Speaking of Pain

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!

[permanent link] [3 comments]