Pain and Art
After great pain, a formal feeling comes
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?
The Feet, mechanical, go round
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone
This is the Hour of Lead
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons recollect the Snow
First-Chill-then Stupor-then the letting go
Here we have one of the poems of Emily Dickinson, a careful study of pain, or the after effects thereof. Despite how indignant some people get after its arrival, pain is a part of this existence. Freud actually theorized that it was such an inevitable part of existence that even the first one-celled organism to slide from the muck had enough angst to consider suicide. However we try to avoid, however we attempt to reframe, and whatever measures we take pain will come.
The measure of a life then is not so much a quantification of sufferings but a matter of how one deals with those insults. Stopping is to be defeated. Voluntary numbing is a stalemate. Moving on is life’s triumph.
Writing, like any art, offers one avenue of triumph, the opportunity to take something negative and use it in creative expression, to produce something positive out of the experience. The sting of love lost becomes the melancholy sonnet. The emptiness of death becomes the vessel for an ode to life still left to live. Bitter disappointment becomes strident challenge to concede the battle but press on in the war. If nothing else, writing becomes a place outside of one’s head to put the rot and filth and stink that invades in the wake of injury. However the fates conspire, whatever evil this way comes, and whatever ill wind blows victory over the pain will come.
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