Pain Theory

You can’t read the rat’s mind. He won’t talk to you and you can’t read their minds. So you can never, ever, as a matter of principle, you can never, ever be sure. — Gary J. Bennett, 1999.

Once upon a time, Descartes took an ax to a tree and struck the trunk in one spot, the shock travelling to the utmost leaf and back again, and the tree said ouch and Descartes noted it and it was good. Büchner tied his loose tooth to the radiator and ran backwards to wrench out a cranial tube, kept rubbing the gun with his poet’s tongue. Melzack and Wall explain knock-knock jokes to the dorsal horn. Cajal’s neurons dive into silver waves. Before the flood my handwriting was much neater. I categorised my scars by shape and location. I haven’t broken a bone. I don’t recall how spraining my fingers sounded although it happened enough. You could ask what I was doing, hitting a ball so hard that my hands swelled, but I’ll talk of lightning. These beautiful problems that slip through my blood, I could pretend I never felt anything deeper. Most of the theory was discovered by accident. The hospital poster reads: on a scale from one to ten, how accurately can you predict rain? When do you start waiting for the needle to hit the skin? Studies have shown that injuries orbit each other. Pain the pocketwatch, the time traveler, a vital sign, a compass, whatever and wherever, some thousand natural blisters and burns: proof the vagus nerve is a willow thrumming gently but quick with wind chimes at the stomach, lungs and heart, all bold echo, mapping all the red pricks in the mirror, looking for the punchline. I bandage my bare skin and wait for someone to ask what happened. It hurts for everyone the first time. I don’t remember how the first time hurt. They said the storm was in my head. You heal and it’s a chance to go home, or is it the other way around? You wince like your grandparents and my best blessing is that nothing removes my own blood as well as my own spit. Before I laugh it off it must be felt and that will never, ever, weigh more that my witness. I say this to keep your eyes clear, trained on mine, unwavering, while I pull out the thorn.