Novel Memoir
pain room is a new project I am initiating, with Murray Toews providing the visuals. This is where it starts. Should I be successful in my funding applications there is a plan to set up a separate domain and website. In the meantime I will start posting fragments, quotes, audio and additional images. The ultimate goal is production of an novel pain memoir, with illustrations and animations. pain room is out of my comfort zone in experience, in writing, in preparing text including stories, sharply drawn images and metaphors, and ideas across many platforms. There will be diversionary tactics, one liners, jokes, as reading about somebody else’s pain is out of most anyone’s culture uh, comfort zone, complicated by the possibility that as a writer, I might make stuff up. That idea is at the heart of these notes and stories.
The Corporal Patient (working name for now) lives in the pain room which we assume he can not leave. He is naked and talks directly or indirectly about his pain. In this instant he is in the (so-called) real moment, analyzing his pain as information. An emperor with no clothes and no feet he has discovered a secret of pain management shared with him by a very wise woman living with Multiple Sclerosis. “Sometimes I imagine this is not the real world I experience, and that in the real world I don’t have pain, or certainly less than I have most days.”
Patient develops a rich interior life, where the moment is imagined, and he spends every day he can mange (likely) as a historical figure, sometimes a hero. His imagined moment shifts time, where as hero he can spend as much time as he likes. Days come and go, but in the real world when he comes back from his adventure at day’s end, he is still Patient in pain. I’ve begun work (research reading, possible opening and structure, ending) for one of the stories called “Augustine on the Beach.” Gus washes up on the Greek island Salamis, where Euripides is said to have written many of his plays in the cave, which provides shelter. He finds the lost Oedipus play, and is visited by the writer, ghost of Euripides. A dialogue ensues. By the time Patient is settling in for the night we will have one explanation for how that play was lost.
So enough for today. Oh, I’ll also be collecting stories, dropping some quotes, and reading some passages related to pain, from outside the pain room (most likely).
1 2 10
On a scale of 1 to (2) 10 where 1 is the least pain you’ve ever experienced and 10 is the most pain you’ve ever experienced, how much does it hurt? This line is asked repeatedly in the heath sector, especially in dealing with extreme pain, accidents, life threatening diseases, or trauma to determine the location and the extent of the pain. While this is on my blog today by tomorrow it will be on the page 1 2 10 where these post will become a separate text, not anticipated for publication, with the exception of some audio/visual materials.