/lit/ - Literature

>>19115789
First paragraph should also be greentext, my mistake

>>19115789
>has no words for the shiver or the headache
except...shiver and headache?

Can Ancient Greek adequetely convey the pain one feels reading the inanities of the female brain.

Pain is weakness leaving the body.

>>19115789
no shit that's what poetry is for

>>19115797
Hopefully this is b8 and you're not illiterate, anon.

>>19115789
The point of language isn't to describe, but to draw upon experience and imagination. No matter how intricate, no language could ever describe how potato tastes to someone who never tasted potato. This is why writers employ metaphors, similies etc. to draw experiences our of your memory and use them as tools.
A sentence
>He touched a hot stove. Ouch! Damn! Yiiikes! Ooof gosh fuck dammit fuck it hurts!
Draws upon nothing, but the sentence
>He touched a hot stove. The pain stung his palm like a viper, snaked into the forearm spreading like a liquid flame in his veins. In the moment of ringing, seizing torture he sensed, with a sickening awareness, the smell of cooked meat.
Draws upon very real experinces, even the readers who never touched a hot stove could extrapolate their own painful moments and relate to it.

>>19115789
Women complain that language is inadequate for complaining

>>19115871
really makes you think

>>19115789
Odd, because you can in fact have an ache, a shooting pain, a throbbing pain, a flash of pain. I think the problem is that the language can tell you about degree and location but can't illustrate the base sensation well because it's both primal and internal.

I can't remember if he talks about expressability but Wittgenstein's Nephew by Bernhard contains a lot of moaning about how sick and in pain he is.

>>19115789
It's not only pain but basically any inner status. Why would love be better described than pain, considered it's an equally subjective feeling? It is entirely possible that each and every experience of love has been different from human to human, despite its apparent reliability when we make account of them. Language falls short in describing inner feelings, but it is also the one and only means we have to rely them in a complex manner. Sure you can communicate anger by frowining and shouting and reddening, but there if you want to communicate the complex aspects of it, you will need words. Love is not more communicable than pain, but it is something we are constantly forced to talk about, precisely because love is about communicating and connecting with others: conversation and expression of feelings is an intrinsic part of loving. On the other hand, pain tends to be more self-contained, in that we are not as willing to let other participate in our pain as we are to let them participate in our love. When you communicate pain properly, the listener suffers: this is not something we (generally) want. On the other hand, when we are in love we mostly can't shut up about it and want to tell everyone, not only the person we are in love with.

>>19115789

>>19115972
They argue that pain is unique amongst internal states in not being referential to the outside world:
>Contemporary philosophers have habituated us to the recognition that our interior states of consciousness are regularly accompanied by objects in the external world, that we do not simply "have feelings" but have feelings/or somebody or something, that love is love of x, fear is fear of y, ambivalence is ambivalence about z. If one were to move through all the emotional, perceptual, and somatic states that take an object-hatred for, seeing of, being hungry for-the list would become a very long one and, though it would alternate between states we are thankful for and those we dislike, it would be throughout its entirety a consistent affirmation of the human being's capacity to move out beyond the boundaries of his or her own body into the external, sharable world.
>This list and its implicit affirmation would, however, be suddenly interrupted when, moving through the human interior, one at last reached physical pain, for physical pain-unlike any other state of consciousness-has no referential content. It is not of or for anything. It is precisely because it takes no object that it, more than any other phenomenon, resists objectification in language.

>>19115843
he's right though she fell into her own tarp

>>19115871
as if a woman doesn't have a million variations of the word headache ready at all times

>>19115975
what abous whites

>>19116055
Pain means you just need to work harder and also be yourself

So who is the author of this, OP? Name of book?

>>19116055
Whites report less pain intensity for the same stimulus than Hispanics and Blacks but are more open and willing at be prescribed opiates to treat it. More resilient but more trusting in doctors and medicine.

>>19116027
Pain isn't an emotion, it's a physical feeling. Might as well say language has no words for cold, soft or rough (it does). English has dozens of words for various pain sensations.

> Kill James Bond!
>Alice Caldwell-Kelly, Abi Thorn and Devon watch a different Bond film each fortnight in an attempt to give 007 the socialist, feminist upcoming he so richly deserves.
Bondbros...we got too cocky!

>>19115789
Language is inadequate at describing everything. Language is not a reality, it is just a tool for (naturally, imperfectly) describing reality. I don't get how people are still hung up on this. If language were a perfect description of reality it would no longer be language but reality itself.

>>19115789
BTFO'd by Wittgenstein

>>19116204
>>19116209
who is right?

>>19115862
>>He touched a hot stove. Ouch! Damn! Yiiikes! Ooof gosh fuck dammit fuck it hurts!
Except this is based

>>19115975
>Jews may be vocal and demanding of assistance
Reported to ADL.

>>19115862
>>He touched a hot stove. The pain stung his palm like a viper, snaked into the forearm spreading like a liquid flame in his veins. In the moment of ringing, seizing torture he sensed, with a sickening awareness, the smell of cooked meat.
This is so fucking bad.

>>19115862
I love when people try and throw in their own writing as a casual example of something good. Throw some more commas in there.

>>19116296
Sounds like Tom and Jerry

>>19117416
I'm not him but even if the sentence is shit, (it is) the point he was making still stands. The first sentence just conveys very little meaning to the reader. The second is far more descriptive so that, like he said, you can imagine what it feels like even if you never experienced it.

>>19115789
Until the hard problem of consciousness is solved, qualia aren’t even describable as physical phenomena. And even then, a full physical description wouldn’t convey the experience, only it’s mechanics, to reach beyond this, we will have to create some machine that directly induces desired mental experiences in subjects.

>>19115789
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a500/incarnations-burned-children-david-foster-wallace-0900/

Read this

>>19115841
haha

>>19115789
I really like, and respect Virginia Woolf, but she's retarded here.

>>19116265
Both. No words can adequately convey your experience because it's inherently private. At best it gives a sense, but even then it cannot be experienced via language.

>>19118182
That story doesn't directly describe the sensation of pain. Like >>19115862 said; Wallace is drawing on literary tools to elicit empathy from people's own experience/imagination.

Directly state what a cluster headache feels like without evoking emotion or using similies. There aren't words. You could make an argument that a description of anything isn't direct and the point of Woolf's observation is literary--pain is grounded in individual physical experience and describing it is like describing the colour blue to a blind person.

>>19115789
Sophocles was meant to be performed; The perforer conveyed pain. It's easy to empathise with how some people suffer through their expression of it in writing. Laurence Sterne's letters, about his illness, Kingsley Amis describes hangover in such a way that anyone who'd had such a hangover would empathise, James Kellman describes the dissociative aspects of head injuries very well in How Late it Was etc. I guess what I'm trying to say is that this soulless tramp lacks both experience in reading about pain and basic human empathy. I wonder what plane of existence she actually lives on, when she's a blank both intellectually and emotionally.... Oh, I know: twitter.

>>19118311
The point of Wallace's story is that there's no way of communicating pain. The child's condition is an exaggeration of our own. It tries to communicate but no one can really understand until it's too late.

>>19115789
I guess she forgot about the word "pain" or "hurt." Or maybe she doesn't know that humans speak in full sentances for a reason or describe abstractions using methaphors. She must have lived selfishly in order for her to not understand how pain is so accurately described by someone who is in pain

>>19115835
painis:DDDD

>>19115789
I mean, I never even remember how painful pain is until I am in pain again. Every time after intense pain I think “why was I being such a bitch? I could have endured way more” and then the next time you come under pain you can’t possibly comprehend how can you endure any more, until it ends. If anything the issue is that we can’t conjure an accurate representation of pain in our memories, thus words relating to them are incapable of conjuring the full extent pain in the mind, because what exists in the mind to be conjured is not the full extent of pain.

>>19118546
You weren't clear about that (and it's in agreement with what I wrote). Also, I don't recall pain and empathy in that sense being a theme of the story. Do you think you're reading into it as intentional based on the conversation at hand?

>What she meant was:
I wish my physician had been female. Maybe I wouldn't have been placed on rest-cure, despite never engaging seriously with the treatment and lying about symptoms (not signs) when queried to avoid assessment.
>Borderline Personality Disorder

>>19115789
>but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry."
Docter I have sudden intense cluster headackes in my left eye, which radiates to my left cheek and causes a sharp, pounding pain, vertigo and naussea.

done

I feel like I can understand what she is saying. I have suffered from headaches all my life and I feel inadequate when trying to explain it to doctors. Here is my best attempt:
>it is not really a burning, stining pain, but more of like a dull ache, something that is always subtly there that constantly pulls my attention back to it. It is not so bad that it overwhelms my day at all times, but it is bad enough where I can never quite ignore it and can never really be relieved from it. the subtltely of it is a major part of the problem and annoynace. Sometimes I wonder if I even imagine it, but its just always there, this dull ache calling attention to itself and decreasing my immersion in life. Like it disconnects me from life, and this constant feeling, day after day, is just unbearable
Thats the best I can do with the words that I have. I feel like the true pain of it cant be communicated

>>19115862
I hope to god you aren't trying to be a writer

>>19119932
>diagnostic criteria
Filtered.

There's nothing connoting how incredibly painful the headaches are--no one would guess why they're called "suicide headaches" by your description. You basically just described diagnostic criteria that could be mistaken for a migraine.

Pain is meaningless. Feeling one's negative emotions warrant expression only indicates a lack of self-control and their subjugation to external influences.