"Ooh, Ooh, Pain is So Close to Pleasure"

The French actually have a word for it ... Jouissance ... the kind of pleasure that is so intense that the boundary between its pleasurable parts and its pain becomes blurred. Freddie Mercury and Deacon musta been pretty young when they wrote these lyrics. It's part of the mystery of life that these lyrics that get down deep into the experiences that frequent our lives in a profound way were often written by folk in their late teens and early-to-mid twenties. How can that be, the Denizens of Quarter Four ask, that mere children so accurately represent experience that either -- or so we assume -- doesn't begin till later or those that we may forget have been lifelong. Here are part of the Mercury-Deacon lyrics:

                            "Ooh, ooh, pain is so close to pleasure, oh yeah,
                        Sunshine and rainy weather go hand in hand together all your life,
                                 Ooh, Ooh, pain is so close to pleasure everybody knows,
                   One day we love each other then we're fighting one another all the time,
                                          When I was young and just getting started,
                              And people talked to me they sounded broken hearted,
                                        Then I grew up and got my imagination
                                     And all I wanted was to start a new relation,
                                         So in love but love had a bad reaction,
                                        I was looking for good old satisfaction,
                  But pain is all I got when all I needed was some love and affection,
                             Ooh, ooh, pain is so close to pleasure, yeah, yeah,
                 Sunshine and rainy weather go hand in hand together all your life,
                              Pain and pleasure, Ooh, Ooh, pain and pleasure."

Oops: Just checked. They recorded this song when Freddie was 40 and not all that many years before he died. I should, by the way, point out that I would have never known about this particular genre of music if I hadn't "hooked up" (as they say) with M some 20 years before the song was recorded. Credit where credit is due. I was never meant to be "a Rocker" and never became one. We're fortunate when we find someone who brings a dimension to our lives that we don't and weren't ever likely to possess. It was Teddy Reik who years ago pointed out (claimed?) that both Love and Hate begin in envy ... in realizing that someone has something that you will not ever have. 

                              "Ooh, ooh, pain is so close to pleasure."       

What appears to be "the fact," though, is that a whole crop of humanity find this situation too painful to bear. Love and Hate ... Pain and Pleasure ... have to be kept apart ... compartmentalized in such a way that when one is ascendant, its natural partner is not to be found but is, instead, denied or hidden. 

I was thinking about this, this morning. Recently, my back has hurt everyday, upon waking. Getting out of bed hurts. First feet to floor? hurts. Figuring out how to get my feet through the openings of my skivvies is a challenge made possible only by holding one hand on the wall of the bathroom and managing not to "tilt" like a cheap pinball machine. Still, there's a smile that comes on.

                                                   "Howard ... dammit .... feel it ... you're alive!"

Yeah, yeah! I'm alive and well enough even to contemplate cutting down some trees this weekend (we'll see if it happens) ... trees that are beginning to intrude on the path that my visitors take to my office ... a path that I and my two adolescent sons built 36+ years ago when we all had good backs ... when mixing dozens of bags of Portland to sit on top of a sand-base was a weekend job. No! No more mixing lottsa bags of Portland Cement without the certainty of intensifying the AM back aches ... for my sons, as well. And this coming Winter may be the last one during which I can shovel that 100 foot path. (Maybe it's time to let it grow over and become forest-bound like some fairy-tale ogre?)

But back to my visitors. It may well be the most serious sources of emotional disequillibration that I see: I refer to the inability to juggle Ole Freddie's "Pain and Pleasure." Many of those who toddle up the path that Howard et fils built function on the guiding principle that when pain is present, there can be no pleasure. Whenever I witness this splitting of reality into "The Good" and "The Ugly," I remember my conversations with Corbett. We hadn't known each other all that long. We met in a discussion group that dealt with the writings of some guy named W. R. Bion. Corbett lived with his family in San Francisco; I and M lived here on America's Atlantic Coast. Corbett decided one day to come for lunch and on another occasion arrived for a week with his son, Zach. Ain't the internet grand! Any case, we became friends.

What Corbett didn't decide about his life-journey was his discovery at about 60 that the pain in his hip was a very aggressive, galloping osteo-sarcoma, one that would only be satisfied when it commandeered his whole body and killed him. Within a few months of diagnosis, he was in a hospice somewhere in San Francisco looking at a two month window given him to say goodbye. We spoke, more or less, each night for about an hour. Sometimes, Corbett and I kidded; betimes, we philosophized about a variety of writers; sometimes, we cried, together. Most of the time, there was more than a bit of each. Corbett was no splitter. He didn't use this method of compartmentalization to quell anxieties. He welcomed the Good and accepted the unavoidability of the Bad. 

                                        Ooh, ooh, pain is so close to pleasure, oh yeah!

This morning? I miss my old friend and simultaneously toast his life-well-lived! And you, my aching spine that has supported me for roughly 70 years? I toast you, as well! You both did real-good!