That Casual Word, Pain

 

Art: The Returned

To be sentenced to pain is to be sentenced to time.

It is to serve time.

So obviously there was a crime of some kind, there had to be.

Why else would it hurt so much?

I try to see blood dripping from my withering hands, I try to think back, think, damn it, think, just calm the fuck down and think, think think think. Yet, the blood I struggle to divine just becomes a dark thick honey whenever I attempt this. So I’m basically stuck with a palmful of a dark thick honey, sticky and useless, for no reason whatsoever, not an inch closer to figuring out what the crime actually was.

I remember my other body, the invisible one, a silly flower within a silly flower, the one that always said, “Okay, let’s go, let’s go,” the one that walked freely among the countless minutes. The minutes with no trace of pain, an incessant savage cascade from the sky. That other body moved within the cascade, between water and water, which is certainly impossible, but it moved in a strange calmness, between water and water.

The other body was folded into me and didn’t hurt, it didn’t hurt, it didn’t shiver, it didn’t cry, it didn’t hurt, and no one ever walked away from it. I wasn’t brought to my knees and I wasn’t alone, I wasn’t alone, and people didn’t leave me because of my uneasy flesh and my unlikely bones. Even unseen, my other body radiated a certain suppleness and a terror, and I didn’t have to think about it at all.

There was no distance between us, we didn’t need words, we were one and the same. We wove ourselves in and out of the world, inside and outside, outside the world, outside time.

But one day I came home without it, the cells in my body toppling over into the void. I knew it got trapped somewhere, maybe as I was racing through the city in my sturdy black power wheelchair, maybe it’s still in one of those little coffee shops, maybe I carelessly, fatally, foolishly cast it aside in a momentary occlusion of madness, like a paper tissue or some other small useless thing.

In my room of depth and asceticism, something stirred and I finally sensed time. It wasn’t

measuring anything. There was no purpose to it, except I knew that it came out of my pain. Maybe we got it all wrong and pain came before time, long ago. I mean, who are we kidding? Pain always comes first. The hurt circled through my flesh, it bumped into my cells and scattered them like ashes, and when I tried to lift myself up, I didn’t hear the usual, comforting, “Okay, let’s go.”

In fact, I didn’t hear anything at all, except the ticking of the clock, one timepiece multiplied by a hundred twenty-seven million timepieces. There was neither scarlet nor blue anymore, all colors faded, as time was burrowing into my tiny crippled body. It hurt, and it hurt, and it hurt, and you can’t fit time into a small human body, just like you can’t fit the sky into your bones. I learned that there’s a blood and a prison to all timepieces.

The longer it hurt, the more time I accumulated inside me, until I had so much of it that everything else, just like the colors, slipped into obscurity. Me and time, we were out of joint. A second lasted an hour, a minute lasted a day, and a day lasted the expanse between the cradle and the grave, between the mind’s death and the mind’s exile.

I began to study the black miracles of time, like how it can fit into a common human body or stretch all the way between the lamb and the lion. I checked out a pile of books from a local library, yet I quickly realized that surprisingly little has been written on this matter. The greatest minds kept silent about black miracles, the ones that aren’t really all that terrific. Undeterred, I decided to figure this out myself. I was smart and singularly focused, which is to say, perfect for this task.

As my flesh throbbed with the hurting, I saw time circle and circle around my wounds, I heard it move in the pitch-black of the night, bumping softly into the objects in my room, I felt how it saturated the air, the man-eater.

But, even years later, I was no closer to understanding these black miracles than when I began, except that they are not supposed to happen, that you are not supposed to witness them, that you pay the blood price for each and every one of them, you pay the silver and the iron, the orchid and the dung, you pay the price of the world in its fierce and beautiful brilliance.

A human shattering, I, a beggar queen and a hero without honor, am waiting for someone else’s voice to disrupt the forever-ugly ticking of the clock.

When people hear that you’re in pain, they always assume it’s temporary, it’s inevitably finite, a glitch in the flesh, like an interlude of sunshine on a moist, fragrant orange peel, haunting and beautiful in its thoughtless abandonment. It’s a sprained ankle and a bedrest. No one thinks that true pain goes into the spaces between the minutes, that it is not a passage, but a rope, that it encircles time itself like a noose. Up into the air you go, kicking and twisting, up and up and up.

And as they cancel their visits in an overwhelming, almost endearing casualness, I don’t think they ever realize that I cannot take this continuous duration of timepain, not anymore. I cannot take it, not even for another minute, not without losing the barrier of antique dolls and sacred chimes separating us from a life without hurt and without mercy, the barrier we call the human mind.

How do I make them understand that sometimes hurt is time stripped of all space, all world, and all human voice? Tell me how. For fuck’s sake, tell me how I make them understand.

There’s nothing silent or unspeakable about pain either. It speaks in the language of clocks and their inviolable hideousness, it speaks in the sharp luminous crystals that riddle your wrists and your ribs, the bones of all bones, it speaks in the receding footsteps of those who were once near.

I never gave up on attempting to remember, again and again, what I had done in order to be sentenced to time like this. But I came up empty, the murderess minus the murder. But I think I do know why my invisible strangeflesh that didn’t measure time didn’t cry disappeared one day, just like that. I lost my other body because two sides of one coin cannot exist without each other, yet they cannot be together either. Because to put the two together is to break the coin. Which is to say, my wounded flesh could never be truly together with the other flesh.

I am either the wound or I am the salt. 

Come to think of it, I think I prefer to be the salt, no matter the consequences.

I was young and I didn’t really get that at all. I thought m other body and I were one and the same, I was giddy, irreverent, and free of time, with all the world, crimson and clover, before me. But my other body must’ve fled in terror once it realized that I was so oblivious to its eventual fate, the fool and the shiver.

So the thing is, sometimes there’s no crime.

Sometimes you get the sentence anyway.

Sometimes—

the day

lasts

forever.

Three Woman by Robert Altman

One woman becomes two

Two women become three

Three women become one

Women are a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic peril, a deadly fascination, and a painted ill.

—St. Chrysostom

In the arid expanse of the California desert, three women dwell in an apartment complex, their lives interwoven in a tapestry of solitude and silent longing. Shelley Duvall breathes life into Millie Lammoreaux, a therapist at a senior care center, whose days are marked by routine and a yearning for connection. Sissy Spacek embodies Pinky Rose, a newcomer who secures a job at the center and soon becomes Millie's roommate, her presence a delicate disruption. The idea of disruption is something I will repeatedly return to later. Janice Rule portrays Willie Hart, the heavily pregnant wife of the building owner, who navigates her days shrouded in melancholy and silence. She distances herself from the others, retreating into a world of her own creation, where swimming pools become her canvas, adorned with fantastical beings, men and women, both bizarre and near-mythological in scope, locked in an eternal dance of menace and mystery, the lines between the pursuer and the pursued blurred. While she rarely speaks, her presence is palpable, weighty, and unmistakable. Willie is akin to a modernist re-imagining of the earth witch.

Despite its origin in the nebulous realm of dreams, this film's surreal narrative and enigmatic characters compel us to explore its depths, seeking meaning amid the ambiguity. Dreams often reflect our deepest fears and desires, and the film's dreamlike quality offers rich ground for interpretation. This invites us to peel back its layers and examine the intricate dance between reality and fantasy. Needless to say, in our pursuit of interpretation, we must embrace ambiguity, recognizing that some mysteries must be left unresolved. I would insist that being dreamlike should never be an excuse to forgo understanding but rather an invitation to engage more deeply with what lurks under the surface, like Willie's phantasmagorical creatures, with what makes us dangerous, with what keeps us unpredictable and alive.

When Pinky begins to work at the same senior facility, she becomes immediately infatuated with Millie, inexplicably seeing her as the height of perfection. Pinky herself is of an indeterminable age, oscillating between a woman and a child. In a very real way, she has no fixed societal role nor is she culturally molded. At some point, she dumps a bunch of salt into her beer, to watch it froth over, and at another, she blows bubbles into her soda, oblivious to how this appears to others. As Millie snaps at her later, “You are not doing anything you’re supposed to!” That means Pinky doesn’t obsess over her looks, doesn’t smoke, and is not interested in scoring dates or collecting recipes.

Yet, it is precisely Pinky’s arrival that hails a disruption of lives, identities, and the lines between dreams and reality. She activates the fault-lines in those around her, pushing their fundamental wounds to the surface, with catastrophic consequences. 

Michael Balint's concept of the basic fault might be illuminating here. This foundational psychic wound transcends conventional language and adult cognition, rooted in preverbal experiences, which is one way of interpreting the choice to punctuate the film with the shots of Willie’s otherworldly murals. These murals are the tipping point of all verbal, rational meaning and discourse. These primal etchings create a pervasive sense of internal wrongness, not as a conflict or complex, but as a fundamental fault. This fault is a dynamic force, manifesting as a deficiency within the mind, a profound sense of lack or incompletion. It is, in fact, a painless scar. Pinky’s presence, with her childlike behaviors and lack of societal molding, serves to reveal and exacerbate these hidden wounds, forcing the women around her to confront the deepest parts of their psyches.

Pinky herself appears to be the most damaged of all of them, in a fundamentally obscure way. In a sense, she is the blade to open all scars.

As Millie and Pinky become roommates, the former openly dismisses Pinky’s attempts at conversation, forever in a world of tragically delusional romance, with the undercurrent of meanness, while the latter repeatedly violates Millie’s privacy by reading her diary.

As Pinky survives an act of self-harm, which happens right after she witnesses Millie about to have sex with a man (yes, I am suggesting that her attraction to Millie goes beyond platonic), she undergoes a psychic metamorphosis, as does Millie, who, for the first time, seems to be utterly shaken up and so very, very lonely. Her raw loneliness becomes almost unbearable to watch when she meets the people who appear to be Pinky’s parents and begins seeing herself as part of Pinky’s family. She no longer seems interested in her appearance or flirtations.

(Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalyst, introduced the concept of the real as one of the three key registers of human experience, along with the symbolic and the imaginary. This idea is particularly important here and later in the film. The real refers to what is outside language and cannot be articulated. It's everything that cannot be symbolized, represented, or fully understood. The real is what remains when words and images fail. It's the raw, unprocessed part of reality that resists integration into our understanding and experiences. The real can manifest in moments of intense trauma or shock, where normal comprehension, the Kantian schemata, breaks down.

It is an elusive and sometimes unsettling part of our existence that highlights the gap between reality as we know it and reality as it truly is. It is the trauma that breaks through all of our defense mechanisms.)

Pinky, on the other hand, sees herself as Millie now, or perhaps her version of Millie, as she emerges from her coma as a dominant personality. It is now her turn to belittle and dismiss Millie, mirroring the earlier behaviors towards her with unsettling accuracy, calculation, and, let’s face it, pleasure.

Nearby, Willie’s marriage to a drunken womanizer collapses when her asshole of a husband leaves her completely alone in their apartment to give birth, after hitting on Pinky and Millie. Both women rush to her, once they realize what’s happening. This is somewhat similar to her demeanor visiting Pinky in the hospital, Millie is in a state of clear anguish, desperate to help. She tells Pinky to fetch a doctor, continuing to do what little she knows about helping someone in labor.

Pinky never calls for help.

I admit that my way “in” into the film and my obsession with it are the excruciatingly prolonged moments when we observe Pinky's face, her mind and body immobilized in complete inaction. Pinky is merely watching a woman in labor, about to deliver a stillborn. Her face is inscrutable. A blue line is pulsating before her, as the umbilical cord of a life that could have been saved, the mother’s grief averted. This situation, as Adi Ophir would describe, demands real and moral urgency, necessitating relief for the suffering individual. Any hesitation signifies acquiescence or indifference to the suffering of the specific embodied other, amounting to a superfluous evil. While we can endlessly speculate about what crossed Pinky's mind during those moments, the fact remains that she either couldn't or wouldn't provide any practical help. (At this point, I turned to my husband and said, “Maybe don’t send the crazy person on a life-or-death mission?”). In this, Pinky both illuminates the possibility of disrupting suffering and simultaneously shatters it, brutally and forever.

It is worth noting that after a very clearly traumatized Millie approaches her, the blood of the stillbirth on her hands, the realization that Pinky never went to help descending upon her like a vulture about to gorge on her torment and grief, Pinky’s expression remains just as blank, even as she hears Millie’s words, “He is dead.”

This scene is grueling, psychotic, and one of the greatest in cinema. Pinky had previously demonstrated her capacity for cruelty, and I am convinced that a certain terrible cruelty was unfurling within her. If the primordial ethical cry is a demand for analgesia, as Emmanuel Levinas puts it in his brilliant essay “Useless Suffering,” we feel the passage of those minutes in an agonizing, visceral way, understanding that as long as Pinky fails to act, any possibility of help for Willie and her baby is always already too late.

The film’s ending is enigmatic and surreal, leaving much open to interpretation. After a series of identity shifts and emotional crises, the three main characters—Millie, Pinky, and Willie—settle into an unconventional family dynamic, now inhabiting Willie’s house. Millie assumes a maternal role for both Pinky and, strikingly, Willie, who appears to be hollowed out of her eerie, magnetic witchinness. They, in a sense, merge together, possibly for the sake of survival, possibly because each is too shattered to exist alone, without the psychic propping from the other women. The last words we hear is Willie telling Pinky, “Don’t know why you have to be so mean to her [Millie].” Once again, we encounter the theme of Pinky’s possibly innate meanness, at a crucial moment in the film, no less. 

While this film invites endless interpretations, the key point for me aligns with Ophir’s claim that the sufferer does not need interpretation; they need relief. The movie hinges on the fact that there was a possibility for relief during Willie’s harrowing labor, with Pinky as an impassive, almost stone-like observer. And then there wasn’t.

All the lingering questions (how much of Pinky’s temporary transformation was real and how much was faked, for example) and the dreamlike sequences and transitions collide with the immutable fact that the plea to interrupt suffering, that the demand for analgesia, fell on deaf ears. Finally, it is up to every viewer to decide just how much Pinky’s admittedly obscure, yet severe psychic trauma mitigates or even justifies the catastrophic consequences of her failure to act.

Finally, Altman weaves a haunting and dreamlike atmosphere through its minimalist, dissonant score by Gerald Busby and unsettling ambient sound effects, all calibrated perfectly to create a pervasive sense of dread and foreboding. The surreal murals by Bodhi Wind, filled with mythic and symbolic imagery, reflect that which precedes and goes beyond language. 

This style profoundly influenced David Lynch, particularly, I would argue, in the key scene at Club Silencio in Mulholland Drive. Like the terrible realizations during Willie's labor—Pinky's failure to get help, Willie's realization of abandonment, and Millie's lack of preparedness—the Silencio scene presents a moment of devastating clarity.

Sometimes the most terrible thing in the world is a lucid moment.

In both films, the music, sound, and surreal imagery converge to expose harsh truths. In 3 Women, the fragility of their constructed identities, and in Mulholland Drive, the collapse of all illusions revealing the reality that the mind could not bear. This is the real that breaks through any barriers, regardless of what sense of comfort or safety they might offer, for a time.