For me the essence of things are almost always best captured in the idiom of art. And there's no better representation of what it's like to suffer than Auden's poem "Surgical Ward." Here there is none of the rush and inarticulateness of everyday reality, with doctors running to and fro and patients unable to get a word in edgewise. Auden paints a picture that stands still to be looked at, a picture that incorporates different viewpoints, the "bigger picture" that ordinarily can't be observed by the individuals inside it.
They are and suffer; that is all they do;
A bandage hides the place where each is living,
His knowledge of the world restricted to
The treatment that the instruments are giving.
And lie apart like epochs from each other
--Truth in their sense is how much they can bear;
It is not talk like ours they smother-
And are remote as plants; we stand elsewhere.
Fore who when healthy can become a foot?
Even a scratch we can't recall when cured,
But are boisterous in a moment and believe
In the common world of the uninjured, and cannot
Imagine isolation. Only happiness is shared,
And anger, and the idea of love. (my italics)
The first half of the poem describes the person in pain whose entire life is now lived underneath the bandage. The pain is all consuming. "What do you do all day?" was the question posed to chronic pain patient Lous Heshusius. I do nothing but deal with the pain! she might reply. And while the sufferer fixates on what is going on inside of her, the world outside fades to black, "like the shore seen from a ship far out at sea" (Virginia Woolf).
The second half of the poem (in italics) describes the outsider and is the mirror image of the first half - We stand elsewhere. What is all consuming for the sufferer is invisible to the doctor, spouse or friend. Because they often see nothing, it's easy for them to turn away. They quickly get bored of the constant complaints or feel like they have more important things to do. Even the most compassionate people eventually turn away. They don't recall the scratch that happened long ago or lack the imagination to picture a pain they never had. The healthy and pain-free, according to depression sufferer William Styron, simply can't imagine a torment so alien to their everyday experience, and that goes for people with plenty of imagination, artists and writers like himself - in his memoir he tells us how unsympathetic he was at one time (because unknowing) to a friend who had been depressed.
Auden captures the felt experience of pain because he captures the wall that is present for both sufferer and outsider. One looks one way, the other looks the other, a great divide separating the two. There is no way to breach the wall, no way to communicate or understand the other. Whether real or imagined, this is almost always the way it is perceived and felt on both sides.
No matter how much we know about pain - about alpha-delta receptors, spinothalamic tracts, opioid pathways - if we don't know this, then our knowledge is woefully incomplete, a fact which surely contributes to society's failure in dealing with so common and pervasive a part of life.
In order to act effectively, we need to SEE pain and what it does to people. Not seeing it will make us ask questions like "What do you do all day?" and cause doctors to prescribe insufficient pain medication for their patients. On the other hand when we SEE pain, there's little chance we wouldn't feel compelled to say and do the right thing. Auden helps us see more clearly.
References
WH Auden, "Surgical Ward," in Selected Poems (Vintage, 1989)
William Styron, Darkness Visible (Vintage, 1992)
Virginia Woolf, "On Being Ill," in Collected Essays (Harcourt, 1967)
