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Suffering resists occupancy. The western self (in context) resists identification with weakness, with true trauma, with being the effect of some uncontrollable outside causality. The extreme measure of this suffered identity posits itself automatically in non-existence, in forgetting, in the non-conscious. Yet the measure of suffering lacks universality. I spy a man with a hand on a hot stove. He wants to know if his blood can boil, and if so, to measure the efficacy of the body’s thermal regulation. Freshly fallen children first hold their hands up, surveying the damage, and then look to spectators to ascertain their own reaction. At some point, visualizing blood becomes the empirical standard for crying. Childhood in social creatures implies a malevolent God; each and everyone must endure a period of helplessness, assured by physical submission to a dominant and larger body. To call this trauma denies the definition of suffering. One cannot both occupy a childhood and suffering, unless its forgotten, unless its incorporated into a Weltanshauung. A natural process: numb to habitual suffering, a greater disaster provides an awakening to the other side of our life’s tourniquet. We, after all, occupy the position of Affect(ed). A will to suffering connotes submission, not empathy towards the effected. The effected rarely occupy pain beyond the instant; body realigns itself into proper fortification against recurrence, the attitude, feeling, the pathos adjusts itself to the event, to rationalize it, to assure that a system is in place and the existence of such a system allows us to predict its motions, to minimize our suffering.
Pain moves in prime numbers
offsets symmetry, appears random.
Although the experience may be permanent, memory distorts. Although the pain of the instant dissipates, there exists an eternal instant, an eternal recurrence where one exists in exile of pleasure, as an aesthete to the motive forces that drive our contemporary life.
Artaud, permanently occupied suffering. The necessarily involuntary tenants of such a body relay messages from outside “healthy” thinking.
Monday, March 10, 2008
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