Free and Unfeeling?

Pain has an element of blank.

— Emily Dickinson

Much of my work in recent years has been to think through the relationship between my scoliosis-related disabilities and my writing practice, both creative and academic. As the academy so often compels us to disavow or conceal our pain, I wanted to learn how to sustainably write from pain — beside it, through it, with it. Having lived almost three decades with chronic pain, I have become increasingly invested in recovering what Alyson Patsavas has called the cripistemologies of pain, which will "permit us to think pain otherwise, to produce painful new knowledge, but also to construct analyses about pain that are less painful, and less dangerous to those of us in pain, and, in doing so, to re-imagine our (shared, pained) futures."1 As opposed to complying unquestioningly with the curative impulses of biomedicine, which tends to frame pain as a state to be ameliorated or eliminated, what might it mean to envision pain instead as a situated knowledge worth conserving for how it might help us reimagine the very terms of compassionate, ethical caregiving in the face of the opioid crisis?2 But in the past year, I've been confronted with two seductive but dangerous fantasies: 1) of becoming unfeeling, 2) of becoming pain-free. To become unfeeling might mean no longer being beholden to my pain but also losing the ability to feel entirely. To become pain-free may make my daily life easier but at the loss of a crip consciousness constituted by a lived experience of pain. In what follows, I try to confront the implications of these ableist fantasies in relation to my own crip investments for what they might suggest about the tensions between theory and lived experience.

I.

Despite being a contingent faculty member, I was fortunately eligible for a good health insurance plan to see a spine specialist about my worsening spinal curvature. I would now be able to see proof, ten years after my first set of x-rays, of what my body has always painfully known. So electromagnetic waves made knowledge of my body, my personal history hastily translated into billable codes on the doctor's laptop. The verdict was as anticlimactic and unremarkable as I had imagined: kyphoscoliosis — a compound condition involving the rounding of and the textbook "s-shaped" curve sideways of the spine — judged idiopathic or without known cause. Once origin and causation were deemed impossible (read unnecessary) to trace, Doctor B. wasted no time in laying out the menu of options to "blunt the pain": epidural steroid injections, trigger point injections, spinal cord stimulation, nerve-root blockages. I immediately imagined the repeated, almost comic violence of being stabbed in the back over and over again for the rest of my life. The perverse pleasure of electing to become a living pin cushion.

Yes, pleasure, for a part of me contemplated the tantalizing possibility of a day without the dull aches and sharp pangs, the heating pad and the muscle relaxants. Not permanent relief but as close as I could get. You'd just feel a little less. I had heard this before: the same oversimplification my psychiatrist used to describe what it would be like to go on antidepressants. But the obfuscation here is that the pain itself is not lessening; rather, it is my ability to feel that pain. In the case of a nerve root block, a local anesthetic is injected directly where the nerve exits the spinal column to temporarily "block" certain enzymes that cause neural irritation or nerve fibers that communicate pain. Interrupted transmissions, deliberate impasses, chemical silencing.

These reservations are deeply shaped by my research and teaching of eighteenth-century literature and culture. The man of feeling in this period was both celebrated and mocked for his permeability to sensation. To be moved by the world meant the capacity for sympathy, for transformative relations with other bodies acting upon one's own. But, as Wendy Lee has recently argued, the subject incapable of feeling also became a limit case in this period for philosophical and literary understandings of the human character. To encounter the insensate "who lacks volition or desire, who is neither moved nor moves" meant also a confrontation with the frustratingly inscrutable, an "ethical quandary of what to do with him or her" because the insensate offers nothing.3 Would my chemical inhibition of pain simultaneously transform me into this deadpan figure whose dispassion incites passion in others while never feeling them himself? The profound irony, of course, is that my imperfect attempts to cope with my constant pain frequently get read as coldness or emotional distance. My decisions to alter or cancel plans because of my pain, my deliberate seclusion during bouts of intense pain, my curt deflections when asked if I am okay — all strategies ironically developed in response to feeling like a burden to those who have to coexist with me and my pain. The injections would only catalyze my apotheosis into the man of unfeeling, more aloof and antisocial than ever before — from a man who feels too much to a man who feels nothing at all.

Unfeeling at what cost? From a cripistemological perspective, the deadening of my pain meant the possible loss of my own self-knowledge, my very embodied way of knowing the world. If even my earliest memories were colored by, shaped by pain, would I be then alienated from my own painful formation? Would I even be able to identify as disabled anymore? This existential dilemma of choosing between therapeutic intervention and a politicized identity constituted by and sustained by impairment remains all too familiar for many disabled people. Disability civil rights historically depended on the social model of disability, which seeks to locate disability in environments, ideologies, and social relations, over the medical model which individualizes disability to bodily problems in need of fixing. But it is also the social model that produces this reductive tension between identity and seeking medical care instead of making space for their coexistence. Alison Kafer, in her articulation of a political/relational model of disability, notes how "a strict social model completely casts cure out of our imagined futures; cure becomes the future no self-respecting disability activist or scholar wants."4 Thus, to even move toward curative relief, is often seen to be traitorous to the disability cause. In my pursuit of comfort, was I giving up both myself and my community? To lose the feelings that hurt me was to risk losing my histories of feeling and disability consciousness to a terrifying numbness — one of the few words we have to describe the very sensation of insensibility. This should not be the choice I have to make.

II.

After turning down Doctor B.'s offers to "feel a little less," I reluctantly agreed to see a spine surgeon for a second opinion. I exposed myself again to the diagnostic light — this time from the new EOS x-ray system from France that could take images of the spine on two planes simultaneously with minimal radiation. Looking and mumbling at my shadowy form on digital film, Doctor G. suddenly ups the ante: surgery could possibly make me pain-free. I would have taken him seriously except for how he presented himself like the caricature of a surgeon with an itchy trigger (or is it scalpel?) finger: scrubs a few sizes too small to emphasize the results of an obsessive gym routine meant to prove back pain could be "overcome," a pair of snakeskin cowboy boots to prove he's "relatable." As he rattled off studies and statistics — mostly of his own surgical success rates — I tried to make sense of what sounded too good to be true while the imaging software virtually "corrected" my spine on screen.

Of course, it was too good to be true. The truth was that even with the risks of paralysis and complications after surgery, correction of the spinal curvature was only estimated at 80% and not even for both of my curves. This did not even account for the possibility of new structural problems and new pains produced by the insertion of rods into my spine forcibly configured into its new, "correct" form. Doctor G. perceived my visible disappointment and began rifling through his rolodex of truisms and platitudes. Well, Travis, we all have pain. It's just a fact of being human. It is this condescending universalizing that made me want to leave the examination room immediately. No, we do not all have pain because not all pain is recognized as pain, let alone pain worthy of care. My pain is only validated because I am legible to biomedicine in the proper, profitable ways and willing to consent to its practices, however invasive and impersonal. (Meanwhile, the poster on the wall reads While Pain is Inevitable, Suffering is Not!)

The inevitability of pain has a long racial history. I am reminded of this by my Romanticist colleague, Bakary Diaby, who has brilliantly written on the interconnection between white fragility and Black in/vulnerability. As he and other critical race scholars have pointed out, the project of imperial expansion and chattel slavery depended on figurations of the Black body "as immune or resistant to pain."5 Such physiological justifications for enslavement and abuse also invoked other racist stereotypes about blackness as atavistic, bestial, or incapable of higher feeling. Slavery, as an institution, thus depended on a paradoxical "logic where physical pain is used to discipline and punish Black bodies, implying that they can, in fact, 'suffer.' But, the constant use of physical pain is justified by the idea that those of African descent cannot suffer, or at least cannot feel as much pain as people of other races. This incentivizes the use of even more pain."6 Doctor G.'s dismissive "we all have pain" remark underscores how such universalizing gestures work by a deliberate amnesia of racial trauma: the legacy of how certain bodies were consigned to pain for the sustenance of other bodies and their painlessness.

As I stood there in my nakedness, I wondered how "free" is it then to be "pain-free"? If I could no longer perceive the pain that shaped me, would I become something different entirely? Would I be alienating myself from my own pained history and from those who share similarly pained histories with whom I have found kinship and solidarity? What are the terms of that liberation when I claim to be "free" from pain? I don't yet know the answers, but I am almost certain they will hurt.

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Travis Chi Wing Lau is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin and specializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, health humanities, and disability studies. Lau has published in academic journals such as Disability Studies Quarterly, Digital Defoe, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, in venues for public scholarship like Public Books and The Los Angeles Review of Books, and in creative forums like Barren Magazine, Wordgathering, Glass, and The New Engagement. [travisclau.com]

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