On Pain, or Amy thinks too hard lately

Apparently, I've been thinking about things without knowing it, again. I remember the first time this happened; I was taking yet another exam at Johnathan Daniels School in Keene, NH, where experimental education programs were running rampant (my first grade classroom had no walls--literally). I was taking the exam, some kind of math test with word problems that I would later recognize as testing pre-algebra skills. The test, like most of these government-sponsored standardized exams, was multiple choice. I read the problem, and instantly knew the answer was B. It was quite clear that there would be three chickens left, although when later asked by the teacher, I couldn't tell her why or how I had come to such a conclusion. Or how I had come to any of my conclusions. Something was working subconsciously or even unconsciously in my brain, and I let it happen.

I let it happen a lot, actually. When Mom was studying aloud for nursing school, droning on about rhizomes and the Kreb's Cycle, I listened while playing Tetris. And then aced science tests without studying for them straight through Anatomy and Physiology. When I hit college, this ability became less important as an English major--reading aloud helped my brain memorize things, but understanding why was often more important than knowing that and I ended up studying like normal kids. It wasn't until I got into heavy literary theory that I realized my brain was still doing its thing, just on a different level. I read Foucault and Derrida and Cixous out loud, I read them silently, I read and read the same passages until I thought my eyes were going to bleed, and still didn't understand them. Then I'd go to bed, or get up to get more coffee, and the answer would be so clear, skipping me past several steps of logical inquiry right to the end. I think that annoyed Lou and Kari, because I got it, but couldn't tell them what I meant.

Lately I've been reading about Burke and ontology, Burke and subjectivity, Burke and epistemology--none of which really relate to my dissertation, but there are a few things I can pull. Somewhere in the fog of synthesizing all of this, namely Monday night, I saw how the pieces fit, and wondered at my earlier confusion. What the hell, Amylea? Why was it all a mess before? I set to rearranging my chapter into something more reflective of my major concerns and moved on to cleaning it up.
Then, in the middle of reading about Burke and various social theories (from Marx to Althusser to Foucault) by Robert Wess, I started thinking about pain. It seemed kind of random, except that I'm hurting--but that's not unusual. But I wasn't dwelling on my own pain, but on the language of pain, in a Burkeian sense. Is not, I wondered, pain the ur-motive? Isn't "pain" really what we are talking about when we discuss "dystopian" fiction--the stories of pain? Thus I began putting forth some propositions:

1. 
   Pain is the name for a situation, or more accurately, an agon to a situation.


2. Pain is not an action, but motion, forced response to stimuli that moves us.


3. The discourse of pain shows us the dialectic of the body--what is inus and what is of us, what we have, and what we are. Pain itself is dialectical; it divides as much as it unites.


4. Pain is scenic: it is the grounds of (for some of us) our existence.


5. Pain is a habitus in the Bourdieuxian sense. Thus those who are pained have a different orientation, different bodily lived life, and thus must have different rhetorical motives.


6. Pain is thus a subject position.


7. Society at large provides us with narratives for overcoming pain, but inasmuch as "society" does not come from the grounds of pain, it cannot encompass for us (provide equipment for living) the situation.

Now, what these exactly mean, that's a project for another time.