From: sharon@jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov (Sharon Hopkins)
Subject: Re: rec-arts-pain, a prose mumble
Organization: Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA)
Date: Fri, 17 Apr 1992 08:36:45 GMT

In article <0101009B.17d5c2@yumyum.meta.com> melynda@titipu.meta.com writes:
>pain---
>
>metaphor cannot hold the pain i have witnessed. but metaphor can sometimes
>provide a way of screaming so that the voice does not give way to stoney
>silence. i realise that i only spoke of women in pain. perhaps men too can know
>pain and not in purely intellectual or metaphorical ways. but men do not know
>the vocabulary of pain that women have endured for millenia. women have voices
>and grammar and syntax but our language may be that of cries and silent gasps.
>                                   melynda too tired for tears

Melynda, I do not doubt the pain you have witnessed.  But I'm sorry, I do not
buy the "Our pain is better than your pain" argument.  "Men do not know the
vocabulary of pain that women have endured for millenia."  Heck, I'm not sure
that *I* know that vocabulary.

But I've watched men cry, men trained that they must not cry, must not weep,
must not show weakness.  I've watched a man trying not to faint after his
toddler's fingers were smashed in a door (by another sibling, accidentally),
blushing with embarrassment at his unacceptable weakness.  I've seen another
man's rage and grief and pain when his wife decided she didn't want to live
under the same roof with him anymore, and wouldn't tell him why -- and watched
his struggle for words to explain it all to his 5 yr old son.

I've watched a father with no language to speak love to his dearly loved
children, who think he must not care because he cannot express himself with
tenderness.  Not in any language that they understand -- he only knows
the language of anger, of discipline, and cannot fit that grammar to his
love and pain.

Ever see a man who was in the midst of a nervous breakdown?  It's not
something that only happens to women, though it's not socially acceptable
for a man to suffer an emotional collapse, to be reduced to helpless
sobbing, unable to control his emotions, unable even to speak his grief.
It's not pretty, but it's a potent reminder that not only women get
"emotional".

(Read up some time on which gender group buys the mushy greeting cards, and
which the joke cards.  It might surprise you.  I would argue that the need to
use Hallmark cards to express emotion is strong evidence that the people who
do so do *not* have the requisite grammar and syntax.)

I do not deny there have been many men who have been (who are now) brutal,
uncaring, contemptuous of felt pain.  But do not forget the fathers who
weep at the birth of a child, those who are tender, those desperately
seeking words never taught them, words for affection and caring and
pain and hope.

It was necessary to object when Joe and others dismissed the quiet power
women have wielded for those millenia you speak of, seeing lack of masculine,
political, governmental power as speechlessness, helplessness, servitude.

But I must also object when you dismiss the men's pain:  men who are
speechless *now*, many of them -- who are not allowed a language of grief,
a language of pain, a language of hurt, or helplessness, or gentleness.
Men who have never learned that vulnerability can be strength, and
have no one to teach them that.

I understand your pain, and do not intend this post as a personal attack.

But I do ask that, in your pain, you do not dismiss the humanity of half
our population.  We none of us are allowed to be half so human as many of us
wish to be.  Women or men.

A poem by James Joyce, about things without words:


		On the Beach at Fontana

	    Wind whines and whines the shingle,
	    The crazy pierstakes groan;
	    A senile sea numbers each single
	    Slimesilvered stone.

	    From whining wind and colder
	    Grey sea I wrap him warm
	    And touch his trembling fishbone shoulder
	    And boyish arm.

	    Around us fear, descending
	    Darkness of fear above
	    And in my heart how deep unending
	    Ache of love!

		(James Joyce; Trieste, 1914.)


--Sharon Hopkins
  sharon@jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems