I don’t know where to begin. With the pain or with the love?
We are born to love[1]; pain shapes the way we do.
The long form writing project I continue to work on (slowly, oh so slowly) has become an exploration of how pain and love develop over a lifetime to shape…well, decisions, behaviours…everything of human being.
The subject of my exploration is me, an N of 1. But nested in my family because the twisted strands of DNA encode a legacy of pain and love across and through generations. Also, my own children, the ongoing experience of raising them. We forget this, thinking of ourselves as separated bodies encased in skin, as individuals in isolation, ignoring how we bathe in oceans of influence from lives and cultures past and present, as well as the speculations of futures.
My long form creative writing project explores questions like, how the fuck did I get here? Why the fuck did I choose to do that? And weaves the territories of my parents’ lives through my own with questions like, fuck, how could they have done that differently? What the fuck happened to them to make them act like that? (Note: technically this is referred to as “reflection[2]”, writing from the point of view of “I” now, having gained (some?) wisdom).
Pain and love are not opposite ends of a spectrum; I understand them better as points of radiation. The rays of light, the spears of dark, overlap, intersect, bend and shape, illuminate and shade our experiences, our beliefs, our behaviours, our choices. And not just our own. This would make it simpler. Our love and our pain shape the vibrating energy between us, in all our relationships. All relationships, with the non-human animal and natural beings in the world as well (I include landscapes, rivers and rocks and sky and trees and more, as part of this comprehensive definition). And relationships are ever moving and changing, breaking apart and reforming. Writing is one way to explore and understand the dynamic process, the influences and impacts, of love and pain[3].
Shakespeare does not begin the play Romeo and Juliet with a focus on the passion between the lovers. Even before the first scene, the prologue hints the pain dooming the lovers to an early (and dramatic) death (with a scientifically prescient nod to trans generational trauma epigenetics!), “From forth the fatal loins of these two foes/ A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life”. And it ought be noted[4] Shakespeare’s very first scene, in a story about love, is set in “a public place” where conflict erupts in violence. In this work of art, love is sandwiched between violence and death. A more general question: does it have to be? Or, is it always? And that got me thinking about other novels and stories …I’ll get to this shortly.
The long project I’m working on continues to reveal its underbelly as I work with it. There was a lot of love in the house I grew up in. And there was a lot of pain. And it’s essential the writing capture both. It’s an audacious research question to ask, even gutsier to explore as a theme in writing: how do we learn to love?
Okay, okay, let’s be clear, I’m not asking how romance develops, how we fall in love with each other. I’m interested in the hypothetical, launching into the imaginary, can we learn to love with an ability to transcend our pain?
At the root of it all, when we “teach” love to our children as we raise them, how do we do it? In order to love (in its highest compassionate, empathetic, unconditional form) do we need to have experienced pain? To this last question…my gut says yes. Absolutely necessary. But why? Is there a love world I could imagine where pain is an unnecessary precondition[5]?
Then I remembered Dune, the 1965 science fiction novel by Frank Herbert, and the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear repeated throughout the novel:
“I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration[6].
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
In the novel, the litany is called upon when the protagonist Paul is made to endure torture as a test of his presence of mind. The litany and story doesn’t exactly transcend pain in the name of love …it remains quagmired in imperialism and an extraction economy[7]…BUT, the litany hints at the necessary discomfort and mind work one must endeavor to move through (or work with) pain, become calm, and progress with clearer (inner eye) sight “to see its path” (i.e., a learning has taken place, in short, mental growth).
A better audacious research question: as humans, as beings vibrating with the emotional between, how do we learn love can be bent through our pain and made brighter, deeper, even more true or real on the other side of it? Working with our pain, perhaps, is how we learn to love better. Perhaps the only way[8].
Of course, my long project won’t answer these questions. But exploring how love develops out of childhood is the first step on the path.
Off the top of my head, I can think of a few short stories illuminating moments of pain experienced in childhood—betrayal, shame, and fear—where the stories leave the reader with the sense of reverberating impact on the child’s subsequent lives.
Betrayal
Anton Chekhov’s <2000-word short story, “A Trifle from Real Life” focuses its moment of illumination on a conversation between a child, Aliosha, and an adult, Nikolai Belayeff. Nikolai, the boy’s mother’s boyfriend, persuades Aliosha to trust him with a secret (the boy visits his father regularly, against his mother’s wishes). Then, Nikolai, using the information as a point of leverage in his own relationship, reveals the secret to the boy’s mother. Aliosha stands there, stupefied and traumatized (the boy is described as being unable to hear his mother’s words) his trust trampled. I was amazed when I went back to read the story for this post how overtly Chekhov writes the boy’s painful lesson, “This was the first time in his life that he had come roughly face to face with deceit; he had never imagined till now that there were things in this world besides pastries and watches and sweet pears, things for which no name could be found in the vocabulary of childhood.”
The story’s title with the words “a trifle”, signals the teaching: how little consequence adults place on the small moments of teaching during a child’s development. I would not have noticed the subtleness of this illumination myself; I read about the technical move[9] Chekhov uses, a deft point of view switch, to lead the reader through the assumption an adult’s experience supersedes a child’s experience. Have lots more to say here but this post is getting waaaayyyy too long and I have more stories to get through.
Shame (specifically, sex shame)
“A North American Education” by Clark Blaise is a story about the sexual awakenings of a thirteen-year-old boy, Frankie Thibidault. Importantly, the story is a reminiscence from an adult Frankie point of view. It relays a series of attempts to “educate” himself about, and satisfy, his body’s physiological longings. Through each scene, the reader is close witness to Frankie’s crescendoing exposure to sex (yes, the scenes do play out like this, gradually building upon one another to the story’s climax), and how his exposures are (repeatedly) shaped by secrecy and shame.
The enjoyment of sex, making love with a person you love, is one of the most glorious (and natural) experiences a human can share. This story, which, incidentally, begins with several paragraphs of family histories going back generations (a nod to influential experiences, including genetic, familial and cultural inheritances), layer moments where normal sexual development becomes twisted through the actions and beliefs of the people we love. In this story, it’s Frankie’s father who shames him while also providing an education about how women might be treated (in this story, no surprise, not great).
I’ve written about Lauren Groff’s “The Wind” in a previous post. It is a stunning, perfectly executed short story exploring the way violence in childhood ripples across time, affecting generations to come. Using a deft and subtle point in time switch, the story happens in the past but moves swiftly at the end to current time, signalling how pain spikes and spirals not just one life, but lifetimes. The narrator is a granddaughter, relaying her mother’s brutal exposure to intimate partner violence and how that exposure causes a misremembering (or selective remembering), the episode too painful to endure. The first word of the story is “pretend” and it is the granddaughter who is coming to terms with the violence her mother witnessed but cannot hold.
This story powerfully shows how violence (and here, I broaden the definition to include wars and conflict, forced displacement, etc.) might REQUIRE generations to shoulder the burden and dull the pain to pass through a prism of love. And of course….any disruption of that process toward love (compassion, empathy, forgiveness etc.) spears the wound again…[10]
So, this got me wondering whether there are any stories (I’m sure there are lots, I just can’t harvest them from my brain at the moment) of developing love, teaching love to our children. And whether there are any marrying pain and love, the interaction between the two. And bingo: Grace Paley’s flash fiction (less than 1000 words!) “Justice – A Beginning” came to mind.
In this story, the protagonist, Faith (note the hopeful name – believe!), is returning from jury duty. She describes the courtroom, watching as the mother of the convicted “leaned on the witness bar, her face like a dying flower in its late-season, lank leafage of yellow hair, turning one way then the other in the breeze and blast of justice.” I love that description, breeze and blast of justice. Not just the alliteration but the conceptual connotations: how easily, breezily, the sentence of guilty is handed down; how utterly devastating, like a bomb’s blast, to the family of the convicted. The narrator continues, completing the image, “Like a sunflower maybe in mid-autumn, having given up on the sun.” (Note the homonym with “son”). I imagine Paley selected the image intentionally. Sunflowers, because they grow by tracking the movement of the sun, can symbolize God’s divine light guiding believers on their spiritual journey. This, coupled with the protagonist’s name, is an intentional layering of meaning in the writing. It’s also an image of something beautiful and hopeful dying.
It’s clear, on my own reading anyway, Faith doesn’t agree with the guilty verdict, “She probably said Oh shit or even Fuck.” In a few sentences, Paley paints a picture of the world of ambiguity (injustice) we live in: yes, the convicted held a gun to rob a grocer, but he was hungry (I assume because it is a grocer and not a bank he robs, a leap maybe)…demonstrating with story how the motivations are never so simple, but justice is served in binary, guilty/not guilty.
The final paragraphs of this short story move to domestic scene and exchange of love and humour between Faith, her adult son and his girlfriend Judy. The camaraderie and the humour are a beautiful counterpoint to the devastation Faith felt earlier as a juror. But she wants to be alone, “She needed to think more about the jury system, mainly her companion jurors. Also the way that capitalism was getting to be a pain in the world’s neck. She thought she might try to make a poem out of that opposition.”
In the end, her son’s attentive love coaxes her from her bedroom: with humour and a deep understanding of each other’s moods. That line, about making a poem out of opposition…it’s the key isn’t it.
With my own writing, exploring how I learned to love and how I work to transcend my pain …this is the block of marble I’m chipping away at, carving into book length sculpture, something, at least, I can view and hold and circle slowly, in the round. And maybe, just maybe, illuminate a way along the darker path of understanding. Pain is a gift…shaping me to love differently, in different ways. And better.
[1] Even when other physiological needs are met with food , water, shelter, human infants fail to thrive (and risk death) without physical contact and touch (loving attention).
[2] Some reflection techniques via Judith Kitchen, written text chunks or weavings such as: retrospection (looking back assessment); intrusion (stepping in narrator commentary…I notice, I employ this technique regularly…like, um, even here, now); meditation (rumination, kicking a dead horse etc.); thinking around (finding a different perspective or a different viewpoint or opinion or even a different description i.e., wide panoramic view versus close up); imaginative alternatives to what did happen (even wishes?); speculation (imaginative alternatives to what could happen, again, wishes?); self-interrogation (asking questions on the page); projection (ascribing a feeling/thought/impulse to someone else…a good way to describe characters as well as the narrator through judgements and opinions, as one example); digressions (wander and wonder lift offs…v. guilty of these and a reader might not be so forgiving, hence all this information couched in a footnote).
[3] I’m most curious, in professional work as well as creative work, exploring the energy, the communication, of what I’m starting to refer to as “the between” …that our concept of “individual” confined in a single body, might occupy and steer too much of our attention. Instead, we could be attending to the “in relationship” forces as the necessary conditions impacting health, wellness, creativity and, most importantly, love. Community forces. Come Unity.
[4] Here, I am deliberately eschewing the palpable grief, despondency, even apathy, colleagues stateside, and here in Canada, expressed these last weeks regarding the recent US inauguration, as well as the upcoming provincial and federal elections here in Canada, as well as wars and deaths and conflicts and legacies of violence happening in different places across the globe. Also, the climate crisis. There is much written and spoken and viewed on these subjects; here, I want to approach them from the perspective of understanding the root causes of pain (that shape such disruptions and destructions), how they might be illuminated and explored through art…with my eternal hope and belief art will propose (and draw) solutions.
[5] And wouldn’t this world be Hallmark card syrupy and one dimensional? I mean, humour alone would wither and die… An addendum: mere hours after hitting the publish button on this post, I pluck from my “to read” pile of books The Evolved Nest, written by Darcia Narvaez and G. A. Bradshaw, and right there, in chapter 1, read how Indigenous groups “lived with Nature’s gift economy, where food and care are shared in response to another’s need rather than being withheld as a means of control.” Followed by the crazy synchronicity (with my own musings in this post) of these lines: “Biologist Humberto Maturana suggests that humans originated and evolved as…a species shaped by a biology of love…With the rise of anthropocentric civilization, however, two other forms of humans emerged from the violation of the biology of love: an aggressive form, …and an arrogant form…The result is today’s dominant trauma-based culture.” Let’s skid past my lack of imagination then and seize this hope: we’ve had a society of balance and reciprocity with the land and one another before, it is possible to recreate it.
[6] Can’t help but see la petite mort in this line. Also, should note, Dune is also set within a foundation of warring noble families and the Litany, according to a wiki fan page, is a nod to another Shakespeare play, Julius Ceasar.
[7] You’re losing your thesis Biro, pull out, pull out!
[8] It’s only in the writing of this blog post that I’m realising the necessity of rendering “learning to love through pain” in my writing. And I continue to run from the pain (metaphorically and pragmatically). It’s stopping me from finishing pieces and stopping me from sending pieces out for publication. Which feeds a vicious cycle of shame and inadequacy and hopelessness. I am very very fortunate that my process is buoyed by people who believe and support and continue to promote my work. The idea a writer works in isolation perpetuates a fallacy. We need community to lift us up. When I write to touch someone, what I’m really asking for is to be touched in return, aren’t I? Or, having been touched by so many artist and writers’ works, I am moved to gift something of myself in return. Fear of pain bends my loving attention. Got. To. Get. Over. That. (Or through. Or with.)
[9] Long Shots to X-Rays: Distance & Point of View in Fiction Writing by David Jauss – this was a post on the AWP website. Unfortunately, the link is now broken – it’s a stupendous craft essay.
[10] Dark Biro. Just. Don’t.
