On Poetry and Suffering

I recently watched the movie Sylvia starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig, who play Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. I’ve never been a big Sylvia Plath fan. Actually, I don’t even like most poetry. There are some exceptions.

Let me say that it’s a decent movie, if simplistic, and to an extent, sugar coated. I read somewhere once that Ted Hughes was a philistine, jealous of his wife’s talent, terribly unfaithful to her, a chauvinist. But Plath was no cakewalk. If she were of age today, she would be jacked up on Paxil or some anti-depressant. She was brilliant but messed up.

I watched the movie not because I like Paltrow – I find her to be a great actress but removed and patronizing – but because I like Daniel Craig, and frankly, I’m running out of stuff to rent. Is that happening to anyone else? It’s like I’ve gone through all the movies.

But anyway, the film got me thinking (to anyone who doesn’t know it, Plath did herself in). First, would she had written the poetry she had, garnered that acclaim and respect, considered a great American poet, had she not been depressed? I can hardly stand to read her dark stuff, but would she written it had she been happier? I would have preferred a different ending. I don’t care about the poetry. We could have lived without the poetry. But this brings me to a consideration: How necessary is suffering? And is the loss of suffering or the quest for an end of suffering ultimately detrimental to individuals or society? Rather, is suffering a requisite part of life?

For me, I have to answer yes. The wholeness and functioning of the human body and mind depends on the ability to feel pain. I think of those poor kids who have that disease – called congenital insensitivity or some such – and who ultimately perish not because of lack of pain or the disease itself, but because in feeling no pain, they cannot prevent perpetual and chronic injury to themselves. This fatally compromises their bodies so that they died of these composite external and internal injuries by the time they are young adults. The kind of suffering I’m talking about is more mental than physical, but we can still apply the metaphor of “congenital insensitivity.”

What can we assume about children, people, who feel no pain? I’ve met them. I’ve even dated a few. These types don’t seem to feel any normal amount of regret, guilt, anguish, sorrow or grief, in regards to their own actions towards others, albeit they can sure get angry when other people cross them. I’m talking about (in children) attachment disorders and (in adults) socio-pathological behavior. These are people who at their worst commit heinous crimes with no sense of remorse: think OJ Simpson or Scott Peterson (if they are indeed guilty, I think so). Children who have some sort of attachment disorder, if not treated, become these adults. I’ve read about cases in the news of kids adopted from orphanages in third world countries that when brought back by otherwise normal adoptive parents, become violent and asocial, due to the traumas they’ve endured.

What does this tell us? That in short, pain and suffering are necessary not only to protect us from bodily injury but also from mental injury to others as well as ourselves. The ability to experience mental anguish is a moral and social barometer needed for a person to be competent and well-adapted in their lives.

But that being said, we don’t want overkill either, we don’t need an army of Sylvia Plaths (one brilliant and martyred poet will do). In fact, I think that Plath’s depression was insidious but not completely involuntary. Sure, she had a mental illness, but her intense focus on herself that is reflected in her poetry and in the choices she made – a philandering mate, a self-indulgent, instable and many times thankless career – only acerbated her condition. It guaranteed that her suffering, otherwise necessary as that moral and social barometer, would be too great for her or anyone else to manage.

The BBC did a story last spring regarding a recent medical report published in Great Britain. Studies on pregnant women (I don’t really want to think about how this test was conducted, ok…) demonstrated that the average fetus feels no actual pain until the 29th week of its development. That means that until babies are seven months in the womb, practically born, they have no capability to suffer from physical pain. The study didn’t gauge mental pain but I’m going to assume because the brain is not yet fully formed, fetuses have a pass on that too. In short, we are not full and total human beings until we have obtained an apparatus of pain, otherwise known as the nervous system.

C.S. Lewis has written a beautiful piece, a short book, called “The Problem of Pain,” that takes a religious, spiritual perspective on this subject.