What Remains After Death
Yesterday was a mirror of all days that preceded it, and as such not worth the bother of description or recounting. Cutthroats of cloud skip like devils across a dun-gray sky. April showers pissing on the head of the world. Wittgenstein says we will never understand pain, only experience it, each in his own solipsistic hell. A language of triage is impossible, as the very problem lies in our inability to communicate our pain to others, what we are feeling or experiencing, and this, clearly, is the metalanguage of pain; its very incommunicability. As such, pain is monological and remains so until death. The only way to understand, or more to the point, feel another’s pain, is through the backdoor, through a reconstruction of one’s own experience of pain through a solipsism that denies access and objectivity. Pain is distinctly subjective; I must take your word for it, nothing more is possible than that. As would have it, I am in horrible pain, yet you have only my word and grimaces to go by in determining whether I am telling the truth or not. Such is the nature of pain, an elusive and hellish experience.
