I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Friday Flash, I share an epiphany or aha moment from the past week.
Today I find myself in a body-self much more wounded than it was yesterday. Yesterday I had a macular pucker, today my left eye is inflamed and sore, with a large gas bubble in it which creates a distracting horizon line across its vision, even though it is bandaged and shielded and, apparently though I can’t totally tell, closed underneath its coverings. Light still gets in so I can still see from it. It’s almost impossible to wear glasses over the shield and bandage. I have my right eye contact in (corrected for distance) and I have a pair of over-the-counter readers perched precariously on the end of my nose, so I can see to read and write.
I overestimated the difficulty of the surgery itself — which went by quickly in a haze of sedation and wonder at the sight of tiny forceps pulling on something in my eye — and the discomfort and disability of the aftermath. It is less than 24 hours after the procedure, so I imagine it will get better. Just having this obnoxious shield and bandage removed will probably make me much more comfortable.
Emotionally, I made it well through the surgery except during the car ride home, when upset took over from equanimity. My eye felt half open under the bandage, and extremely irritated. I called the doctor’s office to see if this was how it was supposed to be; was bandaging the eye to hold it partway open some part of the treatment? The nurse told me, no, it shouldn’t be like that. I should carefully take the shield off, and without removing the bandage, attempt to manipulate the eye closed. I tried to do this at my mother’s senior living place, where my dad and I were dropping her off, halfway home to the suburb that is home to him (at a different senior living complex) and to me (my house). I had to get through the senior living complex with very little vision, as I couldn’t fit my glasses to correct my right eye over my face. I was crying with the pain.
You’d think that a senior living apartment would be the perfect place to move through with an eye patch or any other evidence of woundedness. But I felt great embarrassment.
French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, developed his ideas in the period before, during, and after World War II. His work developed an ethics of the Other. For Levinas, and those who took up his efforts later such as Byung-Chul Han and Iris Murdoch, the Other is not fully knowable and cannot be assimilated into one’s self. Levinas formulated his philosophy as a “wisdom of love” turning around the normal understanding of philosophy as the “love of wisdom.” He believed that responsibility towards the Other takes priority towards any objective search for truth.
In his book The Wounded Storyteller, sociologist Arthur W. Frank quotes Levinas on suffering from the essay “Useless Suffering”:
Is not the evil of suffering—extreme passivity, impotence, abandonment and solitude—also the unassumable and thus the possibility of a half opening, and, more precisely, the possibility that wherever a moan, a cry, a groan or a sigh happen there is the original call for aid, for curative help, for help from the other ego whose alterity, whose exteriority promises salvation? . . . For pure suffering, which is intrinsically meaningless and condemned to itself without exit, a beyond takes shape in the inter-human.
Here, suggests Frank, suffering can become “the possibility of a half opening” to the other:
As I read Levinas, this opening does not give meaning to the nameless suffering, but neither does the suffering remain useless. The meaning and the just suffering are experienced by the witness. The original, “unassumable” suffering has use in calling the witness to these ethical feelings, but Levinas seems to realistic to believe that it is mitigated.
Having my parents drive me to surgery, and stand watch, as my eye was wounded in search of better vision, flipped the normal state of being-witnessed-suffering and witnessing-suffering. I have stood watch for my parents as they underwent procedures designed to help but initially creating more pain and discomfort. When I visit my parents’ senior living complexes, I witness suffering: people who bend over walkers to get around, people with bandages on their faces, people stooped over because they cannot stand up. But yesterday I became the suffering witnessed instead of the witness of suffering. I was witnessed not just by my parents but by the senior living residents who saw me walk through the lobby, eye patched, crying, carefully making her way to the bathroom through the fog of one-eyed myopic sight.
Frank continues:
Most heroes are called to the quest not by their recognition of the suffering of others, which seems to be what calls Levinas, but by their own suffering. The journey is a process of learning that their own suffering touches and is touched by the suffering of others. The “inter-human” opens when suffering becomes the call and response implicating self and other.
This reminds me of the Buddhist compassion meditation practice of tonglen, in which you bring to mind your own suffering, and that of others, and of the bodhisattva of mercy, compassion, and unconditional love Quan Yin. Quan Yin is said to “hear the cries of the world.”
Frank suggests that suffering can render us “other” but through acts of witnessing and storytelling, there can be some connection across people:
Levinas’s most important lesson is that for everyone rendered “other” by suffering who speaks, perhaps in that act of witness some nameless suffering is opened. The suffering person is always the other, reduced and isolated. To tell any story of suffering is to claim some relation to the inter-human. Any testimony is a response to the half opening of nameless suffering.
Levinas was writing primarily about the suffering imposed upon Jews by Hitler and his minions in World War II, thus he tells of “pure suffering” which is “intrinsically meaningless and condemned to itself without exit.” Even in that kind of suffering he suggests there can be meaning found in the inter-human, in the sharing of suffering.
Suffering in the context of medicine and health care is different. Suffering is imposed so as to relieve suffering. But even this suffering can make one feel isolated and alone.
It’s between humans that the suffering achieves some meaning beyond simply “the suffering I must experience for the hope of getting better.” It’s my parents checking in on me by text to see if I slept okay last night. It’s anyone in the senior living lobby feeling some compassion for me rather than simple curiosity. It’s in my own recognition of others’ suffering through aging.
Here I’m telling the story of my suffering, and making it available as an opening, what Levinas says is only a “half opening.” Frank recalls Nietzsche “who named his pain and thus gave it a use, making it an opening for himself and to others.” For Nietzsche, as for me, it was only a half opening because no one could know the depths of suffering he went through, with his seizures and headaches and poor digestion, not to mention being turned down twice when he proposed to his beloved Lou Andreas-Salomé and never finding the marital companionship he hoped for. No one could know the particular character of his suffering, just as no one can know mine, and I can know no one else’s.
Still suffering is an opening, a way for each of us to get beyond ourselves and get some glimpse, some understanding of the Other, whether we are witnessing-suffering or witness-to-suffering.