Elia Tyson
There are few human experiences more ubiquitous than emotional pain. Our friends leave, our grandparents and parents die, our plans fall apart, and our lovers break our hearts. Our minds linger a little too long on the unrelenting march of time toward inevitable death. We may be left with a sharp, burning, tangible sensation or a detached, unfeeling void, but however it manifests, pain ferociously resists alleviation.
It can be easy to see every problem as a modern problem requiring modern solutions, but pain is universal not only in the present day but throughout all of history as well. While I love Phoebe Bridgers as much as the next depressed Gen Z college student, the most cathartically insightful take I’ve heard on the subject comes not from a modern indie songwriter but from 19th-century poet Emily Dickinson:
Pain has an element of blank;
It cannot recollect
When it began, or if there were
A day when it was not.
It has no future but itself,
Its infinite realms contain
Its past enlightened to perceive
New periods of pain.
The poem is short and to the point, but captures the essence of pain — there is an “element of blank,” a kind of blindness, an inability to “recollect / when it began” and to see any “future but itself.” The limitations of our human consciousness traps us in the present, always perceiving only the immediate and often unable to see forwards or backwards to any different state of mind. And pain, in particular, commands such a wide range of the mind’s present landscape that it tends to create deep, sultry basins, inside which the horizon is invisible on all sides.
When trapped in such a place, it can be tempting to try and conquer the surrounding mountains all at once — to escape, solve the problems, and find the distraction that will drown the pain. Such quick-fixes are always temporary, though; the subsequent fall back into the valley can make things bleak. And while there is good to be found in poems like Pain has an element of blank — hearing our experienced described and receiving a bit of hope in the knowledge that we are not alone — ultimately they aren’t a solution either. What, then, should we do?
In a later poem, an older Dickinson suggests that there isn’t a solution, per se. Perhaps pain is more a force of nature, like the seasons — something which repulses treatment and must be left to run its course:
As imperceptibly as grief
The summer lapsed away —
Too imperceptible, at last,
To seem like perfidy [deceitfulness].
The path forward, she says, is gradual. Like the summer slipping into fall, there often isn’t any defined or noticeable point of change. The grandiose sweeps of temporary highs and lows can be deceitful, but the imperceptible change that comes with time is permanent. It brings her to a place where she can look back upon the pain as a thing of the past. No emotional conquests or “a-ha” moments, just an eventual realization that what once seemed eternal has finally lapsed away. And perhaps her experience and words can bring a glimmer of hope to those of us still stuck in pain’s “infinite realms.”
