Pain

PAIN is an integral part of life, and as such has become an integral part of language. Words for pain abound over histories, dialects, accents, body-parts and bodily-functions. Words in themselves can be pain’s cause, and its effects expressed in the boundary between their sense and nonsense. The sharp smart of an ach! Or the guttural lament of a groan, a wail. The word pain is an abstraction of these paralinguistic transcriptions – ach! agh! ouch! – an ‘umbrella term’ prototypical of our medicalisation of experience. Descriptions of pain produce some of the most basic translations between the body and conscious experience. What is it specifically that hurts? How much? And if I press here? Such a dilemma appears to have grown into a common concern across the years. In his C18th Enquiry into the Sublime & Beautiful the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke wrote:

Pain and pleasure are simple ideas, incapable of definition.

And likewise, in her 1925 essay On Being Ill – written shortly after experiencing a ‘nervous breakdown’ – Virginia Woolf opined:

The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare, Donne, Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him.

However, pain as both a word and a concept is invested with a much richer history than these difficulties in translation may suggest – a history which may well provide an account for these issues (and perhaps some others besides).

Etymologically, pain and punishment are intricately bound. The Ancient Greek noun ποινή (or poinḗ) from which pain is derived meant blood money or wergeld, the compensation paid for a life, a murder or injury. This sense passed through into the Latin poena which translates most literally as penalty, hardship or – in some figurative cases – execution. The Latin idiom, ‘poenas dare’ roughly translates into today’s ‘to pay the price’ or more literally ‘to suffer punishment.’ So to experience pain – or peine in the Old French derived from poena — is to suffer, but suffering was, in this sense, often the intention.

According to the OED, in its journey from Latin through Old French into Anglo-Norman and Old English peine (or paine) retained this sense of a ‘legal’ (albeit physical) punishment from Roman law and added to it a Christian inflection as ‘suffering thought to be endured by souls in hell’. This emerges in the Old English of the C11th and C12th – as the effects of the Christian faith begin to filter out into Germanic and Celtic languages – through the word pine (a strange midpoint between pain and fine). In a C13th manuscript written by an anonymous scribe (subsequently collected in the C19th by Ferdinand Holthausen under the title Vices and Virtues) we can read this sentiment clearly:

Ne mai ic þenchen, ne mid muðe seggen, ne on boke write, alle ðo pinen of helle. [I may not think, nor say with mouth, nor write in book, all the pains of hell.]

Such an ecclesiastical sense unsurprisingly found its way into the earliest definitions of the Middle and Modern English term pain – for example, in a phrase attributed to Saint Mary Magdalen (written at the beginning of the C14th), we read of such a distinction between pain (hell) and heaven:

God us schilde fram peyne and to heouene us bringue! [God shield us from pain and bring us to heaven!]

The more established legalistic senses also found their way into the earliest uses of pain – for example, in the South English Legendary manuscript (from which the quote above is also taken), we read of a King commanding an audience ‘under penalty’ at his Clarendon Palace estate:

Þare-fore ich hote ov euerechone: þat ȝe beon þat ilke dai At mi maner at Clarindone: with-outen ani de-lai, For-to confermi þis lawes: ope peyne þat i schal ou sette [Therefore, I command each one of you: that you be on that same day at my manor at Clarendon: without any delay, to confirm these laws: under the penalty that I shall impose upon you]

Such use is also apparent in the slightly later styling of the term through the phrase ‘on pain of…’ evidenced, for example, in John Lydgate and Benedict Burgh’s Secrets of the Old Philosophers:

Afftir his lawes / his statutys to Obeye. Peyne of deth / no wyght be Contrarye, What he Comaundeth / his byddyng to with-seye;

However, it was not long before these specific legal and liturgical senses subdued and more general ideas of pain as any bodily or mental distress displaced previous Old English terms such as ece (ache) and sār (sore).¹ Indeed, the phrase ‘aches and pains’ may be understood as a hangover from this doubling between Germanic and Latin roots. In Chaucer’s Monk’s Tale (an excerpt of his C14th Canterbury Tales), for instance, we read of specific, invisible, intolerable bodily pains:

God for his manace hym so soore smoot With invisible wounde, ay incurable, That in his guttes carf it so and boot That his peynes weren importable And certeinly the wreche was resonable, For many a mannes guttes dide he peyne.

[God because of his threatening so sorely smote him With invisible wound, ever incurable, That in his guts it carved so and bit That his pains were intolerable And certainly the punishment was reasonable, For many a man's gut did he pain.]²

What is most evident in this excerpt from Chaucer, and in this general narrative of pain’s entry into the English language, is a latent moralism attached to the term. Pain, in its relation to fines and penalties, often appears as some form of retribution or sacrifice, the consequence of some fault or heroic effort, whether the pained know it or not. Much of this again is informed by the Christian faith (which may, in turn be informed by this etymology) and, as we move into the C16th and C17th, a newly-formed Puritanism. In his book The Conquest of Pain, Peter Fairley asks:

Throughout the Middle Ages, the great monasteries built all over Britain became the sole centres of medicine, from which herbal remedies, along with philosophy and reminders about morality, were obtainable. One of these reminders was that Christ had suffered on the cross. Was it not right, therefore, that all men should experience suffering to some degree?

In the 1980s Jane Fonda replied, popularising the phrase “No Pain, No Gain” in her aerobics workout videos, simplifying this narrative considerably. Two decades later in 2005 professor David B. Morris, author of The Culture of Pain, summarised this neo-puritan attitude:

'No pain, no gain' is an American modern mini-narrative: it compresses the story of a protagonist who understands that the road to achievement runs only through hardship.

Within this mini-narrative pain approaches something of a virtue, to be courted and desired, an inevitable aspect – if not in fact a shortcut – to success. In her 2003 essay Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag writes:

It seems that the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked. For many centuries, in Christian art, depictions of hell offered both of these elemental satisfactions.

Is such an attitude naive? To in some way covet pain whether in practice or representation? Burke, in his Enquiry of 1757 noted that there “is no spectacle we so eagerly pursue, as that of some uncommon and grievous calamity.” The question of ‘desensitisation’ is certainly not new, it is in many ways a foundation of modernity as a whole.

Perhaps it is tempting to try and do away with pain altogether – not as a fact of life (although many have tried), but its indeterminacy. In Old English each pain-point had a specific word attached to it: bānwærc (bone-ache), heortece (heartache), mūþsār (mouth-sore), endwerc (ass-pain), the list goes on… It is seductive to imagine such an itinerary extending to infinity, an empirical scale of thresholds on which one might plot their aches and sores against those of others, to rationalise impersonally and act accordingly.

Pain’s etymology highlights its relation to injustice, its continued conceptualisation within systems of jurisprudence. Within this context one may feel it particularly unjust to describe as ‘painful’ an awkward encounter the same way one does a war. But maybe it is precisely this term's inadequacy, its inherent injustice, that can provide a space for thinking pain differently? The hypocrisy of the anglophone world in its linguistic and material construction? The question of whose pain is labelled as such and whose isn't?³

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This article was written for a monthly column – The Remainder – in the Sticky Fingers monthly mailout.

This article was read at the Sticky Fingers 5th Birthday Party and subsequently broadcast on Repeater Radio (at 29:00 below).

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Footnotes

1. Interestingly (and somewhat speculatively), the Old English noun ece from which we get the contemporary ache – commonly understood today as a more long-term ailment – may be compared or related to the adverb éce, meaning eternally or perpetually. ↩

2. https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/pages/monks-prologue-and-tale ↩

3. To set aside the sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics for a reflection on how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may—in ways we might prefer not to imagine— be linked to their suffering [...] is a task for which [pain’s history supplies] only an initial spark. ↩