Rolfers live with pain. We debate its definition and whether it
is best to mitigate it, ignore it, attack it, dance with it, or
excavate it. We divide ourselves into camps based on our sense of
tradition and history, and in accordance with a variety of somatic
and psychological sub-specialties, argue passionately about how
best to access and release our client’s pain, be it in their
tissue, in their psyche, or in their field. We take classes on working
with trauma and are asked daily to elucidate the mysteries of our
client’s most intractable and tenacious symptoms. We read
and relate anecdotes and quotes from Ida which reflect an ambiguous
attitude to pain. The deeper we look into this matter, the more
challenging it proves to reconcile Ida’s admonition “do
not go in like a freight train” with the apparent confusion
as to what she meant by her invocations to her students to “go
deeper” (although Myers proves very helpful here), and her
well-known irritation at the persistent criticisms of the pain associated
with her work. From our work’s inception, we have discussed
pain in our publications and texts, and written numerous articles
about it; recently devoting an issue to it (Spring 2001); said issue
having a murky reproduction of Edvard Munch’s ubiquitous The
Scream with a muted stenciling of the word “pain” on
its cover, declaring its thematic contents to one and all.
This
pain that divides us also unites us in our common pursuits, and
our experientially verifiable knowledge that our modality transforms
structure and thereby more often than not substantively improves
our client’s relationship with their pain. Wherever we fall
on the “pain continuum” debates, we all find ourselves
facing its internecine complexities and trying to trace its recondite
etiologies. We should therefore, I believe, welcome any effort to
elucidate this private and shared pain whether said effort be medical
or literary. Such a work is the brilliantly original A Scream Goes
Through the House: What Literature Teaches Us about Life by Arnold
Weinstein. This book challenges the traditionally accepted notion
that pain is a private inner experience that separates and isolates
each of us. Rather, Weinstein argues that our experience of pain
has a larger resonance that connects us all. This shared pain is
Weinstein’s “scream that goes through the house.”
With impeccable clarity Weinstein leads us through his argument,
presenting his thesis with relentless logic and persuasiveness:
“I call this book A Scream Goes Through the House to signal
the staggering reach of pain, to denote its pathway and journey
… Ultimately, the scream that goes through the house communalizes
us, puts us in touch with the sentience of others, quickens through
its tidings our own sense of life and possibility.” (xxviii)
This
scream is not best expressed in the world of science or psychology,
as Weinstein illustrates severally, but rather in great art, most
particularly great fiction, poetry, theatre and film. Again, Weinstein
is marvelously explicit. “The belief at the heart of this
book is that art—literature, painting, and film, but surely
music and other forms of aesthetic experience as well—offers
us a shocking new picture of human arrangements, a picture that
is insistently collective, relational and extended. In art we can
find and tap into a reservoir of feeling, and this encounter not
only breaks open our solitude but also makes audible and visible
to us the emotional lines of force that bathe individual life, separate
us, yet connect us to one another. Art and literature are the ears
we do not have, to hear the sounds of sentience, the emotions of
others, and even our own: they are the eyes we do not have that
can look beneath the surface to see revealed the currents of feeling
that lie beneath our words, our actions, and our separate states,
and also to delineate the larger community in which emotions will
inscribe us.” (5-6)
The
metaphorical house of the book’s title also operates at many
levels. “The house is your own body animated by feeling or
racked with pain. The house is the larger world of living beings
to whom feeling relates us. Finally, the house betokens the very
institutions of literature and art, and there we encounter the ongoing,
unfurling scream, the music of human sentience that is life’s
blood and art’s blood.” (xxix) Weinstein’s house
encompasses a wide range of topics, cultures and artists. Among
the first works he considers is William Blake’s disturbing
poem, “London” which contains these gripping lines:
“How the Chimney-sweepers cry/ Every blackening Church appalls/
And the hapless Soldier’s sigh/ Runs in blood down Palace
walls.” The images of suffering of the common folk ring through
London’s gloomy streets and the oozing flow of vital fluids
(Blake’s blood on the Palace walls) are emblematic of themes
that will follow in many incarnations and guises (as I have deliberately
reinforced with my “cuing” italicizations within the
quotes). Whether he is analyzing such expected works as Camus’
The Plague or the quintessential study of madness and depression,
Hamlet, Weinstein extracts the deeper themes of humanity and shared
suffering contained within. His wide-ranging literary selections
are frequently subtle, viscous, complex works, rich with shared
experience and intricately explored relationships, relationships
that only great literature can reveal. His selections of art and
film are wonderfully illustrative of his argument, mostly the paintings
of Edvard Munch, particularly the thematically relevant The Scream
(said painting offering an interesting intersection with our own
ideas of familiar icons of pain), and the films of the grim (yet
ultimately humanistic) Ingmar Bergman, most notably The Seventh
Seal (1956) and his great “summa,” Fanny and Alexander
(1983). In the Munch paintings in particular, Weinstein makes much
of the swirling clouds, rushing waters and vortices that engulf
and connect its subjects to the larger world of pain, the major
unifying link of Weinstein’s artistic selections and the other
genres he discusses.
We
might well object that Weinstein’s artistic and cinematic
choices seem too narrow, too carefully selected in order to advance
his thesis. However, in the literary arena, he is gloriously catholic,
demonstrating equal mastery whether discussing Sophocles, Goethe,
Dickens, Proust, Ionesco, or DeLillo. Such breadth of knowledge
and mastery of complex stylists such as Eliot, Joyce and Faulkner
is a thing of beauty to behold and experience. With the proper mindset,
we can truly luxuriate in his insightful and perspicacious prose.
The
book’s most relevant and intriguing chapter for us is certainly
the chapter on medicine and medical diagnosis, Chapter 3 Diagnosis:
Narratives of Exposure. Most of the examples chosen here deal not
only with our fear of the ravages of hidden diseases and deterioration
of our bodies, but also the ways in which disease exposes the body’s
inner failings and is “written on the flesh.” Weinstein
also describes the miserable failures of most doctors to scry the
hidden mysteries of their patient’s failing bodies, often
causing them more harm than good. Yet, in the midst of this rather
grimly leveling exploration we find the most beautiful story in
the entire volume, the section where Weinstein discusses the “loving
doctor.” In this story, the medical author Dr. Richard Selzer
narrates the remarkable diagnostic methods employed by Yeshi Dhonden,
the personal physician of the Dalai Lama. Dhonden is described as
elegantly attired in flowing robes and turban examining a chronically
ill patient by listening to her pulse for a full thirty minutes.
After completing his listening, he goes off with the attending physicians
to confer with them on what he has observed. Using a rich language
of Oriental medicine and evocative terms like vortices of blood,
winds and the cascading of waters through her system, Dhoden mystifies
his auditors. Ultimately he reframes his diagnosis, arriving at
the same conclusion as the Western doctors, who are utterly baffled
both by his bizarre methodology and diagnostic acumen. (185-87)
What appealed most to Weinstein in this story was not the exquisite
intimacy of Dhoden’s interaction with the dying woman (yet
it is this I think that most readers of this review would find most
resonant and moving), but rather the richness of Dhoden’s
language, particularly his fluid metaphors, the language of Blake,
Camus, and Proust.
It
is this richly fluid language that permeates not only Weinstein’s
discussions of the arts and literature, but also our own language
for reading and interphasing with bodies. Whether it be the CSR,
the osteopathic “Breath of Life,” the reframing of Ida’s
blocks as segmental water balloons, movement work’s breath-directed
internal explorations, the lunate breathing and undulating spirals
of Continuum, or following visceral structures as they ooze and
slide in the omenta, we live in a sloppy vital world of fluids and
liquescent commingling. Our seeing and movement work are so permeated
with accessing this vital essence as a way of entraining and embodying
that no matter how we frame our languaging or seeing, every time
we contact another, we invariably find ourselves swimming in the
mutable fluid tissue layers of their (and Weinstein’s) interconnected
aqueous world. How can we not wish to enrich our experience by better
understanding the universality of pain and our ability to engage
and transmute our client’s private yet communal habitat? This
seems unassailable in its obviousness.
What
we must realize is that Weinstein’s scream operates not merely
as metaphor, but in a larger sense as a direct portal into the house
of human experience. Great literature humanizes our experience and
offers a depth of feeling and understanding that more technical
medical descriptions but poorly describe; a wonderful example of
which is Weinstein’s comparison of Proust’s rich and
evocative discussions of loss with the technically accurate yet
clinical descriptions of Freud and Kubler-Ross. (314-15)
Great works of literature often pose intimidating challenges because
of their scope, the ambiguities and subtlety of their language,
and their daunting status as “great works.” No one ever
said that Proust, Faulkner, or Burroughs are easy reading, as Weinstein
readily admits. And yet, when you consider the difficulties of the
materials many of us have digested in the pursuit of a greater understanding
of our work, the novels by these and other great writers discussed
by Weinstein should seem a welcome respite in comparison. And the
rewards they offer, particularly when we consider how they deepen
our experience of the messily somatic and rich world of pain and
suffering, by far outweigh their sometimes daunting obliqueness
of style. The genius of Weinstein is his ability to elucidate and
reframe our understanding of somatic experience. He externalizes
pain and builds richly textured bridges, structures that are expressed
best in great artworks, all the while generously proffering the
keys for unlocking their hidden mysteries.
A
personal note: I wish to thank Professor Weinstein for reading and
critiquing this review. |