Notes on Pain & Pleasure

We are born screaming and not with joy. We are pulled from a borderless warmth, a nourishing darkness, into a bright hell of noise and hard surfaces. Hunger, cold, and restraint shock us as edges emerge. We are inarticulate but we know we need and feel need’s hurt so we cry for help, and if we are lucky and loved, we get it. Pain seems the organizing principle of new life: recognizing it, signaling it to others, dissolving it in feeding’s pleasure. New life is a raw deal; protest seems the only sensible response.

I stare at a Y-shaped scar on my left palm, the lines pale and delicate. I stare and try to see the moment I do not remember but about which I’ve been told. My crazed kid brain was for some mute reason obsessed with a particular chainlink fence. Clambering up it at a maniacal pace, embraced totally in the simian pleasure of climbing, I slammed my left hand down atop the fence then screamed and flailed but stayed trapped, pettily impaled, hand attached to the fence as my panicked squirming works the chainlink’s topmost twist through my little paw’s meat, and I am shouting and hanging from it, my negligible weight staked to the metal, kicking with sneakered feet searching for holes, and then my mom grabs me and carefully extricates me from the metal and the metal from me. The wound is clean and easy, so much so that no one remembers whether or not it was stitched. When looking at a scar you incurred as a kid in some prelapsarian fit, when you see a scar whose day you do not know, you face a pain belonging to an other, to a story, to no one at all. Yet the scar seems to grow with you, to match your shape.

As a preteen on Halloween night I snapped my arm in half by diving on a plush lawn while pretending to be spooked by my friend’s cool zombie makeup. I heard a pop and knew something was wrong so I walked to the passenger side of my mom’s car and said quietly, “I think my arm’s broken.” My mother, warm in the overhead’s amber light: “Very funny, get in.” I looked down at the car’s cold door in the suburban dark and repeated emphatically: “I think my arm is broken.” Two seconds passed during which my mom registered the seriousness of her kid, then then she pushed open the passenger door and we both see it together: my arm is the letter V, skin young and unbroken but somehow horrid, a wrongness of body too right-angled for biology. Oh shit then we’re barreling towards the hospital—ghoul-attired friends in the backseat silent and white and tense like motel bedsheets—and then I’m put in a chair and rolled into the ER for the professionals to ratchet the arm out of its instinctive sling of hurt, my little animal frame collapsing into itself and wanting to hide in its belly the shameful asymmetry, in order to do an X-ray—then the pain comes hard and blunt like a big dumb mallet and I feel the oddly-angled bone screech against the flat plastic tray and then I’m out, under, the bone is set, and then I have a cool cast to show off at school. The pain was strong, the worst I’d felt until that point, but the consequent pleasures of sympathy, curiosity, and time away from drudgery were stronger. I learned then that pain could temporarily rearrange one’s life to be more relaxed. Suffering, I was suddenly the center of attention.

Teenagers are unwilling participants in an MKUltra-esque program wherein they are made to pretend to be professional adults while catastrophically high on a mix of hormones whose effects are the simultaneous experience of insecurity, anger, self-righteousness, self-loathing, rapid physical mutation, and a craven and totalizing desire to fuck. The heartache of breakups seems quaint, even Victorian, in comparison.

The busy adult tends to treat some new pain like a ghost that will go away if you stop looking at it. But a ghost does not go away if you stop looking at it. I learned this the hard way after nursing a limp, an ache between my thigh and abdomen, and sharp bladed pains slicing through my guts for a couple months straight. A high fever was the klaxon that blared me into a doctor’s appointment. A nice medical professional stated my new fate: you live in the hospital now. A surgeon was somber and practical while summarizing my odds. I told my mom and fiancée what dead me would want to happen if I didn’t wake up. But there were also so many drugs involved, anti-inflammatories and opioids and analgesics and steroids and bile binders, stingrays and chiller-outers and hormone stokers and little tabs of oblivion, so I wasn’t actually very present while comically falling down the tight spiral staircase of chronic illness. The surgeon and his helpers cut out a stretch of guts gone bad then stapled me back together. I spent a month exhausted by the dull ache of healing flesh and rebuilding my capacities one shuffled step at a time, chunky ravens cackling at me from the trees as my wife held me up while we hobbled down the sidewalk in our hospital-embittered sweatpants. All this pain was supremely useful. It served as a clear and brutal instruction in the existence of limits, and demonstrated the care with which friends, family, and strangers are sometimes willing to swaddle me. And that I can endure baby-again crippling pain, a return to the original condition—though my screams of protest are now mostly silent, directed not at the cold air of individuated existence but instead at the multi-billion dollar corporations on whose products and services my little American life now depends.

Depression, an evil and totalizing illness, was for me like slowly drowning in a permanent fluid whose demiurgic properties bar all recognizable phenomena—pain, pleasure, motion, hope, patterns, anything. Back to the inchoate field of the newborn, basically, but with no appetite and way worse ideas. I’ve written at length about depression and its numbness so I won’t repeat those descriptions here. But while depressed I came to understand that pain can be much less useful than those irruptions of urgent sense into the plodding functionality of life; pain can be an arbitrary stay in an infinite country whose language you will not learn and whose borders you cannot find.

When I was a teenager trying hard to sober up from horniness, I had a Zen freakout. I read Wikipedia a lot and some books by Buddhists and started to meditate frequently. Meditation was a welcome pain, a harmless narcissism as Nassim Nicholas Taleb puts it, and a series of experiences in which I learned that hurting is not actually a cogent story about one’s life. You meditate often and long enough and you experience experiencelessness, a raw form of being in which “there” is only there and everything is simply everything and all the manic work of self-description framing most waking moments just drops away. It’s nice to take off the mask of the self sometimes. Nicer still to know the fragility of the great veil, at least if only you can sit still and breathe.

Another kind of pain creeps in the older you get. It’s the hurt that rolls in like a cold fog as you lose loved ones—friends, family, lovers, pets. Death happens and it feels like the ultimate expression of an arbitrary, petty power: what you needed was here but now it’s been taken away. Living’s silent ledger bears no account, no Why, and us survivors are left to sift through the How while we ache and ache and feel our hearts slowly die. Suicide is the worst of it, the act which most corrodes the necessary conviction in the possibility of meaning and community, and sometimes you get to kiss your friend before they go and sometimes instead you get a phonecall. After the initial shock of feeling at the bottom of some bombed-out hollow, of being pinned to a world so suddenly lesser, the pain of grief passes through you inconstantly, a hard and slow tutelage. You learn how to anticipate death, how to look at your parents differently, how to hold your dog’s face in your hands and let tears well up while trying to stay solid because if you took seriously that chasmic lonely yearning you feel while looking into their eyes you would very simply melt.

But that’s just the half of it. Or, gladly, less than half of it. Socrates ponderously wondered if pleasure is just the absence of pain and luckily we can stop thinking about that question since the answer is obviously No. See the free child feeling the pleasure innate in being a simple animal so new to the world, every horizon imaginable, every nap bringing easy relief, every slice of cake at a friend’s birthday party an ever-renewing commitment to the fundamental goodness of being a hungry body among friends. The sugar high in particular trills the early person into the thrill of the come up, and, when young, the ensuing tantrum remains only a speedbump on the smooth road to more free drugs. Regardless of the nostalgia brokers using the following fact to prey upon us, the realm of pleasure to be found in our first fictions, fantasies, and games is genuinely infinite. Such joy is skin-rippling and heady, similar in structure to the caffeine high preceding an adult’s creative work though of an obviously lesser intensity. Some of this pleasure is a function of realizing that things mustn’t be only what they are (the pleasure of imagination) and knowing that things can be whatever we make them (the pleasure of hope), and some of it is synonymous with the simple hedonism of sensing.

To know yourself as a child is to make your life a project. When I was a preteen, the internet was not yet a surveillance-happy shopping mall run by boring narcissists selling cult memberships, thus children hadn’t yet poisoned themselves with the notion that they are also brands. Regardless, earnest self-construction is an intrinsic part of growing up, and it can be joyful. As you interact with more and more stuff, as time pours into you, you come to know yourself as a loose and shifting set of affinities, of inclinations and curiosities and aversions, and there is great pleasure in manipulating these terms and living as if life were art. Eventually desire becomes more focused: you come to want to feel other people’s lips against your lips, then other people’s hips against your hips, then you realize the soft wholeness of being naked with and accepted by another, both stripped of all pretenses of culture, two animals glad and basking in the light of sated desire. The pleasure of the growing child is accumulative then resolutive. For the adult, pleasure can also be found in noticing such transitions.

Falling in love, really doing it, staking your whole life on persuading another to spend as many hours with you as possible, feeling telepathic and carnal and newly permeable by the miracles below the notice of those saps for whom life is some stale and staid business—it’s a lot of fun, and basically a drug trip as hallucinatory as any other. The pleasures of early love drip rich with narrative; you have a permanent purpose, a for-whom and with-whom, one above all, and are now a freshly-clad zealot in the crusade for a full life of fully feeling. The pleasures of the bets of children are mostly about learning: what can be gotten away with, what can be made, how do things work? The delight of the adult gambling on love is that of a great return to intensity: a conviction in reality’s automatic goodness, access to miraculousness, and a total sympathy with the inner working of the world are all on the table as long as your bet is big enough to inspire fear. And as the gamblers like to say, scared money don’t make money. Maybe my advice is a product of survivorship bias, but I will always advocate for presenting your whole self to another.

And of course there are the animal pleasures ruthlessly debased by markets and whose gratification is so often the ant-like work of adults seeking leisure: food, sex, spectacle. One can’t taste sugar as sweet as that kid birthday cake’s—aging is naturally an abrasive process in which our sensitivities are lessened—but one can instead recognize the whole material world conspiring somehow to put that sugar in your cupboard. It is good to know how things work, contrary to popular belief, and feeling embedded in history and aware of its motive complexities is an exquisite privilege of the thinking adult. It’s not as quick a fix as running around the yard screaming with your pants off while your parents scramble to grab you, but many such pleasures are confined to a particular age (though wait long enough and your kids will be the ones chasing you). Coming to understand oneself, another, or the situation at hand is difficult, but having the ability to do so is under-appreciated.

Good sex is fun and great sex dissolves the ego and proves the existence of God and intimates utopian peace and triumphs over pain/distance/failure and reaffirms the eternality of the imagination and the coextensive fate of humanity; good sex is fun and great sex is the future. I don’t want to sound too much like a hippy, though: I’m saying that great sex is a shared experience during which trust, desire, and unmediated expression all bolster one another, and that this is a model of what must happen more often if we are to live in a better world. (Perhaps I cannot escape the hippy accusations.) To be blunt, we are not free as a species until desire structures most of our waking lives, and an ability to speak and think fearlessly of sex is a precondition to such freedom.

There is pleasure in the little moments, too, as many kitchen-decorating slogans remind us, and, because life is a farce and not a tragedy, admitting the truth of at least some of the claims embroidered on hand towels is a necessary step towards enlightenment. The perennial philosophy—love is reality and then some, love is good, and everyone can know and feel this—is often evinced in quick moments of noticed beauty. Think of the Zen monk Ryōkan getting all his shit stolen then wishing wistfully to have given his thief the moon, or read a poem of Dickinson’s. It’s all there, everything you need, and that is true even in moments of agony and privation. Of course the people who espouse this fact are often killed, so it’s a bit of a hard thing to organize one’s life around. But it is worth remembering that regardless of pain’s long dominance of the headlines pleasure is a quality more essential to living, acting, and knowing. The permanence of love is like a statue whose shape pain mars, but once you regain your vision, existence rests in ecstasy, its folds as supple as Bernini’s stone.