“I want to say at least something about the pain existing in the world
today. Consumerist ideology, which has become the most powerful and
invasive on the planet, sets out to persuade us that pain is an
accident, something that we can insure against. This is the logical
basis for the ideology’s pitilessness.Everyone knows, of course, that pain is endemic to life, and wants to
forget this or relativise it. All the variants of the myth of a Fall
from the Golden Age, before pain existed, are an attempt to relativise
the pain suffered on earth. So too is the invention of Hell, the
adjacent kingdom of pain-as-punishment. Likewise the discovery of
Sacrifice. And later, much later, the principle of Forgiveness. One
could argue that philosophy began with the question: why pain?Yet, when all this has been said, the present pain of living in the
world is perhaps in some ways unprecedented.I write in the night, although it is daytime.”
— John Berger, “Written in the night: The pain of living in the present world”
Tag: pain
“Memory, wherever you touch it, gives pain,”
— George Seferis, tr. by Rex Warner, from Selected Poems;“Memory I,”
“As for their reception, suppose you’re in love and someone’s mistreating (mal aimé) you, you don’t say, ‘Hey, you can’t hurt me this way, I care!’ you just let all the different bodies fall where they may, and they always do ‘flay after a few months. But that’s not why you fell in love in the first place, just to hang onto life, so you have to take your chances and try to avoid being logical. Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you.”
— Frank O’Hara, Personism
In life, as in novels, we are aware of the pain of others, we feel their suffering, only when we learn to love them.
Elena Ferrante, in an interview about the writing process behind the Neapolitan novels
“The new tyranny, like other recent ones, depends to a large degree on a systematic abuse of language. Together we have to reclaim our hijacked words and reject the tyranny’s nefarious euphemisms; if we do not, we will be left with only the word shame. Not a simple task, for most of its official discourse is pictorial, associative, evasive, full of innuendoes. Few things are said in black and white. Both military and economic strategists now realise that the media play a crucial role, not so much in defeating the current enemy as in foreclosing and preventing mutiny, protests or desertion.
[…]
Those who have different visions or hopes for the world, along with those who cannot buy and who survive from day to day (approximately 800 million) are backward relics from another age, or, when they resist, either peacefully or with arms, terrorists. They are feared as harbingers of death, carriers of disease or insurrection. When they have been downsized (one of the key words), the tyranny, in its naivety, assumes the world will be unified. It needs its fantasy of a happy ending. A fantasy which in reality will be its undoing. Every form of contestation against this tyranny is comprehensible. Dialogue with it, impossible. For us to live and die properly, things have to be named properly. Let us reclaim our words.
This is written in the night. In war the dark is on nobody’s side, in love the dark confirms that we are together.”
“Written in the night: The pain of living in the present world”
by John Berger, Le Monde diplomatique, February 2003
Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is a marathon of the mundane. For well over three hours we are asked to watch the quotidian chores of the titular character, a middle-aged widow. The viewer’s mind is set free to ponder Jeanne’s motivation (and the film’s purpose) by the long and lingering shots of the domestic routines. Some viewers interpret the movie’s crawling pace as a way to relay the boredom of a housewife’s life. This video essay offers a different reading by combining Akerman’s meticulous visuals with the precise writing of Susan Sontag.
(Source: https://player.vimeo.com/)
I have lost silence, and the regret I feel over that is immeasurable. I cannot describe the pain that invades a man once he has begun to speak. It is a motionless pain that is itself pledged to muteness; because of it, the unbreathable is the element I breathe. I have shut myself up in a room, alone, there is no one in the house, almost no one outside, but this solitude has itself begun to speak, and I must in turn speak about this speaking solitude, not in derision, but because a greater solitude hovers above it, and above that solitude, another still greater, and each, taking the spoken word in order to smother it and silence it, instead echoes it to infinity, and infinity becomes its echo.
Maurice Blanchot, Death Sentence (L’Arrêt de Mort, 1948)
countervisuality 