THROUGH ME THE WAY INTO THE SUFFERING CITY,
THROUGH ME THE WAY INTO THE ETERNAL PAIN
…ABANDON EVERY HOPE, WHO ENTER HERE.

Dante Alighieri. Inferno (trans. Allen Mandelbaum)

Somewhere on the wall or the back of the door in each room at Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, PA is the Pain Scale. Green. Yellow. Red. Smiley face to tormented one. Looking in the mirror would quantify my hurt.

During my junior year at the University of Houston, I took a poetry class from Gail Mazur in which we read Joyce Peseroff’s “The Hardness Scale.” As a former chemical engineering student, I loved the simplicity and objectivity of the Mohs scale: 1 Talc, 2 Gypsum, 3 Calcite, 4 Fluorite, 5 Apatite, 6 Feldspar, 7 Quartz, 8 Topaz, 9 Corundum, 10 Diamond. To find where any mineral falls, simply scratch it against those ten. Hardest rock wins.

Green: Mild: Does not interfere with most activities: 0-No Pain (Big Happy Face) to 3-Uncomfortable (more of a smirk)

“If no pain is possible, then, another question—is no pain desirable? Does the absence of pain equal the absence of everything.”

Eula Biss. “The Pain Scale”

In fifth grade, I entered a theater for the first time, my sister’s birthday. Movies were sinful, but it was The Sound of Music, rated G. I had seen Mary Poppins on “The Wonderful World of Disney”; somehow TV circumvented the prohibition. I had a crush on Julie Andrews—not sexual, maternal. She sang to the Von Trapp children, “When the dog bites, when the bee stings, when I’m feeling sad, I simply remember my favorite things, and then I don’t feel so bad”—I longed to curl up next to her.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “pain” as “Punishment; suffering or loss inflicted for a crime or offence.” Derived from the French “peine,” originally indicating “physical or bodily suffering” (10^th century) and later “mental suffering” (c. 1100).

My sister describes our upbringing as physically abusive. I don’t disagree, but the physical only ranks third among my childhood traumas—I have become particularly adept at dissociating and rarely notice injury. My mother, the parent responsible for our care, broke a number of wooden spoons on our behinds, had to switch to metal pancake turners. My father had a leather belt if order had not returned when he came home from Joy Publications.

Sometime during second grade, according to my mother, I lost hope and the joy of life. Other than sitting in squares outlined by masking tape in kindergarten and learning the alphabet, I remember nothing from that period.

“It takes more muscles to frown than to smile.”

“Turn that frown upside down.”

“If you’re happy and you know it then your face will surely show it, if you’re happy and you know it say ‘Amen.’”

One evening I was working in the garage with my father, sanding, and got a blister on my palm. “That means you finally did real work,” he told me as he pierced it with a nail, the water squirting onto the floor. That’s the closest he’s ever come to saying he’s proud of me.

Even now, when I smile for pictures, my wife says I’m grimacing.

Yellow: Moderate: Interferes with many activities: 4-Moderate (a forced smile) to 5-Distracting (straight line mouth)

“After a year of pain, I realized that I could no longer remember what it felt like not to be in pain. I was left anchorless.”

Eula Biss. “The Pain Scale”

At the beginning of each session, my former therapist of twenty years would ask me to rank my depression, zero to eight—eight being worst. No chart or definitions. I had to project my place on the scale. What would a zero or one feel like? On my best days, the day my wife agreed to marry me, the births of both of my children, I was happy and hopeful but simultaneously wished I’d never been born. What I only recently discovered is that my aphantasia also includes the inability to re-experience emotions—when I think about those three happy days, I remember that I was happy, but the memory doesn’t make me feel happy. In essence, I don’t have a “happy place.”

In all my math and science classes, I never encountered something that was both positive and negative—okay, maybe the absolute value of something, maybe Schrödinger’s Cat. Is that my depression scale: the absolute value of emotion or someone who is alive and dead until the box is opened?

The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.

John Milton. Paradise Lost

Asking a person who has had chronic, Major Depressive Disorder since seven to rank their depression seems futile. For a long time, I answered “six and a half,” knowing there had been worse days in my life. Eventually, the numbers came down, not because I was happier, but because the question itself was depressing, kinda meta-depressing. Or maybe I was doing what she recommended, “Fake it ‘til you make it.” Awarding my depression a “2” made her feel she had helped me.

“But pain presents a unique problem in terms of measurement, and a unique cruelty in terms of suffering—it is entirely subjective.”

Eula Biss. “The Pain Scale”

My father often asserted that “mental illness is all in your head,” not to be witty but dismissive. It wasn’t real. He never read Milton or any other poetry except the Psalms of David, but his statement sounds eerily like a working-class paraphrase of Satan.

Red: Severe: Unable to engage in normal activities: 6-Distressing to 10-Immobilizing

we’ll get a new needle,
a diamond needle,
which is #10 on the hardness scale
and will cut anything.
…, it will cut the sapphires in my eyes and I will bleed
blind as 4 A.M.

Joyce Peseroff. “The Hardness Scale”

For the Assemblies of God, Hell was simple and absolute. My grandmother reminded my sister and me each time she babysat, “All liars shall have their part in the Lake of Fire,” although both of us were diligently honest. It sounded like the King James. Unparaphrased, it actually read, “But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death” (Revelations 21: 8). Our God was consistent, the same punishment for liars, rapists, murderers, and children who died before they could accept Jesus. Pastor Chaney preached that burning eternally was the most painful punishment, although other Sundays he’d tell us Christ suffered the most painful death imaginable. Was I the only one during those sermons who contrived up more horrific ways to die?

If you have not been raised with the psychological terrors of Pentecostal Christianity from earliest childhood—the constant and imminent threat that Christ would steal your family in the Rapture or the Holy Ghost take possession of you during a service—maybe three years of sexual abuse might seem like the depths of Hell.

“Through a failure of my imagination, or of myself, I have discovered that the pain I am in is always the worst pain imaginable.”

Eula Biss. “The Pain Scale”

That is the one point on which we disagree—the worst pain I can imagine would be watching one of my children experience what I’ve been through. Pleasure for me is vicarious—if I can make my wife or children happy, I feel radiated joy, like the moon reflecting the light of the sun.

Heaven never appealed to me. My parents, grandparents, and teachers all mentioned how wonderful an eternity with Jesus would be. I remember a sermon in which Pastor Chaney illustrated eternity: “Imagine a sparrow in Huntington Beach picking up a grain of sand in its beak, then flying across the Pacific and dropping it in Japan. That sparrow flies back and takes another grain until all the sand on the western shores of the Pacific have been removed. That is the first second of eternity.” Eternity would be long enough for me to learn everything that had ever been known and still have an eternity left to be bored. The fact that Hitler might be in Heaven also didn’t help—for some reason, evangelists liked to use him as an example of how limitless God’s forgiveness was: “even Hitler, if he repented before his death, would be in Heaven.”

“my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.”

William Faulkner. As I Lay Dying

Once I stopped believing in an afterlife, death no longer worried me. My children, raised in my wife’s Unitarian Universalist congregation, both had memorable existential crises when they were about ten, when they realized that they would die. My son wants to live past the heat death of the universe, less because he wants to be immortal but because he wants to observe what happens.

Is the opposite of pain pleasure? Or is it numbness, nothingness? Every five years, I look forward to my colonoscopy, forty-five minutes of nonexistence under general anesthesia. If I had written Paradiso, I would have left those thirty-three cantos blank.

Originally from Los Angeles, Michael Hardin lives in rural Pennsylvania. He is the author of a poetry chapbook, Born Again, from Moonstone Press (2019), has had poems and flash CNF published in Seneca Review, Wisconsin Review, North American Review, Quarterly West, Moon City Review, among others, and has been nominated for a Pushcart.