Cut and Run

by Aritha van Herk

“The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain.”

—Aristotle

Hurt.

Not a locker, for storage or otherwise, keyless and flat-faced, intent on its own secrecy, smug safety deposit boxes holding their midriffs tight, railway stations and gyms hosting that temporary keeping, custodial duty over backpacks and sneakers. Tautology of locker: equipped with a lock.

Hurt strains against confinement, swells like sponge in water, soaking up the moisture of affliction, its aggravation. Not unexpected or surprising, but still a shock, the surprise of flagrante, the mirum of damage.

Pleasure nurtures the same voluptuous prodigality, but without the ornament of harm. Almost nothing of Epicurus survives, a few fragments, misinterpretations of his subtle distillations. He was no sybarite, but tried to coax reductive thinkers toward some balance between absence of pain and tranquility of mind. Theories misconstrued as hedonism. Materialist that Epicurus was, he sought ethical pleasures, friendship and retirement. Aponia was enough for him.

But hurt persists, thick-thighed and clumsy, no fluency or coherence. “I am trying to articulate . . .” What? What? Some abstract dolefulness, tied to the melancholy of senescene?

Do no harm, physicians recite, Primum non nocere, ad nauseum. Applied to an epidemic, the intent prevails, but the prevention of positive ill applies negative to positive, a doubling back on central suspicion.

And what of the virtues of selfishness, that excuse for cowardice, the narcissist cringing behind his own fantasy of happiness? Two dogs and two cats and a dish rack upending scorch-bottomed pots? Married and mauled. Send that to the recycling bin.

The wind tears punctuation to shreds, leaves us shivering behind its sting. Hurt is less mutilation than laceration, a scrape that will not heal, road rash and rancid dermatosis.

And as for the cleansing denouement of pain, the stocks were a better answer, meant to educate and fumigate, the wooden boards a holdfast for humiliation. A criminal’s earlobes would be nailed to that pillory, and when he was released the torn flesh signaled a permanent record of conviction. Notice those ear piercings.

Hurt unexpected or coincidental, lurking behind its own disbelief, waiting to materialize, to perform. Nothing more or less than suffering and sorrow, but that’s an abstraction, does not clone the slice of a knife or the nick of a razor, blood appearing as a way to signal pain.

Study theology in search of answers to the origins of pain, relentless torment or the persistent affliction that refuses to subside, that shudders past time and into the orbit of Mercury, determined revolve.

Pain is temporary, the quick stab, the burn or sting. But pain is the prologue to hurt, and the afterword to event.

Discipline that cry, its vanished echo contrasting two kinds of crime: professional crime and personal crime. In order to improve on felony and damage, the detective must become accomplice to the suspect.

Hurt has no classification, resists amnesia and repeats, although bodily harm and injury are not the same, their suddenness no maiming.

“History is what hurts,” Fredric Jameson claims, that unhappy problematic suffering the predicament of its quota. If “history is therefore the experience of necessity […] it […] refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis…” Ah, there’s the rub.

Inflict harm, wound and damage, and ruin forever the colour of the sea, eau de nil.

It takes work to disappoint hurt, to lock it up in the locker of sadness and embarrassment, the pathos that arouses schadenfreude in the heartless. Hurtle and injure, ban causality, its merciless forceps.

Always remember the caution, “You could hurt yourself.”

Ghandi may have been correct, that “Nobody can hurt me without my permission,” but I am definitely interested in doling out some testicular pain, measured against the radar of an incoming high-headache Chinook.

Hard work does not hurt, and as for the Middle English origin, hurten, from Old French hurter—there is a push, a thrust, a hit, waiting to ambush the unwary.

The wisdom of Robert Kroetsch, in Excerpts from the Real World:10/3/85

That role [sic] of barbed wire you put in my bed. Don’t you realize I could have hurt myself, mistaking it for you?

The last four unbearable reps: that is when the muscles tense and rebound, assert themselves toward strength, endurance, vigour.

Be afraid. Hurt rebounds.

Works Cited

Aristotle, The Nichomachean Ethics (Penguin, 2004).

Mahatma Ghandi, attributed.

Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Cornell University Press, 1981).

Robert Kroetsch, Completed Field Notes (University of Alberta Press, 1989, 2000).