The Words That Fail to Capture the Suffering of Chronic Pain

More than a decade ago, a guest arrived in Chicago and refused to depart for 36 hours. Words failed to do justice to the experience, which remained so singular that no verbal description ever seemed adequate. That guest — and the failure of language to capture physical suffering — has now been documented by Ed Simon, who has written about the stories we tell about pain long after it is gone.

Elaine Scarry, 16th-century mystic Teresa of Ávila, and Emily Dickinson are the sources for a piece called “Whereof One Cannot Speak: On the Limits of Language to Describe Pain,” which argues that putting pain into words is difficult, a matter of poetics rather than of biology.

The Chicago Summer

Simon came across the guest for the first time during a warm Chicago summer. He was enrolled in a summer seminar at the University of Chicago, passing through the brick homes of Hyde Park. At first, the pain was slight, a tingling in his right jaw that he could barely notice. He kept walking past the brick homes of Hyde Park, unbothered.

The next morning brought a new sensation, something he could not place in his teeth. The pain that followed was not mild. It was a crushing, burning agony that ran along his upper and lower lateral incisors, canines, and molars. He felt as if someone had heated an iron rod and driven it through the flesh on his neck just behind his ear, pushing it through his jaw until it burst out through his right cheek.

He treated himself for what felt like around 36 sleepless hours. He slathered thick, viscous glops of Benzidine on his teeth and gums, assuming that the source of the pain was dental. Without dental insurance, his anguished mind did not just assume but accepted that the pain would be never-ending.

The guest had left without a word, departing at some point near the dawn during the second day, while he still lay in an exhausted, lingering half-sleep. Unable to put into words what that presence had felt like, he largely forgot the feeling after that. But it did not stay forgotten, returning again and again.

What the Philosophers Say

Scarry’s book remains the greatest theoretical treatment of the unintelligible experience of pain, Simon writes. Scarry focuses on the actual subjective feeling, not the physical symptoms or the biological etiology, and she argues that pain “does not simply resist language but actively destroys it.” She writes that “It is the intense pain that destroys a person’s self and world,” a destruction experienced spatially as either the contraction of the universe down to the immediate vicinity of the body or as the body swelling to fill the entire universe, or sometimes both.

Simon holds the view that this feeling is found in everyone. Does your discomfort burn or ache, throb or cut, stab or radiate? Pain turns us all into poor poets, as we wildly reach for whatever resting metaphors might help in the moment, hoping some person able to offer relief will understand the severity.

The Limits of Description

According to Simon, the means we use to describe feelings are inadequate when set against the particularity of certain sensations. He identifies two prevailing approaches to measuring pain, and argues that both reveal not a failure of medicine but a failure of language.

Patients are asked to rank their suffering from 1-10 on the Numerical Rating Scale, as though the pain were being judged like Rolling Stone’s album reviews. The Wong-Baker FACES Scale instead asks them to match their agony to cartoon faces, starting with a smiling, unconcerned expression and ending with a grimacing, afflicted one. Neither system addresses a failure of medicine; both point to the failure of language.

“It is the intense pain that destroys a person’s self and world,” writes philosopher Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World.

The Period of the Blank

Dickinson’s “Element of Blank” speaks of a moment when pain cannot be put into words, when one cannot say when it began or whether there was a time before it existed. It is the period of forgetting, when the guest’s presence is no longer felt.

The line between pain and ecstasy is thin. Teresa of Ávila described her excruciating theophany, wherein an angel penetrated her soul with a “long spear of gold… thrusting it at time into my heart…to pierce my very entrails,” so that she is on fire with the love of God, and the “pain was so great, that it made me moan.” The transcendent experience of theophany is not unlike the experience of orgasm, but both are fleeting.

While Simon’s guest returned to Washington DC and again to Pittsburgh, reshaping the image of the iron rod through the head each time, pain prefers to stay for a while.

The Forgotten Feeling

Simon was left with nothing but a fragment of memory after the guest departed from Chicago. The image of the metal spear endured, yet it was an incomplete picture. The sensation could not be put into words.

The crux of Simon’s argument is that pain is not a failure of medicine; it is a failure of language. The suffering is genuine, singular, and cannot be rendered into a scale, a face, or a number.

An assumption about dentistry began the Chicago pain, and Benzidine was the first thing employed in its treatment. It concluded with an ambulance and an opium reverie, neither of which proved adequate — but both were what was at hand to use.

The Return of the Guest

Simon tracked down an emergency dentist in Washington DC, and the man seemed terrified as he revealed the source of the pain was not a tooth wedged beneath the gum line nor a decayed root. The agony had pushed his blood pressure past 200 during a Pittsburgh stop, and he ultimately summoned an ambulance. In the emergency room, fighting off the morphine that might have quieted the pain, he gave in at last to the opium reverie, a remedy that failed its first time but succeeded on the second try.

With each return, the picture changed. The guest kept moving ahead of the words.

The Story of the Guest

Simon’s essay is a narrative about suffering, speech, and the tales we relate. It is not a plea for medical recognition; it is a literary case. The Chicago pain taught him to let go of memory. The DC pain taught him that words fail to capture experience. The Pittsburgh pain taught him that description has its limits.

The guest has a lesson for all of us.

A person’s self and world are destroyed by the intense pain.

Source material: “Whereof One Cannot Speak: On the Limits of Language to Describe Pain,” Literary Hub.

Emily Dickinson · language · pain · Philosophy · poetics · Teresa of Ávila