Anam Cara

When You Stand in the Place of Pain, You Are No One

Suffering is frightening. It unhouses and dislocates you. Suffering is the arrival of darkness from an angle you never expected. There are different kinds of darkness. There is the night when the darkness is evenly brushed. The sky is studded with the crystal light of stars and the moon casts mint light over the fields. Though you are in the darkness, your ways are guided by a gentle light. This is not the darkness of deep suffering. When real suffering comes, the light goes out completely. There is nothing but a forsaken darkness, frightening in its density and anonymity. The human face is the icon of creation. In this countenance creation becomes intimate. Here you are engaged by immediate presence. There is something in suffering that resents the human face. Suffering resents the shelter of intimacy. The dark squall of suffering dismantles belonging and darkens the mind. It rips the fragile net of meaning to shreds. Like a dark tide, it comes in a torrent over every shoreline of your inner world. Nothing can hold it back. When you endure such a night, you never forget it.

When you stand in the place of pain, you are no one. A poignant line from Virgil’s Aeneid describes one of the heroes found dead in anonymous circumstances: “corpe sine nomine,” i.e., a body without a name. Belonging is shredded. You are visited and claimed by a nothingness which has neither contour nor texture. Suffering is the harrowing and acidic force of anonymity. You are utterly unhoused. Now you know where Nowhere is. No one can reach you. Suffering seems to be a force of primal regression. It almost wipes away your signature as an individual and reduces you to faceless clay. Suffering is raw, relentless otherness coming alive around you and inside you.