A Natural History of the Senses (16 page)

Japanese tattoo, called
irezumi
, is a serious folk art like landscape painting or flower arranging, and great tattoo masters still perform their Chagall-like work in full-body tattoos that are subtle, repulsive, magical, seductive, sensuous, three-dimensional, thought-provoking, and macabre.

Ultimately, tattoos make unique the surface of one’s self, embody one’s secret dreams, adorn with magic emblems the Altamira of the flesh. It is also a form of self-destruction; fully tattooed people live shorter lives because their skin can’t breathe properly and some of the inks are poisonous. Those with tattooed faces, hands, and heads have chosen, in a way, to seal themselves off from normal society forever, and so it is not surprising that the largest number of the tattooed in Japan belong to the underworld. Tattoo masters often help the Tokyo police identify bodies. A person completely tattooed in a single coherent scene dictated by body contour and self-image makes you wonder about symbolism, decoration, and identity. In her book of forty-six almost life-size Polaroid reproductions,
The Japanese Tattoo
, photographer Sandi Fellman explains her attraction to tattoos as an infatuation with paradox: “Beauty created through brutal means,” “power bestowed at the price of submission,” “the glorification of the flesh as a means to spirituality.”

Just as westerners donate their organs after death, a Japanese wearing the work of a grand tattoo master may donate his skin to a museum or university. Tokyo University has three hundred such masterpieces, framed. To walk into this chamber of skins must fill one with shock and wonder: What a marvel to see so many lives at full stretch, defined by needles and ink, so many people who wished to become their own text.

In the sand-swept sprawl of the panoramic film
Lawrence of Arabia
a scene of quintessential machismo stands out: T. E. Lawrence holding his hand over a candle flame until the flesh starts to sizzle. When his companion tries the same thing, he recoils in pain, crying “Doesn’t that hurt you?” as he nurses his burned hand. “Yes,” Lawrence replies coolly. “Then what is the trick?” the companion asks. “The trick,” Lawrence answers, “is not to mind.”

One of the great riddles of biology is why the experience of pain is so subjective. Being able to withstand pain depends to a considerable extent on culture and tradition. Many soldiers have denied pain despite appalling wounds, not even requesting morphine, although in peacetime they would have demanded it. Most people going into the hospital for an operation focus completely on their pain and suffering, whereas soldiers or saints and other martyrs can think about something nobler and more important to them, and this clouds their sense of pain. Religions have always encouraged their martyrs to experience pain in order to purify the spirit. We come into this world with only the slender word “I,” and giving it up in a sacred delirium is the painful ecstasy religions demand. When a fakir runs across hot coals, his skin does begin to singe—you can smell burning flesh; he just doesn’t feel it. In Bali a few years ago, my mother saw men go into trances and pick up red-hot cannonballs from an open fire, then carry them down the road. As meditation techniques and biofeedback have shown, the mind can learn to conquer pain. This is particularly true in moments of crisis or exaltation, when concentrating on something outside oneself seems to distract the mind from the body, and the body from suffering and time. Of course, there are those who welcome pain in order to surmount it. In 1989, I read about a new craze in California: well-to-do business people taking weekend classes in hot-coal-walking. Pushing the body to or beyond its limits has always appealed to human beings. There is a part of our psyche that is pure timekeeper and weather watcher. Not only do we long to know how fast we can run, how high we can jump, how long we can hold our breath under
water—we also like to keep checking these limits regularly to see if they’ve changed. Why? What difference does it make? The human body is miraculous and beautiful, whether it can “clean and jerk” three hundred pounds, swim the English Channel, or survive a year riding the subway. In anthropological terms, we’ve come to be who we are by evolving sharper ways to adapt to the environment, and, from the outset, what has guided us has been an elaborate system of rewards. Small wonder we’re addicted to quiz shows and lotteries, paychecks and bonuses. We’ve always explored our mental limits, too, and pushed them without letup. In the early eighties, I spent a year as a soccer journalist, following the dazzling legwork of Pelé, Franz Beckenbauer, and virtually every other legendary international star the New York Cosmos had signed up for equally legendary sums of American cash. Choose your favorite sport; now imagine seeing all the world’s best players on one team. I was interested in the ceremonial violence of sports, the psychology of games, the charmed circle of the field, the breezy rhetoric of the legs, the anthropological spectacle of watching twenty-two barely clad men run on grass in the sunlight, hazing the quarry of a ball toward the net. The fluency and grace of soccer appealed for a number of reasons, and I wanted to absorb some of its atmosphere for a novel I was writing. I was amazed to discover that the players frequently realized only at halftime or after a match that they’d hurt themselves badly and were indeed in wicked pain. During the match, there hadn’t been the rumor of pain, but once the match was over and they could afford the luxury of suffering, pain screamed like a noon factory whistle.

Often our fear of pain contributes to it. Our culture expects childbirth to be a deeply painful event, and so, for us, it is. Women from other cultures stop their work in the fields to give birth, returning to the fields immediately afterward. Initiation and adolescence rites around the world often involve penetrating pain, which initiates must endure to prove themselves worthy. In the sun dance of the Sioux, for instance, a young warrior would allow the skin of his chest to be pierced by iron rods; then he was hung from a stanchion. When I was in Istanbul in the 1970s, I saw teenage boys dressed in
shiny silk fezzes and silk suits decorated with glitter. They were preparing for circumcision, a festive event in the life of a Turk, which occurs at around the age of fifteen. No anesthetic is used; instead, a boy is given a jelly candy to chew. Sir Richard Burton’s writings abound with descriptions of tribal mutilation and torture rituals, including one in which a shaman removes an apron of flesh from the front of a boy, cutting all the way from the stomach to the thighs, producing a huge white scar.

Women in some cultures go through many painful initiation rites, often including circumcision, which removes or destroys the clitoris. Being able to endure the pain of childbirth is expected of women, but there are also disguised rites of pain, pain that is endured for the sake of health or beauty. Women have their legs waxed as a matter of fashion, and have done so throughout the ages. When mine were waxed at a Manhattan beauty salon recently, the pain, which began like 10,000 bees stinging me simultaneously, was excruciating. Change the woman from a Rumanian cosmetician to a German Gestapo agent. Change the room from a cubicle in a beauty emporium to a prison cell. Keep the level of pain exactly the same, and it easily qualifies as torture. We tend to think of torture in the name of beauty as an aberration of the ancients, but there are modern scourging parlors. People have always mutilated their skins, often enduring pain to be beautiful, as if the pain chastened the beauty, gave it the special veneer of sacrifice. Many women experience extreme pain during their periods each month, but they accept the pain because they understand that it’s not caused by someone else, it’s not malicious, and it doesn’t surprise them; and this makes all the difference.

There are also illusions of pain as vivid as optical illusions, times when the sufferer imagines he or she feels pain that cannot possibly exist. In some cultures, the father experiences a false pregnancy—
couvade
as it’s called—and takes to bed with childbirth pains, going through his own arduous experience of having a baby. The internal organs don’t have many pain receptors (the skin is supposed to be the guard post), so people often feel “referred pain” when one of their organs is in trouble. Heart attacks frequently produce a pain
in the stomach, the left arm, or the shoulder. When this happens, the brain can’t figure out exactly where the message is coming from. In the classic phenomenon of phantom-limb pain, the brain gets faulty signals and continues to feel pain in a limb that has been amputated; such pain can be torturous, perverse, and maddening, since there is nothing physically present to hurt.

Pain has plagued us throughout the history of our species. We spend our lives trying to avoid it, and, from one point of view, what we call “happiness” may be just the absence of pain. Yet it is difficult to define pain, which may be sharp, dull, shooting, throbbing, imaginary, or referred. We have many pains that surge from within as cramps and aches. And we also talk about emotional distress as pain. Pains are often combined, the emotional with the physical, and the physical with the physical. When you burn yourself, the skin swells and blisters, and when the blister breaks, the skin hurts in yet another way. A wound may become infected. Then histamine and serotonin are released, which dilate the blood vessels and trigger a pain response. Not all internal injuries can be felt (it’s possible to do brain surgery under a local anesthetic), but illnesses that constrict blood flow often are: Angina pectoris, for example, which occurs when the coronary arteries shrink too tight for blood to comfortably pass. Even intense pain often eludes accurate description, as Virginia Woolf reminds us in her essay “On Being Ill”: “English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache … let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.”

Just as there are many forms of pain, there are many remedies for it. Anesthetics like novocaine or cocaine either block the body’s ability to send high-frequency pain signals to the brain or will not allow sodium to flow into the nerve cell. Some drugs manage to confuse the signals given at different stages of the pain message. Naturally occurring opiates called endorphins occupy the receptor sites so that they can’t receive the neural transmitter’s message of
pain.
*
Cocaine interferes with the neural transmitters in just this way. Part of the reason heroin addicts need more and more of the drug to get high is because that drug causes the body to produce less of its own endorphins and begins to depend on the heroin to take over their task. This increased threshold can also happen among arthritis sufferers or other long-term heavy users of simple analgesics. Aspirin works by inhibiting the flow of substances that stimulates pain receptors when you have an injury, so that you don’t receive as many pain impulses. Continuous use of any analgesic can neutralize its beneficial effect, but only twenty minutes of aerobic exercise is enough to stimulate the body to produce more endorphins, natural painkillers. Shifting your attention to something else will distract you from pain; pain requires our full attention. A simple and effective form of pain relief comes from “lateral inhibition”: If a mob of neurons all try to respond at once they get blocked. If you stub your toe and then rub the area around it, the pain will subside in the mass confusion. If you apply ice to a bruise, it will not only help with swelling, it will also transmit cold messages instead of pain messages. During sex, we tend not to mind a certain amount of pain (indeed, for some people, pain seems to heighten the pleasure) and that may be because of lateral stimulation—the brain is receiving so many pleasure signals it doesn’t pay much attention to those of moderate pain. Relaxation techniques, hypnosis, acupuncture, and placebos can fool the body into producing endorphins, and stop the pain message from being sent out. We don’t feel electricity, of course, we feel sensations; but if the electrical code for pain isn’t handed around, we don’t feel pain. Human beings can withstand enormous amounts of pain (women have higher pain thresholds than men), but not without chemical help, or sleight of mind. During pregnancy, endorphin levels rise as the time of delivery gets closer. One researcher has even suggested that a pregnant woman craves certain
foods because they’re high in substances that produce serotonin, which the woman will need to endure the pain of childbirth.

I once knew a songwriter with a lovely sherbety voice, who played guitar and sang in nightclubs in Pennsylvania. At the age of twenty-eight her arthritis was so acute that she had to loosen up her hands before each performance by baking them in gloves of warm wax. In time the pain grew too stubborn, and she gave up performing for teaching. For long-term sufferers, “Pain is greedy, boorish, meanly debilitating,” as neurologist Russell Martin says in
Matters Gray and White
. “It is cruel and calamitous and often constant, and, as its Latin root
poena
implies, it is the corporeal
punishment
each of us ultimately suffers for being alive.” In a number of specialized pain-control centers around the country, it’s understood that pain is as much an emotional and psychological affliction as a physical one. Teams of neurologists, psychologists, physical therapists, and other angologists (people who study pain) work with those disabled by chronic pain, and try to find ways through the madness of their patients’ bodies.

Why human beings feel pain has been the subject of theological debate, philosophical schisms, psychoanalytical edicts, and mumbo jumbo for centuries. Pain was the punishment for wrongdoing in the Garden of Eden. Pain was the price one paid for not being morally perfect. Pain was a self-affliction brought about by sexual repression. Pain was dished out by vengeful gods, or was the result of falling out of harmony with nature. Indeed, our word
holy
goes back through Old English to
haelan
, “to heal,” and the Indo-European
kailo
, which meant “whole” or “uninjured.” The purpose of pain is to warn the body about possible injury. Millions of free nerve endings alarm us; whenever they’re hit, we feel pain. Slam our elbow against a bookcase, and, as Russell Martin describes the process: