Maldynia as Muse

Introduction ............................................................................................................ 104 Perceptions of Pain: The Essays ............................................................................ 105

Looking at Pain ................................................................................................. 106 A Visual Language for Pain .............................................................................. 107 Unspeakable Pain .............................................................................................. 109

Perceptions of Pain: The Art .................................................................................. 110 The Process ....................................................................................................... 110

Three Photographs: Interpretations ........................................................................ 111 Contextualizing Perceptions of Pain ...................................................................... 114 Conclusions and Recommendations ...................................................................... 117

Padeld’s Call for Psychological Interpretations .............................................. 118 Maldynia as Muse .................................................................................................. 119 Acknowledgments .................................................................................................. 121 References .............................................................................................................. 121

The invitation to write on the topic of pain and art immediately brought to mind the multifaceted nature of pain and suffering, as well as the various media of art. What aspect of pain should we consider, and what kind of art? After a few weeks of reading and discussion, we began to see profound limits of language in communicating about pain. Pain resists language even as it demands interpretation and expression. Virginia Woolf puts it this way: “English which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear has no words for the shiver or the headache.… The merest schoolgirl when she falls in love has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her, but let the sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to his doctor and language at once runs dry”(3, p. 194). Severe pain, Elaine Scarry points out, “not only resists pain but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned”(4, p. 4). These reections led us to focus on the visual arts, hoping to learn about the potential of images to help span the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the one who suffers pain and the one who hears about pain.