The Meaning of Suffering
Pain can be a catalyst of growth—once we get out of it. But is there any meaning inherent to suffering itself?
Suffering is the opposite of meaning. It has no “why.” When you are in a suffering-state, there is no reason or purpose to be found. It’s only by moving away from suffering that the experience can be interpreted and redeemed. A near-death experience allows you to appreciate life, but only if you don’t die.
Pain eliminates language. At its most extreme, it results in an animalistic scream, an expression of utter unintelligibility. The only way to restore language is to move out of the pain-state.
In a study on the loss of identity suffered by people with debilitating chronic illness, Kathy Charmaz wrote that those who experienced lengthy episodes of illness could integrate their sickness into their process of self-discovery and reintegration with the world. Their perilous journey into the kingdom of the ill (as Sontag called it) “heightened their consciousness of who they were and who they wished to become.” But this phenomenon was only found in those who had recovered. For those still debilitated by disease, illness was an ego-destroyer, corrosive to selfhood; it eliminated relationship, connection, behavior, language, and identity.
Illness only means something once you get better.
I have suffered from an autoimmune disease since I was 19 years old. For me, this means that I have chronic joint and muscle pain, mild lung disease, and a slew of secondary symptoms from my immunosuppressing medications. At least twice a year I get so sick that I can’t get out of bed, can’t think, can’t read, can’t work or make art. My daily pain limits me, holds me back from certain activities, reduces opportunities to socialize, and hovers on the fringe of each day. It reduces both the quantity and quality of experience.
Yet my relationship with illness has not been worthless. It’s caused me to fundamentally reconsider the meaning of my life, my goals, my identity, and my faith. It’s forced me to reckon with my own mortality. As a result of the experiences stemming from my illness, I feel profoundly—sometimes painfully—tuned in to the moment-to-moment passage of time. I experience frequent manic-present-states when the world comes alive. You might know what I mean. After a health scare, the sky, trees, colors, faces, air, music, everything doubles bright and glows; the world is fresh and dynamic. This is what I experience when I recover from bad pain.
But I only get this once I get out. When I am in pain-state, the world hides behind a curtain. Shadow and echo. Gray ceiling, gray blinds. Static fuzz. Autoimmune disorders goad the body into eating itself. When my illness is active, it pits flesh against flesh, warring blood against muscle. It divides my brain from my body and prevents me from existing as a whole. Following my body, my mind becomes disharmony. Nothing matters.
A fundamental question haunts me. Is this illness of mine meaningful? Does it grant me access to something transcendent? Or is it merely degenerative? Is there anything special about having a body that eats itself—is there anything worth discussing—or does dwelling on it, thinking about it, and writing about it only increase its power over me?
I have friends who are deeply creatively and spiritually engaged with their lives in a way that does not require them to have a body that destroys itself. The brilliant connection to the world I feel once I leave pain-state does not require the pain-state to exist. The suffering isn’t mandatory.
And whatever heightened consciousness I get once I leave the pain-state is not enough to justify the pain-state itself. When I am sick, I don’t want to simply wait to get better. I want to believe that there is something hiding in the center of the suffering moment: a pinprick of light, a morsel of beauty. But when you’re there, it’s impossible to see. It’s impossible to feel. You have to convince yourself of the possibility of meaning before you encounter suffering. You have to find a story good enough to convince you of the presence of something you can’t sense.
Because I experience these pain-states frequently, I fear that they merely reduce my ability to do the things that make my life worth living. This terrifies me, and so I have the urge to redeem the pain-states inherently. If I have to experience serious illness at frequent intervals for the rest of my life, I must make it, itself, valuable. If I have to journey frequently into the kingdom of the ill, maybe I can make a home there. Or at least craft an excellent story about it.
Plenty of great artists, philosophers, writers, and leaders have suffered from chronic pain or illness. Physical pain is not unique, and suffering is universal. But few people focus their work on the theory or meaning of illness. At best, it seems, disease is a biographical note that simply limits people from their real work. As a result, illness itself is underdeveloped as a theoretical or metaphorical phenomenon.
Virginia Woolf wrote about this in an excellent essay titled “On Being Ill”:
“Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia, lyrics to toothache. But no; with a few exceptions… literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear. On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenes… But of all this daily drama of the body there is no record… To look at these things squarely in the fact would need the courage of a lion tamer; a robust philosophy; a reason rooted in the bowels of the earth.”
According to Woolf, illness ventures into a realm of consciousness where literature struggles to follow. It induces incomprehensibility—a vagueness that detaches us from the ongoings of daily life. The world floods with sensation, sound, feeling, shadow. Words feel burdensome, and underlying meaning eludes us.
Her thesis—that few great works of art have concerned themselves with the subject of illness—feels true to me. Although illness appears in many stories, it’s usually a plot device or a symbol, not necessarily a theme worth exploring on its own. Illness is a conceptual stand-in for adversity, a tool of dramatic tension with a veil over its own face. But the real subject is death, or life, or relationship, or difficulty, or sadness—not the naked reality of physical pain.
Knowing this, my project for a while was to write something that captured the experiential reality of being in pain. I wanted to write something that could convey the felt reality of being disabled because I had never seen it done effectively before. I thought this, inherently, could imbue meaning to the experience. If I can say something about suffering itself, if I can make sense out of it, then the pain-states can become more than life-obliterating blackouts. The lost weeks are not lost at all; they’re just research. Information-gathering. Field work.
But I’ve come to realize that art that concerns itself purely with pain (including the art I’ve tried to make) is still inadequate. Art about pain is extremely nihilistic. It feels hopeless and empty. Rather than creating meaning, it merely invokes the sensation of not-meaning.
The most visceral artistic expression of physical pain I’ve ever seen occurs in the animated horror movie Mad God, a grotesque and cosmic piece of stop-motion art pursued obsessively by its creator Phil Tippett over a period of thirty years. One scene features a character hooked up into a series of agonizing medical machines. The character is awake. His bloodshot eyes open. Suddenly the camera shifts to show us the world through the character’s eyes—dark, grainy, pulsing—his vision fixated on a clock on the wall. It ticks off seconds, one by one. Then the seconds start to slow down. Bit by bit. Until the passing of each second takes ten seconds. Twenty. Time distending. Unbearable. But passing. And awake.
This scene is ostensibly what I was pursuing: a true and effective translation of the pain-state. It’s not black-out, it’s not unconsciousness; it’s awareness, violent awareness, feeling the passage of every second. But when I saw this scene, I didn’t feel any catharsis or euphoria. I just felt horrible. It made me feel sick and disgusted. Old awful feelings reignited inside of me. There was no beauty, meaning, or hope in this scene. The accurate transcription did not redeem it. It was only degenerative. It even felt evil.
Maybe the reason that great artists don’t focus on the pain-state is not because they are disinterested in it, or because art cannot capture suffering, but because they recognize the futility of lingering within severe affliction. Great art makes meaning out of things. If art makes meaning out of illness, it does so in the way we all do: by following the movement out of suffering, by capturing its associated revelations and epiphanies, by pursuing the heightened-consciousness that comes out of pain.
Artists and people alike thrive by integrating suffering into bigger, more beautiful narratives. But art that dwells too single-mindedly on suffering rots at the core.
What does this say about a life lived in pain?
There are many shades of suffering. The kind of suffering I am talking about— degenerative, corrosive, meaning-eating pain—is something Simone Weil called “affliction.”
Affliction goes deeper than suffering, which can at turns be noble, self-sacrificial, transitory, or character-building. Martyrs and saints may suffer gladly, but affliction is something different. Darker. It is random, severe, and meaningless, neither earned through noble consequence nor deserved by bad action. It interweaves physical pain, mental anguish, and social degradation into one misery. It cripples a person, leaving them “struggling on the ground like a half-crushed worm[;] they have no words to express what is happening to them.”
Pain that eliminates language.
Weil conceived of affliction as a state of existence almost totally removed from God, making him appear to be absent, “more absent than a dead man, more absent than light in the utter darkness of a cell. A kind of horror submerges the whole soul. During this absence there is nothing to love.” And yet, according to Weil, the only way to contend with affliction was to continue loving, either loving the utter emptiness of affliction or merely loving the impulse to love. The soul has to remained pointed toward God. How is this possible?
The answer, for Weil, was the image of Jesus on the Cross. Jesus was afflicted, so much so that he, himself, felt forsaken by God, abandoned and empty. The reason for his suffering was not clear to him. He prayed for it to be taken away, but it was not. “Men struck down by affliction are at the foot of the Cross, almost at the greatest possible distance from God,” wrote Weil.
And yet it is the image of Jesus that allows God to be present even at the worst moment of affliction. It is a nail piercing the center of soul and pinning it to the Cross.
“He whose soul remains ever turned toward God though the nail pierces it finds himself nailed to the very center of the universe. It is the true center; it is not in the middle; it is beyond space and time; it is God. The nail has pierced cleanly through all creation, through the thickness of the screen separating the soul from God.
In this marvelous dimension, the soul, without leaving the place and the instant where the body to which it is united is situated, can cross the totality of time and space and come into the very presence of God.
It is at the intersection of creation and its Creator. This point of intersection is the point of intersection of the arms of the Cross.”
Affliction is cruel, but it contains a trace of the sublime. When we are separated from God, when we are in hell, God is still there: a pinprick of light the size of a nail-hole.
Some people think Simone Weil fetishized suffering, and maybe that’s true, but I forgive her this indulgence. She suffered from intense migraines, and I empathize with what I see as a desperate desire to understand the phenomenon of blinding pain in a way that did not require denial of the sensation itself. Indeed, it was during one of her worst migraines that she first had a visceral experience of God, a vision that did not decrease her pain but rather allowed her to find pure and perfect joy in the midst of it. Instead of running from her affliction, she stared directly into it, and what she saw at the center was God—Meaning itself.
Jesus did not stay dead. The story of the resurrection parallels what I spoke about at the start: the radiant, meaning-soaked days of life that flood out of three days of death. The Cross is meaningful because it is not permanent.
The thing that has been plaguing me all the way through is this paradox: there is obvious truth, utility, and beauty in focusing on the coming-out of suffering, the movement upwards and onwards, the lift, the flight. But how do we embrace this type of meaning without condemning ourselves to hell in the moments where we experience suffering? Can we find purpose in pain while seeking to avoid it? Is it worth it to try?
I think the answer is that both moments are necessary. They exist in a sort of symbiosis: neither can fully exist without the other. There is no resurrection without death. And death without rebirth is just destruction. Jesus on the Cross is not greater than Jesus Resurrected. But the latter depends upon the former. And the Cross, as a symbol, is an incredibly powerful tool of identification. When God has forsaken you, Jesus is with you.
The suffering-state matters inherently. That answer has to be true.
It doesn’t matter because of the lesson you might learn at the end of it. It doesn’t matter because it makes you appreciate being better. It matters because you are there, inside of it.
And in the Christian story, Jesus is there with you. Pinned by the same nail to the Meaning you can’t see in front of you because it’s behind you. When you believe in this story, you believe that affliction does not last forever. Rebirth is coming. It is something that we all constantly undergo, dying to our old stories and our old ways of living and coming into new understandings. Without resurrection, life becomes stale and empty. This is not a strange and supernatural cosmology, but actually just a true description of the most beautiful part of being alive.
The worst affliction can be overcome. We only have to have faith that God—Meaning—is bigger than the moment we’re inside of. That it is, in fact, so much bigger and more powerful that it subsumes and makes irrelevant the suffering-state. This is how we continue to have hope.
Suffering has no meaning. Meaning has suffering.
Two months ago, my son died shortly before being born, after a pregnancy that felt interminably long and was excruciatingly physically painful for me. Birth is supposed to be that beautiful thing that emerges from physical pain, but for me it just led to even more suffering. So my existence, lately, has been more of the pain of grief than of physical pain. But I still experience this same cycle, where I completely am consumed by the pain and I have to tolerate each excruciatingly long second, until it inexplicably lifts and I am struck by the intensity of existing in the world again. A week after he died, I drank a glass of wine for the first time in almost a year, and the pungency and flavor of it just completely punched me in the face. I momentarily could emerge from the pain and experience world in that hypervivid, intensely saturated way. I can't ascribe any meaning to my son's death, or to my suffering, but there is a sort of beauty to the occasional receding of the pain, even if it's just momentary.
I know this isn't really what you were writing about here; it's not really the same. But you've still made me feel less alone, and maybe a little more hopeful. So, thank you.
This is so fucking clairvoyant. I have been thinking about the concept pain and suffering too !!! whats in the air omg this is so epic so humansauce