Pain

What is pain? Many artists, whatever be their medium, attempt to express pain in all it's forms. But has it yet been defined? It has been categorized, surely. But actually defined?

Within the Writing Project, I struggle with the concept of pain in all of its manifestations, emotional, physical, spiritual, mental, (not to be confused with the emotional which I will explain in a bit.) But what is it?

Or should I ask: What is it not?

In the emotional category, pain is usually likened to an absence of someting such as love. (I will not dare to define love just yet. Let a braver soul take that on.) The absence of something is not limited to love, but it encompasses the loss of a loved one, a loss of an interest, loss of a thing, loss of an idea and more loss. Very painful. A hole. ( Such a cliche there.)

Then there is rage. Rage is very painful since it errupts from the emotional loss. But there is another kind of rage. A bestial dichotomy that tears at the spirit which then leads to spiritual pain. "Who and what am I?" are the questions asked in this moment. It is sickening, entrapping, making one want to crawl into a corner because to emerge into the light would reveal the true nature of our "natural" existance. And that is both illegal and immoral.

Physical pain is never fun, and if it is, then it's the emotional pain that one strives to escape through the physical. Masochism is a serious business.

Voices and delusions in an otherwise "normal" mind bring about the mental turmoil. Again, one is trapped with no "rational" way out except through either medication or masochism, medication leading to the pain of loss of one's true self.

A circular and twisted motion, pain is. And it is a motion that traverses through the emotional, mental, spiritual and physical in such a way as to create the illusion of no seperation.

Pain is then illusion and one which is the most insidious because we all feel it and therefore believe that it is very, very real.

What a pain in the ass, that is.