The Pain of It All

the bodies are always ours, every single one

Last night, I had my annual there’s too much pain breakdown. I howled uncontrollably for twenty minutes, mind casting back and forth between different kernels of horror: animal exploitation, destroyed land, Gazan children, precarious workers, Trump’s fascism, a warming world. With every new thought my heart ached deeply, wounded with the unintelligibility of it all. There is no way to make sense of the scale of the destruction, not in its entirety. We can understand pockets of it, or even the greater picture when observing from above. But the thick of it is harrowing sorrow, a tangled web of steel. It keeps us separate from each other, traps us in our little corners where all we can do is wail into the silence and hope someone can hear us, that someone knows what this is we’re feeling because we ourselves can barely begin to grasp this thing let alone wrestle with it.

Since I was the small child who was obsessed with nature documentaries and horrified by the emotional whiplash of watching them, the thing that has always most upset me is the idea of violence against innocence. I think even then, innocence was defined as those who could not speak, or could not understand, because once a human being can grasp the possibility of a reason stoking violence they, surely, are no longer innocent, burdened as they are with the reality of the world. That cruelty and horrors befell children and animals was a great source of agony, then and now. There is an element of consent that comes with an explanation - the consent of existing within a world, at the very least; of inhabiting a shared reality that language creates. It is not a meaningful consent by any means, but any sliver of understanding provides the means to scrabble at a sense of control, even if that control is an illusion. The sheer powerlessness that must overcome a creature who can never know why it suffers immensely has always crippled me.

I suppose this is when we come to face the fact that no matter what story we create to justify or explain pain, it never gets to the heart of the truth which is that pain hurts, make it stop. The story may provide the feeling that we have the power to make it stop or at least by alleviating it, but what is there, really, to understand about pain? That it can befall creatures without the linguistic skills to make sense of excuses should show that pain has no place in language. Its universality escapes comprehension. It merely is, and we, while experiencing it, are merely with it, in isolation. There are no words that make pain better, only words which signpost that someone sees you, they hear you, that they are there with you, and if they are there with you then there must also be a different world, a without pain. That is the hope that words provide: they turn the threads that connect us into ropes that we can pull ourselves along, back to each other. If pain is endless, shards ripped from the space-time continuum, then words find the edges of those shards, the border where, just over the edge, we can find ourselves again.

But what about those without words? How can they ever know in that shattering moment of pain that there is another place to come back to? How can they feel for the edges if they have no word for them? How can they hear the call that another world is also there, a world without pain? How can they ever know how sorry we are? How can they know it’s not their fault? How can they know we see them? How can they ever know that we’re here with them, too?

But would you tell them, if you could, that at its very core, it was all for nothing? That their lands were ripped away and their homes destroyed and their bodies exploited so that some people somewhere can feel powerful? Maybe if all the creatures mankind has endangered could speak and we could explain that their sacrifice was noble and we were grateful and the world we had built was beautiful and we were making space for them too and we would never have to do it again — maybe then, just maybe, they could forgive us. But that is not the world they suffer for. The world they suffer for is narrow and cruel and cold and the only sense in its vast, meaningless project is when we feel each others hands’ that reach out through pages and canvas and instruments and laughter and we hold on tight. Those hands make medicine and shelter and soup in large vats for the hungry. Those hands raise their pens in the face of fascists and place bulbs firmly in the earth. Those hands sign petitions and paint signs and throw rocks. If the voiceless felt the touch of those hands maybe they wouldn’t suffer.

Show me a hand I can bite. I don’t want to feel powerless and futile and lost in the incomprehensibility of the sheer scale of it all. I want to find my footing here on this land and growl down the barrel of a gun. I want to screech from the skies and beat my chest at intruders. I want to swarm an enemy and capsize a boat with my very own body. I want to break a skull in my jaw and stampede a convoy. I want to swallow a body that’s bigger than mine and digest him slowly. I want to tear down the doors of the history with my own claws and roar at anyone who defies my right to be seen, to be heard, to be here.

I want to resist, with you. Hold on.

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