"The Pain Scale" by Eula Biss affects me intellectually. Although it is a hard piece to classify and understand what the central message is suppose to be, this piece still grabs my attention and holds it.
The main concern Biss seems to have is the inability to quantify pain. There is no way to measure how much pain someone is feeling and have the other person who recieves the measurements to completely understand that pain. She furthermore explains the attempt that we make in quantifying pain: on the pain scale, from 0 until 10, with zero being no pain to 10 being extreme pain. The dilima with this is that pain is a subjective event that includes physical and emotional feelings, and sometimes even spiritual and/or social and/or financial feelings/reasons.
When Biss is asked what sort of pain she felt at a particular moment, she felt she had to protect her "reputation" and "act certain" that she was feeling pain that needed to be tended to; she did not want the doctor, her farther, to think that her pain was a lie. This is how many people feel about going to the doctors: you just do not know how to express your pain whereas the next person will understand it as you do.
Although pain and the inability to measure it or express howmuch of it one is feeling to another person seems to be the core theme in this piece (especially because it is titled "The Pain Scale"), religion and the number zero are reoccuring thoughts throughout. Biss compares zero to be less tangible than Christ. This maybe because when one speaks of Christ one speaks of love, and there's only one force that opposes it: hate (Satan); you can only have one or the other. With the number zero on any scale, you're essentially measuring whether you have something or not; but you have many more choices: from 0-1 there is an infinite amount of numbers between these two numbers along; so how is that one could ever reach zero at all?
Throught, Biss appeals to the readers' logic with her knowledge but she also presents many unanswered questions to leave us to figure for ourselves.
Charlie,
ReplyDeleteI really like how you get at this idea of a "reputation." That we feel sometimes like we have to prove our pain to doctors and one way we have to do that is the pain scale. Perhaps we say "10" because at that moment we want to convey that we are in extreme pain and need immediate attention---we say "10" in order to "prove" our pain, although frequently I will tell you, doctors do not believe you.