A homeless man set up camp in the parklet directly below my apartment. When warm days and laundry days compel me to jiggle my bay windows loose from their sticky frames, his drone-like vocalizations carry directly into my living room. For hours on end, he moans in bass-deep tones, guttural and didgeridoo-like.
In the most charitable frame, it’s kind of pretty, like a meditative chant — a serious sound that comes from deep within its maker. But in a less charitable and more truthful frame, I find it unnerving. It is not the noise of a sane person. It is the noise of someone who feels cornered into making it, like a trapped animal squealing. It doesn’t sound prepared or voluntary. It sounds like something demanding to be let out.
In Midsommar, Florence Pugh’s Dani Ardor, having just retched from the shock of seeing her boyfriend sleeping with another woman, is shepherded to a private room where a group of women absorb her distress by mimicking her screams. One of the women holds her face, one cheek in each palm. Two others, her hunched shoulders. The rest huddle around her, expanding and contracting as she vocalizes. Together, the mass wails in unison: rhythmic, pained bellows so rawly unusual they inspire laughter when heard out of context.
Though the scene depicts manipulation, I can’t help but hope for something like it anyway: the opportunity to pass my grief to a more capable group.
I think I have a high pain tolerance, but there’s no real way to know — I can’t access your pain, nor you mine, so we can’t compare them in any objective sense. Sometimes we try to anyway, like through the classic “stick your hand in ice water and keep it there until it’s unbearable” test, but even standardized experiments have a fundamental flaw: if two people endure different lengths of time, we don't know if it's because one has higher tolerance or because they're simply experiencing less pain to begin with.
In the ER, the pain scale is a mainstay: "On a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being no pain and 10 being the worst pain imaginable, how would you rate your pain right now?" This, too, of course, is an ambiguous heuristic.
On his podcast, Hank Green suggests an alternative: “I just don’t think numbers are a good way, and I don’t think words are a good way [either]. And what does that leave us with? Sounds. You should be like, ‘Okay, can you tell me what your pain sounds like?’ Because if I go like eeeeee, you know that’s very different from arrrrggggh, which is very different from rrr-rrr-rrr-rrr. And those are all very clear kinds of pain.”
Before I suspended my disbelief around enlightenment, I used to cringe at people who sigh audibly on the exhale of a deep breath. Now I’m one of them.
The other evening, though I was professedly happy and well, I screamed at the ocean so loudly and unbridledly that I lost my voice. These days, it feels like everything is tumbling out of me: love, hate, adoration, spite, gratitude, rage, despair, frustration, contempt, shame, mania, elation, self-pity, bitterness, love, love, love, love, hate.
I often revisit a Sasha Chapin line, “I…felt every emotion I was capable of experiencing, in an emulsion which hung about my skin.” When I reread it, I picture myself tangled in yarn, as if encumbered by an aura crocheted by an amateur. In this vision, I lift both arms to determine how much yarn is attached to me. I try to guess whether untangling it will take a lifetime, or two.
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I like words a lot. I’ve based my career and personality on learning how to use them well. But they are blunt instruments, and there’s no nobility in denying the effectiveness of a whimper.
It's always a treat to experience your writing, Brit :)
i look forward to reading your post every time they hit my inbox! things have been tumbling out of me, too :)