in the ear. The same sound frightens us more in the darkness of night. We cannot turn a deaf ear to fear. Like fear, the ear compels us to remain alert. No one can escape the pain they suffer.

Within the cycle of its pain, every body finds a state of quiet suspension that soothes and silences the representation of the sign, its discursive configuration, in a temporality that defers, disagrees and differentiates us. In pain, time, duration and horizon dissolve. Everything and nothing are and are present at once. Everything seems to be there, suspended, like a ghost, like a vague memory. Reality itself is held in suspension, like a note, a tone repeated without end. Pain and, perhaps, music invite us to give meaning to our lives: they are the gravitational force of the human soul, of existence itself.

Nietzsche suffered every kind of pain through much of his life: headaches, intestinal problems, insomnia and vomiting that prevented him from reading or writing with ease or for very long. His suffering may have made him more comfortable with aphorisms. Feeling short of time helps one use it well and reduce distractions to a minimum. Perhaps aphorisms, like music, ultimately became his only consolation. Nietzsche was a renowned music lover, a good pianist and, up to a point, one of Richard Wagner’s most faithful followers. Music was for him the best means of escaping the sordidness of the world, as Ramón Andrés tells us: the history of music could be traced through consolation.

In pain, music can sound horizontal. Indeed, this was my only consolation in the face of bodily pain, without rest or sleep, and the suffering of feeling myself irremediably finite: the horizontal listening to delicate, repetitive, microtonal music made of minimal variations. Through that listening—horizontal—and from this position without a horizon, thanks to pain, I descended into places I had never heard before. A flayed listening to my own being and sole destiny. Where hell becomes heaven, Dante descends and beloved Orpheus ascends, not without pain, not without surrender. In those moments I was immersed in the Acheron of existence itself. I was crossing that river of pain which, for the Greeks, marked the place where the underworld’s river Acheron branched out: an unhealthy marsh in a desolate landscape, where the ferryman Charon carried the souls of the newly dead into the realm of Hades.

There, where the place of stammering is born, where the impossibility of language, of the sign, springs forth. There, where the landscape hurts, music sounds and consolation arises.

Pain locates us, positions us, places us before the mirror of our biography. It forces us to relocate ourselves, not only in relation to our bodies but perhaps especially within our lives, or within what we think remains of them. Pain lays us down, and in fact we tend to remember more through pain than through joy, except in the final moments. Or so they say. It is pain that writes, forcefully and in invisible ink, the meaning of our experience across our bodies. What hurts, sounds. Perhaps every pain has a soundtrack. Perhaps listening to that horizontal music today returns me, unsettles me, before that mirror. Listening seems to leave no trace, yet it leaves an imprint.

For Pascal Quignard, music is always a deeper ontological apprehension, more than human, always beyond. And perhaps it is true that something lies beyond, something music tends to bring back to us. Hunters, with their lures and calls, know this well: they attract what feeds them. We are hunted in listening; we are flesh and prey to music, to the senselessness of life. Music may therefore have no meaning, yet it grants life its most secret condition and the eternal possibility of meaning.

Melody exceeds speech: before the unsayable, within silence, melody is violence itself. The rending of the world’s wakefulness is the nocturnal cry, without a future, the last cry. At night, listening is afraid.

Perhaps, then, at the dawn of language we should place stammering: the word at the limit of speech, silence on the verge of speaking. We must learn to see in stammering a suspension of speech towards silence and a suspension of silence within speech. Silence and death have a name that the word expels, where silence falls silent. In stammering, silence inclines towards speech. It has no voice, no utterance and no meaning in itself.