Whereof One Cannot Speak: On the Limits of Language to Describe Pain

The author describes their experience with severe, recurring jaw pain that began in Chicago over a decade ago during a summer seminar. The pain started as a slight tingling in the jaw but escalated to intense, burning agony that felt like an iron rod piercing through the neck and jaw, radiating across the teeth. For 36 sleepless hours, the author applied a dental numbing agent called Benzidine, mistakenly assuming the pain was dental in origin. Without dental insurance, they feared the pain would never end until it suddenly subsided on the second day. The author highlights how the pain was so overwhelming that it erased all other concerns and left them with no words to describe it. The pain later returned intermittently, defying clear recollection due to its intensity, which the author compares to Emily Dickinson’s concept of the Element of Blank—a state where the onset of pain is impossible to pinpoint.

The article references philosopher Elaine Scarry’s book The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985), which argues that pain is not just difficult to describe but actively destroys language itself. Scarry explains that pain can make the world feel either infinitely small, centered only on the body, or infinitely large, as if the body has expanded to fill the entire universe. The author notes that pain forces people to rely on inadequate metaphors, such as the Numerical Rating Scale (a 1-10 scale for pain intensity) or the Wong-Baker FACES Scale (a cartoon-based pain assessment tool). These tools, though widely used in medicine, fail to capture the true nature of pain, as they reduce a deeply personal experience to simplistic or abstract representations. The article suggests that pain, like ecstasy, is ineffable, though pain tends to linger while ecstasy is fleeting.

The article draws a parallel between pain and ecstasy, noting that both experiences are similarly difficult to describe. It references the 16th-century Spanish mystic Teresa of Ávila, who described a divine ecstatic experience involving a long spear of gold piercing her heart, causing intense pain and a sense of being set ablaze by divine love. This illustrates how the boundaries between pain and pleasure can blur, with both states feeling overwhelming and inescapable. The author suggests that humans, as fallible beings, often perceive both misery and bliss as eternal, even when they are temporary. This duality is further explored through the author’s own experiences with pain, which they describe as brief but intense episodes of suffering that feel like a spear being driven through the skull.

The author’s pain was eventually diagnosed as trigeminal neuralgia, a chronic nerve condition nicknamed the suicide disease due to its severity. This condition causes sudden, excruciating facial pain, often triggered by mild stimuli like chewing or speaking. The author’s symptoms included jaw pain so intense that it spiked their blood pressure to over 200, requiring an ambulance. They initially resisted morphine due to a fear of addiction but eventually accepted it, experiencing a temporary relief described by physician Mikhail Bulgakov as pain vanishing without a trace. The author later discovered that reducing caffeine intake (from two-to-three pots of coffee daily to minimal black tea) alleviated their high blood pressure and reduced the frequency of pain episodes, though trigeminal neuralgia persisted.

The article discusses the challenges of describing pain in literature, noting that even great writers struggle to capture its subjective experience. Virginia Woolf famously stated that literature could express the thoughts of Hamlet or the tragedy of King Lear but had no words for the shiver or the headache. The author cites philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s statement from Tractatus (1921), Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent, to highlight how pain often reduces people to pre-linguistic states, such as screaming or gasping. While literature can gesture toward the shadows of pain, it cannot fully convey its depth. The article also mentions David Budbill’s poem Tumbling toward the End (2017), which explores the inability to think beyond pain, further emphasizing the inadequacy of language in describing such experiences.