Chronic pain is pain that lasts for months, years or even a lifetime, and doctors have a hard time understanding it. Not only is it sometimes impossible to cure, but doctors also tend to fixate on bodily pain and not address the ways pain is also psychological and emotional. In fact, Travis Chi Wing Lau argues that this attitude goes back to the ways doctors have been trained since the eighteenth century to observe outer bodily symptoms and discount patients’ subjective experiences. Turning to Travis’s poetry, we discuss why we need poets as well as doctors to understand pain.
Tag: spiritual
It’s difficult to maintain attention when surrounded by distractions. Even if we’re just trying to focus on our own thoughts, distracting words have a way of popping into our head uninvited. David Marno has been studying early Christian thinkers, for whom prayer meant paying attention to God, leading them to worry that distracting thoughts were caused by evil demons. But avoiding these demons of distraction wasn’t the goal for everyone: the poet and preacher John Donne believed that true attention could only emerge out of distractedness, and so wrote poetry that moves readers from distraction to spiritual attention.