Tell you it’s real nice boppin along with no pain and
feeling that you’ve never had a bad day in your life and never will have. Then
suddenly you have pain. By pain I mean not the kind that animates the sensory
nerves and sends a jangling along the pathways to register as fire in the brain.
The pain I speak of has no fire, no jangling. It is the stunned silence after a
bomb blast, the clear-cutting of perception which the migraine would otherwise
occupy, the wide absence of tiny understandings. It is mortal pain without the
histrionics, agony without writhing. It is dumb, it is dumpf.
