The Precision of Pain and the Blurriness of Joy

Yelena Bryksenkova, "Breakdown"

The Precision of Pain and the Blurriness of Joy

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The precision of pain and the blurriness of joy. I'm thinking
how precise people are when they describe their pain in a doctor's office.
Even those who haven't learned to read and write are precise:
"This one's a throbbing pain, that one's a wrenching pain,
this one gnaws, that one burns, this is a sharp pain
and that––a dull one. Right here. Precisely here,
yes, yes." Joy blurs everything, I've heard people say
after night of love and feasting, "It was great,
I was in seventh heaven." Even the spaceman who floated
in outer space, tethered to a spaceship, could say only, "Great,
wonderful, I have no words."
The blurriness of joy and the precision of pain––
I want to describe, with a sharp pain's precision, happiness
and blurry joy. I learned to speak among the pains.

Yehuda  Amichai


“Joy blurs everything.” I remember as a teen talking to a friend going to college, we were discussing poetry, and he told me something that I’ve thought about ever since – “Everyone writes about love. Love is easy to write about. Hate and pain are much more difficult.” My own thoughts are muddy on that point. On the one hand, love (and joy) is more pleasant, but I do think this makes for a lot of glib sloppiness. Pain, by contrast, demands accuracy of a writer. With love we are generous, with pain, exacting. Pain asks a question, pain isolates, and the one who speaks of it has to make her position absolutely clear in order to be understood. The one who speaks of love, however, assumes comprehension. Everyone knows what love is. It’s a uniting, bonding experience, a commonplace. But that’s where we make a mistake. That’s where this poem gets me. “ I learned to speak among the pains.” To use what one has learned in and from pain to speak clearly and accurately of love? Amen to that. May that be what we learn to do with pain. Because we only think we know what love is.