Title: Pain

Author: Stephanie de Montalk

In: Sport 33: Spring 2005

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, 2005

Part of: Sport

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Sport 33: Spring 2005

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John returned. We few south, then drove to Languedoc, and La Balbougette, my cousin's petit manoir.

This is sunflower country; on either side of the road, crops bow east and west, acknowledging the changing light, waiting for rain.

It is a region of spirited winds, the wild dreaming and interpretation of winds, the chronic bending of trees.

It is home to the autan, which makes autumn seem like spring and brings malice and happiness in the same breath.

From the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries it was a stronghold of the Cathars—believers in the greater religious purity of early Christianity's gentleness and poverty before their denouncement as heretics, their suffering at the hands of the Inquisition and the eradication of their faith.

We spent an afternoon at Carcassonne, a working walled city, page 25once a Cathar fortress, exploring the restored ramparts and towers from which sieges were lost and repelled while the population within perished in epidemics and died of thirst in the summer's intense heat. As we were leaving, storm clouds gathered overhead funnelling thunder, rain and a midnight wind through the streets. Lanterns swayed. Tourists converged in a narrow dash to the barbican and car park. The heat wave had broken.

At La Balbougette, after the wind had died down, the shutters had stopped banging and the loggia and pool had been cleared of branches and leaves, I helped with the leisurely purchase and preparation of food. And lay as if in a field, beneath Indian lilacs, flowering laurels and the sky of the sieges, balanced between the Crusades and Inquisitions of Languedoc and the short-lived relief of the Edict of Nantes; themes of pain and transcendence.

Here pain, still skilled in the art of intrigue, spoke with a Saracen tongue, posing questions about the blending of the pain of body, mind and soul with salvation; the existence of ecstasy without agony; the influence of the middle ages when the owners of hospices—centres of enlightenment as well as curing—sought portraits of suffering for their chapels so that, in the contemplation of intensely visualised pain, the sick, wounded and possessed might be persuaded to confront and come to terms with pain, to pray and, through prayer, achieve healing belief.

I recalled the life-sized figure of Christ on the Isenheim Altarpiece by sixteenth-century Bavarian painter Matthias Grünewald, commissioned for the hospital of the Antonite monastery in southern Alsace, where the polyptych remained until the French Revolution and the secularisation of art and healing. And the centre panel of Grünewald's masterpiece—the crucifixion—which embodied not only unimaginable suffering—graphic wounds; the grey distortion of shock, exhaustion and the body's dislocating weight; the hidden suffocation caused by the pull of the stretched arms and sockets constricting the rib cage and lungs—but also, through the symbolism of the lamb at Christ's feet, patient and sacrificial suffering as a means of redemption. On the panels either side of the pictorial disquisition, wings, supportive saints and images of the Annunciation and page 26Resurrection were depicted, like Nantes, in the bathing, golden light of salvation.

I reflected on the heroic example of Pope John Paul II, for whom the meaning of suffering was said to be found in reminding the rest of us that we cannot control our lives, and in eliciting from those who observe pain and its process, an ennobling compassion. The view of the fourteenth Dalai Lama that suffering was unremarkable, and occurred because it was a 'part of nature and a fact of life', simply because the body existed. De Quincey, continually battling opium withdrawal, whose writings suggest a conviction that without pain the creative spirit and intellect will not fully develop. Voltaire's pragmatic Candide, who, having endured and witnessed a range of suffering, decided: 'All this was indispensable; for private misfortune makes the general good, so that the more private misfortunes there are, the greater is the general good.'

I wondered to what loss society has anaesthetised and misplaced the physiological processes of pain and its wider references—in the hasty, changing face of nursing, for example, in which machines are the first call of patients in their hours of greatest need—and whether the streamlining of alleviation—and technology-based nursing— mattered? A recent article in the Sunday Times had suggested it did. The writer, who suffered a chronic condition and had been admitted to a famous London public hospital where she had languished in pain and 'terrified' despite a sedative and strong painkiller, had lamented the decline in clinical expertise and absence of the 'essence of nursing'.

'Their training has robbed them of the language of compassion,' she wrote, citing the 'uber' efficiency and theoretical ethos of the new university-trained nurses.

In the end I conjectured that, new efficiencies aside, the quiddity of long-term pain—which, even as it eases seeks to return, escapes shape yet is a shaping force, causes life to lose its leniency and also its steadfast form, raises walls and during phases of relentless attack breaks those same walls down—is uncertainty. That its chronic form educes a state of closing doors: doors behind which I had found neither rampart nor crenellation, 'mirror of intuition' or rite of enlightenment and, while it would have been reassuring to believe otherwise, no page 27new tolerance, patience or proof of learning; just a heightened sense of Time—sometimes stoic, sometimes teasing—which replied when I said, 'I am sadder and more aware, but can I really say I am wiser?': 'Take what comes your way. You are what you are, as you were born, as you were raised, as you will always be.'