Involuntary applications for pain

 

Is there any just measure of suffering? Can the capacity of a human being be assessed or measured by some scale where there are no tears left and the blood runs out? Where politics, along with religion, are not or are not (n)the basis of the inhumanity created on earth?

I have names in my head, but very few, compared to the many who have inspired me to walk, to believe in life and to be resilient in love. Many I have forgotten over the years, sometimes one or another comes along, but most of the time they are pieces of text that are attached to acts, which gave rise to their words, to a speech, not always organized, but inspiring. They pay attention to this, a few hundred, because it seems to me that I would have to live another fifty years, cutting through my work time, which is not visible (those loads of boring, routine, domestic tasks, which I have almost always abhorred), to "steal" leisure breaks, contemplating the many points of view and human experiences of so many authors. And it's never just writers, nor just musicians, many painters and photographers, sculptors and teachers, actors have captivated me, as well as anonymous strangers with whom I had the happy "coincidence" of crossing paths. I consider this a great find for a person with limited vision, often rigid and not very well-traveled, like me. It is a true glory to be able to feel passionate about the arts and human culture that is covered in so much suffering and sacrifice, so many faceless people and so many masks that are worn to hide the pain and varied human expressions. Whether culture or art, they are translations of social, political and psychological voices at all levels of the human psyche. And when we touch souls, we have already been taken away by them and others find themselves taken away, constantly.

Anyone who sees the world today, if they know how to read between the lines, will be able to say that we are thousands of humans walking on the same piece of land, on the same surfaces of the globe that, only to the eyes of eternal travelers, seems infinite. Those who do not travel are limited to half a dozen square meters and the biased information, from the daily diary on site, are the experiences, those that can be seen, perhaps measured, described, counted, written, analyzed, but what cannot be done is to enter into anyone's soul and atone for the constant monologues, incapable of pacifying other souls, unless one puts on the shirt, exposes the soul, like a wound or a fear or a shame that one wanted to face, to push against the wall, to lose control. Eradicate. Or that life itself has shown us that we are not capable of hiding. We don't want to hide it anymore. Forgetting history leads to the repetition of mistakes. Many lives, back then, in the time that belonged to others, to those who came before, to those who built and thought and traveled before us, in those times, and in these times now, there will be more and more souls willing to sacrifice themselves for the sake of others, who exposed themselves in the raw and who gave rise to the most fabulous performances, the most incredible stories and the most exhausting pain of all. Those who lived through the wars in the first person, telling their personal version of their personal story, were able to take revenge in the art that remained with us, to reveal to us that we are all narrators and observers of cycles that repeat themselves. Asian authors have surprised me a lot, especially with their ability to translate the simple (and what could be simple about constant and repeated human suffering?), without invoking hatred, without giving prominence to the continuation of pettiness, nor exacerbating warlike emotions for posterity. It seems to me that there is a latent therapeutic intention to understand the phenomenon, the illness, the war, the motivations, in order to better overcome them. That is to say, progress in this understanding of the human being.

When I read Sweet Tokyo, I read it as if I were drinking a glass of natural juice on a hot summer afternoon, and yet, Durian Sukegawa exposed the suffering, shame, fear and stigma of Hansen's disease, while cooking dorayaki, a sweet with the soul and heart, adding a great, challenging note, because it limited and continues to limit those who live with the bacillus, and although one no longer dies from the disease, one can still, playing with serious words, die from its cure. And if we approach life from the point of view of the question, what did we come here to do? we can always be surprised by the multitude of beings who tend to offer themselves and others the same answer: We came to be useful to the world (and the world is always others, what else is there, after these others, or, without these others, what are people?) and, based on the most common answer that is thought, I believe that not all of us live in the same way, nor serve others with the sense of servitude. That there must be two, and forgive the redundancy of the verb to exist, but it will serve as an excuse to differentiate the type of positive servitude and the type of egocentric servitude. Wars are the pejorative and consequential servitude of not finding a way to circumvent what motivates them, which seems to continue growing, more than trees on earth, more than salt water in the oceans. And it bends the profile of human beings, as if to confirm their uselessness for the evolution of humanity, in its generality and historical component of progress.

Socially, have we become more demanding, or paradoxical? Holocausts follow one another in time, distributed by nations against nations, neighbors against neighbors, brothers against brothers, and they seem to want to be forgotten, instead of being remembered, hidden under the carpet of memory, not serving as a lesson to avoid a new mistake, as Nanjing does not care about (of the Japanese military forces in China, the last survivors die, asking the younger generations not to forget the lesson). Life is full of them, private wars and public wars, where innocent people pay for the mistakes of less innocent people. And if Durian Sukegawa, a Japanese author, proposes the analysis of leprosy as a poem from which we can extract dorayakis and Tokues and Wakanas, Han Kang, a South Korean author, manages to transform the historical narrative of the Jeju massacres, of communism, such as those produced by Francoism, Stalinism and the many isms, through a similar formula, not giving voice to anger, to the continuity of nationalist idolatries, of entire villages, by describing the simplicity of the landscape, to the detail of the snow in the "cutting" contrast, the proof of a pain that does not expire, of the trauma, of the mountain under the mattress, after the end of the Second World War, where, once again, the American influence was present in the worst way. And it is, however, by exposing what happened that the author constructs the narrative, giving voice to the mother as a traumatized witness, of an experience that tests our human limits, resignifying the atrocities, so that they do not fall into the apex of oblivion, which the fleetingness of time produces.

Pain, which has been a generational and cyclical inheritance, will still reach a level of usefulness, in healing. If we allow it. In the history of mentalities, it will fulfill its Plutonian function. Transforming pain into reminiscence can take us, as a species, to one of two places: Either to the mental, sociological and individual progress of the collective, abolishing tears, eliminating negative emotions, or, to the most feared void of the abysses, living in war, in an eternal loop, without definitive reparation of the damages that will repeat themselves cyclically, approaching oblivion, emphasizing the inability to overcome, as humans, the limits that we place on ourselves, beyond living life, just existing.

These three Asian narratives, which include this video-poem by Ni Wen, about suffering, cruelty and great inhumanity, go hand in hand with the denunciation of pain, an unparalleled beauty, this flow into serenity, ever present, and I say that violence corrodes us, but the way we experience it leads to a cultural outcome, and the way we understand it, what we can do with it, so that it does not hinder the future, that history must be written faithfully, without stirring up hatred that only promotes the continuation of negative emotions, which feed the big arms-producing countries, which continue to profit from the pain of others. Aren't these great producers of war part of the human group? Not all of us see in life a way to be useful to the whole, some of us see the usefulness of the whole for itself, and these are not the rule, but rather the exception, fortunately. May the drowsiness, fear, unconsciousness, frivolity and populism that leave most of us in a state of despair expire, and may a great leap be taken towards the personal power of each one, so that we know how to defend and better choose what kind of life to live, where pain is not seen as an imposition, but rather as a historical factor belonging to the past, with regard to the suffering of the majority. And if empathy and growing compassion awaken or grow among the masses, my prayers will have been heard. The world can and should be peaceful.