Chronic Pain Performance and Knowledge: Toward a Process With Ecological Pain

Abstract

I have lived with chronic back pain for over 20 years. My experience has shown me that my relationship to pain can resonate with what it means to relate with wider ecological pain. I reflect on Pain and I—my autobiographical dance performance that explores the rich complexities of chronic pain and asks “what can pain teach us”? I explore what chronic pain experience can reveal about having a process with pain and staying “with the trouble” of our “wounded Earth.” I draw on autoethnographic poetry, performance text, pain theory, and ecological philosophy.

Brokenness is generative. Creative.

Bayo Akomolafe (2017, p. 16)

It is in listening to . . . troubled stories that we might encounter our best hopes for precarious survival.

Anna Tsing (Tsing et al, 2017, p. 34)

Welcome

Hello. My name’s Sarah. I’m in companionship with pain.

Take however long you need to settle in to where you are. You are invited to do what is most comfortable for you. You can sit, stand, lie down, stretch, lean, move around. Engage with as much or as little as you want. Take your time. Rest. Breathe. Read slowly. Follow momentum when it comes. Be led by your curiosities. You do not need to be a polite viewer. This space does not merely accept you but needs you to be you for it to be itself. This space shakes its head at pressure and judgement. It wants another way. You are invited to rest into your body, acknowledge yourself however you are, and settle in to the richness of listening to pain. Welcome.

Text adapted from Pain and I performance.

This experimental research paper discusses what it means to have a process with pain in the context of living with, and creating performance about, chronic pain; and from this, exploring how we might have a process with—a relationship to, a response to—ecological pain.

I’m listening to you . . . to try to get to know your qualities and atmospheres: to mark you, honour you, see what you have to say, and let you take centre stage.

I hope that I am giving you your due.

Pain and I—performance text

Middles

This writing has no tabula rasa beginning or neutral starting point. There is no ideal body to return to, clearing away of bodily tendencies, linear autobiography of ability to disability, or fantasy of curing pain. There is no return to pristine nature or an Edenic planet baseline. There is no once-and-for-all process of recuperation. There is no pretending that pain, damage, and horror do not exist, or plans for getting back to “normal.”

When it starts again

Breathe into that unsmiling feeling

Of mashed up sadness, frustration, anger,

Speaking of how my body has—once again—stopped itself,

Been undone,

Tightened into something hard to own.

To do’s unknow themselves,

Trailing into simple needs

Of rest.

Plans, getting-on-with-it, productivity,

Become distant concepts,

Forgotten thoughts.

October 2022

This writing exists in the middle. I am in the middle of research, a performance process, and my life with chronic pain. This writing emerges in the middle of theory and practice, pain philosophy and ecological thinking, and the personal, poetic and critical. We are in the middle of what “I” am and “you” are inasmuch as we are each always already “several” and thus “quite a crowd” (Deleuze and Guattari, 2014, p. 1). If “everything begins in the middle” (Akomolafe, 2017, p. 12), then we have no choice about being in the middle, but we do have a choice about how we work with the realities of being in the middle; choices about how performance, thought, research, knowledge, and dissemination can be middle-embracing-practices.

The adventure is here.

In the candlelight in my bedroom.

In my neighbourhood

The trees along familiar streets,

Walked in dusk and darkness

For 16 years.

In nearby friendships.

The adventure is in the dirt

Light

Weather

Ground

Middle

Of where I am.

October 2022

Introduction

I’m an artist-researcher who works across live art, dance, and performance. I’ve lived with chronic back and neurological pain for over 20 years. Until recent years, I related to my pain solely as a hindrance to my life and work.

I’ve spent a lot of time hating you and I’ve used so much energy up to carry on hating you. I’ve hidden you, ignored you, played you down, tested you and planned many times that you will leave me.

Pain and I—performance text

About 6 years ago, I began to explore what it means to turn toward my pain differently. It was Spring 2017. I was experiencing constant pain flare-ups. The logic of what a body should be—the neoliberal capitalist logics of ableism, health, productivity—were impossible to sustain. I was spending weeks in bed, unable to work or make plans, at the end of my tether, at a loss. I was drenched in a sense of not knowing myself: I was not what I thought I was. It was in this lost space—lying in my bed day after day—that something in me gave in. In giving in something gave way: another way was given space. I remember it clearly—from the horizontality I was stuck in, my giving-in-letting-go gave way to a torrent of thoughts and questions. I had a sense that working with my pain creatively—that dancing with, rather than despite, my pain—could allow me to listen to the lessons and knowledge contained in pain experience. I suddenly saw my pain anew—as a collaborator that could contribute, rather than only be a barrier, to my practice and research. What if living and working creatively with pain could aid me in exploring the ecological questions that I had been engaging with through performance for the past decade? A thesis arrived in my mind and body: the micro of chronic pain experience contains expertise about what it means to work and relate with wider ecological pain. The ideas were not quite so formulated in that moment as I write them now, but the sentiment was the same: this pain may be of some use! I smiled for the first time in weeks.

Audre Lorde (2020) wrote that the power of giving voice to her experience of living with breast cancer was not simply so that her and other women were recognized, but for her experience to be “of use” (p. 1). That moment in 2017 was a realization that not only was I ready to share my chronic pain experience, but the experience has perspective and knowledge—offering something useful, even needed. From the horizontal life I was living, a different logic about my pain could emerge: a crack in the usual patterns of my thinking opened. Philosopher Bayo Akomolafe (2022a), reflecting on how his autistic son lay down in the middle of a shopping mall, suggests that “there’s a view of things entangled with that horizontal position that our anxious postures of rectitude know nothing about.” Dance artist Raquel Meseguer Zafe—who works creatively with her chronic pain, and with whom I researched dancing with pain as “cripping choreography” (Hopfinger, 2021)—explores horizontality as a useful and “different way of being in the world . . . a different perspective.” Chronic pain can contain hidden generosities, like the unexpected gifts of enforced horizontality: cracks in the fabric of being and knowing.

My body cannot be fulfilled.

There are gaps,

Cracks,

Fleshy undertakings.

Splitting and cutting up the tamed life.

Splash away unnecessary conversation.

Be a responsible trickster.

Surge me into generosity.

Erupt me into patience.

Push me into combinations of laughter, pain, care.

Flash me the glimmer of my insides.

Give this the time it deserves.

Serve me up a monster of daily revelations.

Query the traps tripping me into obedience.

Place warm hands over my middle.

Cry for the differences.

Hold me here,

Gently.

Kind edges of sanity.

Whirlwinds of beautiful crazy.

Warmth of erratic chaos.

The heart of being lost.

Ask for a place

In me

That matters and makes a difference.

November 2022

My intention here is to take chronic pain seriously as an experience that contains knowledge about having a process with pain, and to put this knowledge to wider use by exploring how it can help us to understand what it means to have a process with ecological pain. I am conceptualizing environmental catastrophes, such as pollution, climate change, species loss, and ecosystem damage, as forms of pain: I use the term “ecological pain” to refer to our complex experiences and emotions in relation to the damaged earth. The term also refers to the pain of nonhumans and the unfathomable pain of ecosystems themselves. My concept of ecological pain extends positively from the current environmentalist discursive trend of “mourning” environmental loss (Cunsolo & Landman, 2017). That literature focuses on humans grieving the losses from “eco-catastrophe” (Shaw & Bonnett, 2016, p. 573). I am not making a case, or prescribing a method, for ecological grief, but am working toward what it means to have a process with ecological pain, in all the mystery, complexity, and messiness of what that may be.

My focus is not to simply draw analogies between living with chronic pain and living with ecological pain, but to explore how chronic pain performance and knowledge can “dance . . . thought around” (Manning, 2013, p. 45). I explore the kind of process that emerges from working creatively with chronic pain and attend to how that process offers thought about engaging with ecological pain. How can chronic pain help us to think through what it means to “stay with the trouble of living . . . on a damaged earth” (Haraway, 2016, p. 2)? How does living in a damaged body and creating performance that embraces that body reveal possibilities for an “arts of living on a damaged planet” (Tsing et al., 2017)?

To tenderly open to you

Saying “Yes, this is how you are!”

You are screaming and straining.

You are

You.

I embrace.

No strings attached.

As I would my lover, friend, mother.

You need my whole heart.

No tired aching towards healing.

No expectation.

No pilgrimage aimed at recovery.

My broken body is already whole.

Inasmuch as anything is whole

Or not.

You get to take up space,

Be a valid ontology.

Something shows its shy head.

Your value is wild.

Coming out

Slowly.

Cautious.

So fleshy and real.

Much trust is needed in this embrace.

Here

I am listening

To what you have to say!

October 2022

Approach

I interlace performance text and poetic autoethnography throughout this paper—a zooming in on the details of my chronic pain experience. The performance text—italicized and indented—is from my ongoing project, Pain and I: a body of work that explores the rich complexities of chronic pain and asks: what can pain teach us? Pain and I sits between dance and live art: It involves choreographies that explore the limits and possibilities of my chronic pain body and poetic text framed as a love letter to my pain. I perform the piece naked, emphasizing my chronic pain body as a site of knowledge. My approach relates to Dee Heddon’s (2007) proposition that autobiographical performance can offer a way for marginalized voices to “talk out, talk back, talk otherwise” (p. 3). With Pain and I, I focus less on my voice as marginal and more on chronic pain as a marginalized experience which needs to be heard; chronic pain as an experience that has something to say. I have come to understand this project as a way of developing a language for pain experience and sharing what a creative process with pain can be. Created between 2019 and 2022, Pain and I includes a live performance, audio piece, graphic score, and installation. I continue to develop and tour the work (www.sarahhopfinger.org.uk/pain-and-i).

My performance approach is process-led: I do not work with a preexisting script or structure as to what a performance will be, rather I devise the work through a process of exploration in response to an inquiry. For Pain and I, my inquiry was about embracing the rich spectrum of chronic pain experience. Like other artists who take a process-led approach, I look for what is immanent in the process itself: I discover a performance through making it. Performance theorist Laura Cull (2013) discusses immanent modes of creativity, where a performance emerges from the “bottom-up” (p. 25). Karen Christopher (practitioner and former member of the now disbanded devising company Goat Island) proposes that, in a devising process, the performance material itself “begins to suggest certain directions” and thus the performance begins to “make itself” (in Bottoms & Goulish, 2007, p. 120). Forced Entertainment director Tim Etchells (1999) talks about the “ethical need . . . [to] fall into . . . their work . . . to let it take them somewhere unknown, to surrender to that . . . to go with the work” (p. 62). I understand the performance process itself to exert pulls toward certain directions, and I see my job as a performance-maker to listen and respond to those pulls: rather than try to lead and control what the work is, I try to join with the “agency of the practice” (Hopfinger, 2018, p. 499).

By drawing on material directly from Pain and I, I want to bring out the knowledge contained in the performance itself, as opposed to using the performance simply to illustrate theoretical ideas. As choreographer Rosemary Lee puts it, the aim in reflecting on dance is to value the “knowledge generated by the practice itself rather than producing interpretations through analytical frameworks” (Lee & Pethybridge, 2019, p. 471). With practice-led research, I understand performance as a thinking and theorizing activity (Hopfinger & Bissell, 2022, pp. 47–48; Vincs, 2007, pp. 100–108), treating performance as “knowledge or philosophy in action” (Barrett, 2007, p. 1). Here, I explore how performance has something to say philosophically about what it means to have a process with pain.

I also include “poetic autoethnography” (Hanauer, 2021), written during two pain flare-ups: August–September 2021 and October–December 2022. The autoethnographic text is non-italicized and indented, with the month and year it was originally written. Though I have developed the writing since, much of it stays the same as when I first wrote it. By including writing as it emerged from inside the very moments and modes of my pain experience, I want to emphasize the situatedness of chronic pain knowledge. As Haraway (1991) argues, knowledge is always already being made through specific experiences in specific places, so the “only way to find a larger vision is to be somewhere in particular” (p. 196). Sara Ahmed (2017) also embraces the situated-ness of knowledge, proposing that “we need to give up distance to follow . . . thought” (p. 16). I am embracing the inside—the bodily experiential situated-ness—of my chronic pain experience, to find a wider vision for what it means to have a process with pain. My autoethnographic approach also resonates with other disabled scholars who acknowledge the embodied nature of knowledge production by writing their own bodies into their research (Birk, 2013; Leder, 2016). Lara Birk (2013) brings attention to the chronic pain body as a site of scholarly awareness, emphasizing how chronic pain can embody “sociological insight and political agency” (p. 390). Writing about illness, Havi Carel (2013) proposes “bodily doubt” as a site of “philosophical insights” (p. 178). I am concerned with the embodied insights of chronic pain and in creatively-critically working with those insights to understand what it means to have a process with ecological pain.

Muddles

To explore a process with pain, I take what I am calling a muddle methodology. This is akin to the epistemological approach Gregory Bateson (1987) spoke of 50 years ago: “if we . . . spoke logically all the time, we would never get anywhere . . . to think new thoughts or to say new things, we have to break up all our ready-made ideas and shuffle the pieces” (p. 25). It relates to Haraway’s (2016) formulation of “theory in the mud,” where she uses “muddle” as a “theoretical trope . . . to trouble the trope of visual clarity as the only sense and affect for mortal thinking” (p. 31, 174). A muddle methodology, also, speaks of the unpredictability, vulnerability, and precarity of what it means to be entangled in the more-than-human, or as Tsing (2013) puts it: “we are not in control, even of ourselves” (p. 20). To work with muddle is to play with logic, transgress linearity, and embrace losing our way. Akomolafe (2023) invokes that, amid our current ecological crises, “to find one’s way, one must lose it generously” (p. 7). To be in a muddle, and to work from the middle, is the most realistic approach for staying with the troubles of both chronic pain and ecological pain. I think of performance practice too as a method for generatively being inside the muddle and middle of an inquiry.

To do the muddling work of exploring chronic pain knowledge for its insights into having a process with ecological pain, I am experimenting with my critical voice. Rather than finding strengths and weaknesses in theoretical perspectives and looking “for holes to fill in,” like philosopher Brian Masumi I am concerned with the “movement of thought” (Masumi in Manning, 2023, p. 142). I look for concepts not in terms of ideas to critique, but as invocations to breathe air into the muddle: concepts that feel “like friends” (Manning, 2023, p. 6). I work with words in the way Fabrice Dubose (2023) puts it: “words and concepts may be used with creative ‘assemblages’ rather than to index or categorize the world” (p. 40). Jane Bennett (2010) proposes that humans are assemblages of “tools, microbes, minerals, sounds, and other ‘foreign’ materialities” (p. 36). Therefore, thinking and writing is always already a matter of taking part in more-than-human agencies, or as Haraway (2016) puts it: thinking is to “think-with other beings, human or not” (p. 7). The creative assemblage that I work with here includes my chronic pain body, performance material, poetry from inside pain experience, and other harder-to-name more-than-human forces.

I work with critique in terms of how it can enact a displacement of thinking—or as Judith Butler defines it, critique is a “state of ontological suspension” (Butler, 2001). However, I also work with Akomolafe’s (2022b) insight that what may be more rigorously needed in the times of crisis that we find ourselves in is a “move beyond critique” where we are able to enact a bold embrace of “writing as a spiritual ally.” Many thinkers of the Anthropocene propose that we are not simply in an ecological crisis but “a crisis of sensitivity . . . an impoverishment of what we can feel, perceive” (Morizot and Zhon Menguel, 2018). I think that a shift in sensitivity is connected to Akomolafe’s call to embrace the spiritual in research. This writing, then, is an assemblage of the personal, poetic, and critical; an invocation; a spiritual ally; and a practice of inviting in alternative ways of thinking, feeling, and knowing.

Misty-eyed.

Stretched, taught, pressed.

Bricks between organs, muscles, skin, bones.

My lover that unfollows linearity.

A fucking with me that meanders.

Fucking up expectations.

I am undone,

Daily.

A slap in the face,

A slap into rest.

Snapped in

the middle.

Sapped of will.

Stay with your trouble.

Slowly.

Slower.

You call out not to be mistaken

As demands to do less of the same.

The resistance is speaking

Of a fugitive joy,

Where torrents come forth.

Work tells of itself through playful modes,

A study space for entering the power of falling apart.

Speech wants to be a friendship

Of unlikely combinations.

The sacredness of letting ourselves be,

Rings out celebrations

Of another way.

You are not another thing to fit into the workplace, to include.

Have done with performative care, you call,

Spill into emergence,

Being in a not-too-soon not-too-holding-back,

A living into.

You shake me up.

Shake things up.

You are opener of worlds.

Fast tracking me to the heart of it.

Shattering dreams I never had.

Juicy substances of pleasure

Swing in,

Unapologetically arriving at life.

No explanation needed.

A sensuous playful care,

A source of spectrums in laughter and tears.

This is serious work.

Toppling regimes of knowing.

Inviting in souls.

The intellect of feelings.

The knowledge of emotions.

The wisdom of bodies.

Gifts of staying with.

The reward is

Being in love

With life.

October 2022

Turning Toward

There is the fresh shock of the pain arriving, born into me—like so many times before but still so huge, so astonishing in its reality. I cannot accept this pain: its enormity and its repercussions feel unbearable.

This recent pain flare up begins on a Monday as I bend down to pick up my washing basket. A ripple travels inside me, a creaturely aliveness running through my lower back. In the first minutes of the pain, I walk about as if this is not happening: this re-arrival is impossible to accept. I walk into my living room and move to the floor to stretch—pretending I can still do such things. I am in denial.

I take pain killers, hoping they keep the pain at bay. They don’t. Nothing gets through, the pain is too alive, too determined, too becoming; a tide of reality creeping up on me. I go to bed, try to breathe. I cannot think properly. After three or four hours, I become angry—fuck, fuck, fuck, this is bad. I cry out to my bedroom. My dog hears me. I stare wide-eyed. I cannot change this, it is happening. The pain is expanding across my back, slipping down my leg, pinching its way into my hip, and taking over my buttock. I lie there, teetering on the edge of panic. Though I have experienced countless flare ups, I feel like a novice at being in pain.

The next day I wake up, it is so early. Maybe the pain woke me. It feels scary to try and move a millimetre—even the thought of moving hurts. The next three days pass in a blur of lying down with many pillows, trying to find positions that give some relief. I develop side effects from taking such strong doses of codeine—fatigue, immense morning grogginess, constipation. I do not understand where the food goes—I joke about this with my good friend, Teodora, who I live with. I have spurts of irreverent humour: they come crashing down as if a trickster is trying itself out through me, gaining confidence and being playful. There are moments of letting go, of surrendering to the situation, a kind of oh-well-what-the-hell-I-am-in-pain-and-that’s-the-truth-so-why-not-play-with-this-trouble.

August 2021

Welcome to the wakeful nights, the unease of daybreak, the hindered steps, the troubled ones. Welcome to the stiffening and shrinking of my world, the stretching of my fear and despair, the lengthening of my discontent.

Shake me up and shatter me, leave me lying crying in the fields. Let me flounder. Flame up and compress my smiles and words. Undo my sense of self. Shoot me from the inside and ache it into my identity.

Pain and I—performance text

Part of turning toward chronic pain is—perhaps obviously—about admitting and acknowledging the horror of the pain. I have come to understand Pain and I as a practice for doing this admitting and acknowledging.

I’m scared of this body. I’m scared of its unpleasant ways, of its threatening, dizzying, draining and unpredictable ways, of its weaker-than-it-was ways, of its loss of life-ways. I’m scared of what has been worn away and is unrecoverable. I am scared of this damage.

Pain and I—performance text

What I have found to be key about acknowledging pain is that it requires a space of nonjudgment. Pain and I—in creative process and presentation—is about creating a space where hardships are not things to try and make better but are treated as valid experiences that are allowed to be felt and expressed: hopefully, allowing audience members to connect to their own pain in a similarly nonjudgmental way.

The touches of breezes and whirlwinds that have brought you here—the currents of quiet and chaos—sound out their bells; booming your validity, vastness and vulnerability.

Pain and I—performance text

Each time I perform Pain and I, I find it a powerful relief to acknowledge the extreme aspects of pain experience. By not playing difficulties down—not succumbing to expectations of hope and optimism—I am able to have a process with the pain. Chronic pain research points to the importance of expressing pain experience (Lynch et al., 2013). At the same time, the invisibility and “unsharibility” of pain are acknowledged across pain philosophy (Corns, 2017; Scarry, 1985; Wortham, 2015). Admitting and embracing the impossibility of describing pain is a key part of having a process with it.

I head straight for you.

You crumble

into unexplainable torments.

To speak of you directly

is inadequate.

Detailing your tendencies with confidence,

I lose your unexpected possibilities.

You are best touched

best shared

in moments that let slip

pauses in the relentless

grind.

You constantly undo conclusions

about you

and me.

You ask me to be at ease

with incompleteness.

You reveal things

between times.

Encouragement surfaces

like a good friend.

I find you

indirectly stroking my heart.

November 2022

Environmentalist Joanna Macy (1995) has, for three decades, explored how acknowledging and living with “our pain for the world” leads to affirmation of “our existence and release[s] our power to act” (p. 249). Her work implies that turning toward ecological pain is key to having a meaningful process with it: there needs to space for expressing pain.

The air calls you in, speaking in a slowed disenchanted voice: there is space for you here, space for the unhealed.

Pain and I—performance text

Haraway (2016) proposes that we “live in disturbing times . . . troubling and turbid times,” where staying with the trouble is about becoming capable of responding to a wounded earth (p. 1). She implies that staying with—or as I think of it, turning toward—the reality of ecological suffering is the most realistic way to develop radical methods for contributing to environmental “flourishing” (pp. 7–10). Rather than denying or being nihilistic about our damaged planet—and equally, rather than trying to return to pristine or Edenic pasts—“staying with the trouble” requires “learning to be truly present . . . as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings” (p. 1). Haraway implies that we need to have a process of becoming present with the trouble—the brokenness—of our damaged planet.

When you are here you take over.

What is not you fades from view,

freezes in time.

You arrive with such certainty

that nothing else can be as real.

You are loud, undeniable, immense.

I’m swept up by you—swept in, swept away.

And then, when the whirlwind of your arrival calms,

your intensities settle in to me.

I become used to your bigness and persistence—to waking up with you.

You seep into my patterns,

Make your way into my depths,

Become my feelings.

Our entanglement becomes unsaid movements.

You change me

every time.

We

an intimacy

with its own life.

November 2022

As I blur into the second week of this flare up, I feel surprisingly “at one” with things, as if a spell has been put on me and I can let go of the initial panic. I continue to lie in bed, feeling thankful on some level that all I can do is rest. I sleep a lot. I have dreams. I have not rested properly for so long. I am finally really resting. This acceptance of the pain merges into a soft presence. A quality of warmth and friendliness emerges—what feels like a loving embrace. There is deep relief.

This warm and friendly sensibility does not cancel out other feelings—it is not an everything-is-ok-and-all-I-need-to-do-is-accept-things-and-what-will-be-will-be attitude. It is not an innocent coziness. It is more like a comforting-caring hum that is singing amongst the shifting-overwhelming-unnerving-ongoing-up-and-down feelings: a way of being in the horror of this situation more peaceably.

August 2021

Working with my chronic pain, and devising Pain and I, has taught me that turning toward the terribleness of living with pain is how I am able to notice what my body still is and what my life can still be. By embracing the horror, and accepting my damaged body, I discover how to experience life and joy within the brokenness. Tsing (2013) argues that we must embrace the unavoidability of living on a damaged planet, proposing that “precarity” and “ruin” are the conditions (though spread out unequally) of our times (p. 2). She explores the matsutake—a mushroom that grows in the most “damaged . . . places on Earth”—as a guide for the “possibilities of coexistence within environmental disturbance” (p. 50; 4). Having a process with ecological pain is not only about becoming present with pain (becoming present with pain runs the risk of getting stuck in the numbing effects of disaster); rather, to acknowledge ecological pain is a route into, as Tsing (2013) puts it, finding “life in this ruin” (p. 6).

As I enter the third week, the warm-friendly-acceptance-hum brings another quality: a tremendous focus takes a hold of me. I begin enjoying how simple things are. Inside of this broken time, with this broken body, all I can do is what I can do. As the days go on, this focus grows into an attitude of gentle ambition. I begin doing the tiniest of Pilates movements from bed: lying on my back, bending my knees, allowing each leg to move to the side a few centimetres and back—a toned down version of the most basic Pilates beginner’s exercise. I am appreciative of, and enjoy, this smallest of movements. I experience fulfilment from this tiny sign of a tiny bit of recuperation. I let go of the need to recover fully: partial recuperation is gentler, realistic, more joyful.

September 2021

I cannot be healed, I cannot be healed, I cannot be healed.

Pain and I—performance text

By finding a language for the horrors of chronic pain experience, I can find a way into exploring the possibilities of what I can do to partially recuperate my damaged body. This partial recuperation is about being playful and creative about working with what I have. Within this playfulness, there are unexpected qualities to discover.

Come home

To this intricate body

Of condensed tightened un-soothed sensation.

Its undoing is powerful,

Protection from the dull and mundane.

Protective

Of the unwieldy.

Unlikely protagonist,

Give me your story.

Tell me about intimacies that grate up selves,

Paradoxes that lick my body.

Tickle energies of honesty,

Giving in to truth fires.

Swell up crevices in my body,

Producing predictions of nothing.

Strike lightening from my insides,

Collecting fragments of trickster shapes.

Shatter fixations on expected patterns,

Constructing curious words that make unheard sentences.

The baseline here is cracked tenderness.

November 2021

By accepting and becoming present with the realities of my pain experience I can: first, find ways to work with my damaged body as it is; second, explore how to partially recuperate; and, third, find unexpected qualities immanent to the experience. In the process of writing the text for Pain and I, I realized that I was writing a series of love letters to my pain: as a way not to play down the terror of pain experience but to have a richer relationship to it. By validating the horrors of living with pain—by turning toward pain—I was able to turn toward other more life-giving possibilities and qualities: gentleness, tenderness, joy, and love.

Welcome the unchosen ones, those ones left out; those disruptive, uncomfortable, quietened, shameful ones. The air calls you in. Your shimmering of the unbearable—your shadow sides—crisscross the now, and we scream “come back to me, there’s space for you here.” Your kiss of brokenness, your kiss of damage; it wets, softens, and calms.

Pain and I—performance text

The crack that pain experience opens can, if I have a process with it, lead to a richness of experience. Turning toward pain—accepting, becoming present, exploring partial recuperation—is not about giving up but about opening to unexpected possibility and flourishing. A kind of creative realism!

You know about panic, overwhelm, and rage. You know about fragility, kindness, and care. You tell me about soft energies, peaceful ambitions, a quiet boldness. If I am there to listen, you whisper revelations. You have the power to push me away from others and the power to create beautiful intimacies. I don’t know what our future holds and I don’t know how you’ll be, but I know that you’re more than what you seem and that so much is tangled up in you.

Pain and I—performance text

Haraway’s (2016) discussions imply that we need to work with both joy and terror to do the work of staying with the trouble (p. 31). She discusses science-art activisms that loop “love and rage” and are “committed to partial healing, modest rehabilitation, and still possible resurgence in the hard times of the Anthropocene” (Haraway, 2017, M38; M33). Rather than focus on returning ecosystems to a baseline of what is considered pristine “nature,” Haraway (2016) is committed to the more realistic and “modest possibilities of partial recuperation (p. 10). Having a process with ecological pain is what can allow us to generatively engage with partial recuperation: rather than giving in to nihilism or getting stuck in unrealistic hope, partial recuperation opens us to ‘still possible finite flourishing” (Haraway, 2016, p. 10).

Slowing Down

You ask for gentleness and another kind of time. You tell me about deep disappointment, the shattering of expectations, being rebellious, and what it means to dare to live another kind of life.

Pain and I—performance text

Turning toward my pain brings me into a different experience of time, where the urgency of the flare up transforms into a necessity to slow down. Like Meseguer Zafe (2021), I find that the necessary rest and horizontality that my chronic pain demands can bring about welcome qualities, such as softness, care, and a more expansive sense of time. In the context of ecological emergency, Akomolafe (2022b) discusses the wisdom of slowing down in that it can “allow us to notice a different path hiding in the obviousness of the familiar.” Tsing et al. (2017) propose that slowing down to become present with, and listen to, the world “seems our only hope in a moment of crisis and urgency” (p. M8). Haraway (2016) implies a slowing down process when she argues that a “common liveable world must be composed, bit by bit, or not at all” (p. 40). Part of responding to ecological emergency is to slow down enough to notice our ecological pain and the qualities contained in that pain. By having a process with ecological pain, more possibilities about how to respond to ecological emergency can emerge, as well as opening ourselves up to more generous ways of being. Akomolafe proposes that it is “in places of rupture and defeat, through individual and collective brokenness, new relational commons are emerging” (in Dubose, 2023, p. 57).

When I tried to ring fence my sadness,

Corner my spontaneity,

Rule out other worlds.

I sang out habits of mere survival,

Scalded my exhaustion,

Blamed my tendencies of retreat,

Heard the loudness of inadequacy,

Predicted images of my success.

There are too many ways of less generosity.

You are a power

Of enforced inaction.

A juiciness of lack.

You inflict death to my daily patterns.

Saying stop

To the promised and sold

Ways of being.

I am dissatisfied by your re-entrance.

I was already dissatisfied.

You wake me up,

Make a brittle space

To realise what I am

Missing.

Yearning for.

You kill productivity treadmills and fake choices,

Bring a sharper focus

On vitality.

A sensorial reintroduction

To a slow love.

Easy-to-ignore questions are made acute.

Your force is brutal and kind.

This softening I must do to survive you

Makes a frame to become myself.

I get unexplainably giddy

With you.

Your arrival in recent years

Has become a signal fire

Of mundane life getting undone.

You rejig my life.

Reconfigure the coordinates

To make a sanctuary

Where revelations happen.

Your arrivals are getting to know me

Differently.

Each time

A crack opens for renewal.

October 2022

Conclusion

I have explored how living and working creatively with chronic pain, and making performance about that experience, can contain insight about what a process with ecological pain can look and feel like. Having a process with pain is, crucially, not a once-and-for-all process. I recurrently go on the process of turning toward my pain, working with it, and opening to the qualities contained in it. It is a lifelong process of making friends with myself, my pain, my damaged body, over and over again. With ecological pain, the ongoing-ness of the process is key: staying with the trouble of our damaged earth is not a linear or single process, but a middle-embracing-practice where we must be willing to work with muddles and the unexpected qualities that emerge, and, then, to keep going!

You are not my choosing.

Your arrival is unwanted.

This is not a good time.

I’m not ready.

I despise the hints of your return.

You steal

My smiles.

Hand out restrictions

Easily.

You out me

Into question.

Fuck it up.

Get under my skin.

Creep me out of my body.

A torrent

Overhauling the logics.

Undoing me.

When I turn towards you

There is movement.

How turned away I was,

Tightened against your existence.

Armored thoughts

Against your uncanniness.

A boarded-up heart.

You shatter me.

Shatter my rules.

You ensure I lose myself.

Create frameworks for difference.

You crack me open.

Make cracks for alternatives.

You are my realisation

Revelation

Work

Integration

Access to love.

Something speaks softly

Of radical acceptance.

A world of friendliness

To loss

Tells tales of hopeful kinship,

Punctuating portals for living.

A sanctuary gets made

From a bed of restrictions.

Mundane days

Sparked,

Jolted into textures and spectrums.

Shouts of joy

Dance with trouble.

Something is declaring itself.

Bleeding out the answers.

A recalculation

Of success.

What is to be achieved is of a different order.

You create

A lived knowledge

Unknowingly craved for.

I invoke

You

Here in this word movement.

I want to make more of you.

Your relentless disruptions.

Collapsing walls.

Your disrespect for my life.

Broken ways.

Force.

Your movements

Turn me

Into something

Different.

The quiet roar of a wilder way.

October 2022