The poetry of pain
News Desk
Published 06.21.06
I want to dazzle your pain
so it may leap out
and begin to dance
-- Ekiwa Adler Beléndez
It isn't often you find yourself in the presence of an obvious prodigy.
But such was the case last week when I attended a panel discussion at
the Mythic Journeys Conference here. The topic was pain and the center
of attention was Ekiwa Adler Beléndez, an 18-year-old poet from Mexico
who published his first volume of poetry when he was 12.
Ekiwa has cerebral palsy and, because of radical surgeries, knows
severe pain intimately. He is a mesmerizing speaker. His fingers are
impossibly long -- like spider legs, he says in one poem -- and his
voice is full of "amazing composure," as Mary Oliver writes in the
preface to his book, The Coyote's Trace.
I attended this particular discussion because, as I've written here
before, I've spent the last 16 months dealing with pain. Three
unrelated surgeries, including two emergency ones, have made pain a
relatively constant companion. And the pain has evoked a nagging
question: "What in hell have I done wrong to go through this?"
I certainly didn't get an answer at the discussion. Coleman Barks, also
on the panel, quoted Rumi, the Sufi poet whose work he is famous for
translating: "Love comes with a knife." If love is inevitably painful,
then life itself must be painful, as the Buddha asserts in the first
noble truth.
But, I silently protested, there is the ordinary pain of existence and
then there is pain of such extraordinary intensity that it seems to
take you out of the world. As with depression, it's difficult to
describe what relentless physical pain does to the psyche. Four months
after surgery on both my knees, my pain is minimal now. When I try to
remember the worst days of the pain, I draw a blank.
A friend who underwent two major surgeries two days apart when he was
12 reports the same experience. He can't remember three weeks of his
life at all and, he says, "I can't even explain the pain." Another
friend, who is living with fibromyalgia, says he has often prayed to
die. His pain is so "beyond description" that he has a device attached
to his spine that blocks nerve impulses. He regards his continued
existence as something beyond explanation, too -- something of another
world, like the pain itself. Ekiwa read a moving poem dictated to his
father after a difficult operation to repair his scoliosis. His first
response to everything is poetic. He turns to metaphor, whose virtue is
that it allows one to approach the most difficult subject indirectly.
We cannot exactly describe the world to which pain takes us but we can
say what it resembles. "I am in the white prison/of those with
disjointed feverish limbs," he told his father as he awakened from the
anesthesia. At the end of the poem he claims his given name, Ekiwa,
which means "warrior."
That is something I recall: amazement that I could even endure the
pain. It kept me awake until I was too exhausted to stay awake, and
after I slept, it returned in a variety of ways: "Is your pain
unpredictable/quick and sharp like a humming bird/or slow and familiar
like an old house?" Ekiwa writes in a poem to his mother.
While Ekiwa simply communicated his experience and what he has tried to
make of it, others tended to engage in what another audience member
called "romanticizing" and "spiritualizing" of pain. Nobody advocated
the extreme position of Mother Theresa, who thought pain was ennobling.
She would not permit the dying to take pain medication.
Nor was there that attitude I often encountered in the early days of
the AIDS epidemic. People like Louise Hay endeavored to answer my
question -- "What did I do wrong for this to happen?" -- by telling
people they were suffering a spiritual malady. When one of my friends
was hours from death and traveling far in that other world of profound
pain, members of his support group surrounded his bed and told him his
death would be a victory for "negative thinking."
There was none of that at the panel discussion. But there was the
excited depiction of love's knife as a kind of instrument of surgery
itself -- a tool for exposing the nexus of pain and a new
consciousness. I suppose pain, randomly visiting, could potentiate a
transformation, but what intensely felt event in life doesn't do that?
And who says the change is always positive?
"There was nothing spiritual about my pain," says my friend who had
surgery at 12, "except that I begged God not to let me die. Write this
about pain: 'It hurts really bad.'"
cliff....@creativeloafing.comcliff.bostock@creativeloafing.com
Cliff Bostock holds a Ph.D. in depth psychology.
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