What is pain?

I am about to embark on another long distance race tomorrow, and events of this week in my personal life make me wonder once more about what constitutes good pain. Pain and suffering are subjective, of course, and can be soul building experiences. To endure, to accomplish, to come out of gruelling activity is a rite of human passage. When we choose the contexts and contours of our pain and suffering it becomes even more meaningful. But, we also need to stop and listen to the body when need be; and, to be compassionate with ourselves in order to eventually prepare our bodies and minds for rigour. I was reminded of that lesson this week in one of the most grave ways possible. To me, the bioethics of sport and physical activity must involve central questions about and connections with the ways in which we can help each other suffer and find pleasure in pain, while protecting one another from pain and injury which threatens rather than enlightens.

On running

You stop a horse that is bolting. You do not stop a jogger who is jogging.Foaming at the mouth, his mind riveted on the inner countdown to the moment when he will achieve a higher plane of consciousness, he is not to be stopped. If you stopped him to ask the time, he would bite your head off. He doesn’t have a bit between his teeth, though he may perhaps be carrying dumb-bells or even weights in his belt (where are the days when girls used to wear bracelets on their ankles?). What the third-century Stylite sought inself-privation and proud stillness, he is seeking through the muscular exhaustion of his body. He is the brother in mortification of those who conscientiously exhaust themselves in the body-building studios on complicated machines with chrome pulleys and on terrifying medical contraptions. There is a direct line that runs from the medieval instruments of torture, viathe industrial movements of production-line work, to the techniques of schooling the body by using mechanical apparatuses. Like dieting, body-building, and so many other things, jogging is a new form of voluntaryservitude (it is also a new form of adultery).

Decidedly, joggers are the true Latter Day Saints and the protagonists of an easy-does-it Apocalypse. Nothing evokes the end of the world more than a man running straight ahead on a beach, swathed in the sounds of his walkman, cocooned in the solitary sacrifice of his energy, indifferent even to catastrophes since he expects destruction to come only as the fruit of his own efforts, from exhausting the energy of a body that has in his own eyes become useless. Primitives, when in despair, would commit suicide by swimming out to sea until they could swim no longer. The jogger commits suicide by running up and down the beach. His eyes are wild, saliva drips from his mouth. Do not stop him. He will either hit you or simply carry on dancing around in front of you like a man possessed.

All these track-suits and jogging suits, these loose-fitting shorts and baggy cotton shirts, these ‘easy clothes’ are actually old bits of nightwear, and all these relaxed walkers and runners have not yet left the night behind. As a result of wearing these billowing clothes, their bodies have come to float in their clothes and they themselves float in their own bodies. Anorexic culture: a culture of disgust, of expulsion, of anthropoemia, of rejection. Characteristic of a period of obesity, saturation, over abundance. The anorexic prefigures this culture in rather a poetic fashion by trying to keep it at bay. He refuses lack. He says: I lack nothing, therefore I shall not eat. With the overweight person, it is the opposite: he refuses fullness, repletion. He says: I lack everything, so I will eat anything at all. The anorexic staves off lack by emptiness, the overweight person staves off fullness by excess. Both are homeopathic final solutions, solutions by extermination.

The jogger has yet another solution. In a sense, he spews himself out; he doesn’t merely expend his energy in his running, he vomits it. He has to attain the ecstasy of fatigue, the ‘high’ of mechanical annihilation, just as the anorexic aims for the ‘high’ of organic annihilation, the ecstasy of the empty body and the obese individual seeks the high of dimensional annihilation: the ecstasy of the full body.

Baudrillard, Jean. “AMERICA – Excerpts 1” Verso, London and New York. 1998.