Acts of God

by Kanan Gill

The establishment of the no-pain-no-gain orthodoxy ensured the integration of pain into the capitalist ethic, whereas some other economic structures just ended up with no gain and only pain. Economists will tell you that this anomaly is gain’s own fault and sociologists will tell you that they are in pain. In this insidious way, pain writes itself into our lives. As a necessity, as a backlight through which we see our outline. Pain shows us our shape, pain defines us and our extremities

how much can you take, how much will you give? So far this chapter is a pain. Behind every action – irrational, prescriptive, proscriptive or cruel – there is pain. Pain denied, pain refused, pain dispensed, pain received. Where there is a whiff of destruction, there is a wick of pain. On both sides of trauma’s see-saw, pain sits and pouts. Blessed are those who find pleasure in it. The drama in all actions, all fractions, all passions, every quadratic modality, each didactic anomaly all reduce down to pain. Pain in the springtime, pain in the rain, at this time we are not certain of the location of the pain in Spain. The poets were the first to know and thus poetry is a pain: Betwixt the stirrup and the ground Mercy I ask’d; mercy I found But when I hit the ground, There was only pain. The keen eye looks out at the world and sees that this whole show is run by pain and people who are in it. We still suffer cascades of cruelty caused by skinned hearts throughout history. So it is more accurate to say: Like every story, this story is about pain.