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| Here's a lovely poem by Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai--a piece of a longer poem sequence from his book Open Closed Open (2000). It raises an interesting question for psychoanalysts. Everything we've been taught about repression and, more recently, about dissociation would have us predict that we should be better able to talk about joy than about pain--and yet....
The precision of pain and the blurriness of joy. I'm thinking
how precise people are when they describe their pain in a doctor's office.
Even those who haven't leaned to read and write are precise:
"This one's a throbbing pain, that one's a wrenching pain,
this one gnaws, that one burns, this is a sharp pain
and that--a dull one. Right here. Precisely here,
yes, yes." Joy blurs everything. I've heard people say
after nights of love and feasting, "It was great,
I was in seventh heaven." Even the spaceman who floated
in outer space, tethered to a spaceship, could say only, "Great,
wonderful, I have no words."
The blurriness of joy and the precision of pain--
I want to describe, with a sharp pain's precision, happiness
and blurry joy. I learned to speak among the pains.
(From "The precision of pain and the blurriness of joy: the touch of longing is everywhere", a poem sequence by Yehuda Amichai in Open Closed Open, (translated form the Hebrew by Bloch and Kronfeld) Harcourt NY, 2000, p. 105.)
Clearly Amichai is on to a deep truth. How do we account for this fluency about what is painful--and our relative wordlessness when it comes to joy?
Comments welcome!
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What a lovely poem, and an interesting question!
Perhaps a greater facility with describing our pain comes from our need to do so. That we turn experience into symbol (language) allows us to examine and understand, and thus to transform the dissociated and repressed from the blurriness of timeless and untranslated repetition to the pecision of symbolic integration.
("I learned to speak among the pains.")
I would respectfully submit that plenty of poets and others have managed to express joy wonderfully, but this is far more rare than those who write about the many facets of pain. I have some sense that we don't need words to experience (or share) joy - though it's a nice rarity when we do have them as reminders. Ironically, maybe it's less important to understand joy symbolically BECAUSE it's not repressed or dissociated...
Priscilla Butler
Robert Prince writes:
Henry: Beautiful. Thank you. Poetry is the best words in the best order. Other comment is superfluous.
A psychologist friend, Bernard Weitzman, who is a practicing Buddhist sent me a comment from his perspective on the specificity of pain and the "panoramic" quality of pleasure:
Pain can be understood as any sensation that fixates our attention. The smaller and sharper the sensation the more it threatens to suck us in and obliterate us.... The pain becomes the world.
Pleasure can be understood as any sensation that invites us to allow our attention to relax and become panoramic. Some studies in the sexology field have held that orgasm is induced by tightening the musculature. It has been argued that this is enacted when the acceleration of pleasure becomes too threatening to the integrity of consciousness.
--
Henry Seiden
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