Source: El Asombrario
By: Antonio García Maldonado
It is not the first time that the writer and lawyer Recaredo Veredas (Madrid, 1970) explores death and pain, and writes about it. He did it before in his essay No es para tanto. Instrucciones para morir sin miedo (It’s not that bad. Instructions to die without fear) (Sílex, 2016). The difference is that this time he did so at the gates of a global pandemic that, by way of its macabre balance of suffering, would remind us of our fragile biological condition as mortals. A few days before the coronavirus outbreak in Spain, the book ‘Todo es verdad. Historias de amor y supervivencia’ (Everything is true. Stories of love and survival) (Silex) was published; in it, the author collects the testimony of different persons who have suffered or are suffering traumatic illness or mourning experiences; experiences that our societies tend to hide and that Veredas insists on looking at the face as the only way to overcome trauma.
It is not the first book you devote to death, although you have done it from different perspectives.
Everything is true is a journey through the ability of the human being to survive impossible situations, get hurt, and yet, not hurt. One of those situations is death, of course, whether it’s someone else’s or our own. I mention our own, because we die several times during our lives before the final disappearance. Such death, as it happens in the tarot, implies the choice between changing or falling. Those who choose to change are those who appear in Everything is true.
Although, in the end, we will all fall.
Such a fate is everyone’s, not that of just a few. As soon as you search, just a few centimeters behind the surface, you find out the obvious: almost all of us have faced difficult situations and, with more or less ease, we have overcome them. The point is to make these incidents interesting for the reader, that is, to find those links making them universal. Exciting material can be extracted from any life, but, on the one hand, it must be that of someone giving enough value to his/her experience to tell it and, on the other, whoever wants to polish it, look for those universal links and make it public. Of course, at the end of the road there is always death, but that is a condition common to any story and to any life.
Do you agree that society turns its back on death? It is a recurring criticism, and it is often insisted that before it was common to see children at funerals and now they are not.
One hundred percent. We consider ourselves immortals, an idea that favors routine, submission and spending and, on the other hand, that generates intense anguish and a persistent background noise. However, the denial of death and the pathologization of suffering are not conspiracies, but inertias promoting a false comfort.
Death is what happens to others.
Serious illnesses and death are considered surprises, unusual events. Those who suffer them are considered unfortunate and therefore guilty, when they are simply humans who follow the human path. Becoming aware that we are beings for death, as Heidegger would say, is not a fall into the sinister but the entrance into the vital. Only those who know that they will die any moment can fully enjoy life.
And the children at funerals?
As for children, they are considered much weaker than they really are. They accept death with a normality that astonishes the adults, obsessed in detours and circumlocutions which include the sky, the eternal journey or the Stalin-style erasure. Such is the case, I suppose, because children are not afraid of what they consider so, so far away, that it should not even be taken into account.
Have you found some common feature, a shared way of looking at the world, among those who have gone through similar extreme pain experiences?
Extreme pain and its cause, trauma, do not make up the entire person but only part of it. Almost always there are fire-free zones left which define the difference between those affected. Since anyone can suffer extreme pain, diversity is as enormous as humanity itself. The proximity between those affected depends largely on the method that each of them uses to address that pain. This method usually involves a look at the world, sometimes a narrative, that the affected person internalizes and makes his own. For example, psychology—either gestalt, psychoanalytic, behavioral…—provides resources to those who undergo a treatment that makes possible dialogues with their own keys. Other proximities are fear, which is triggered nearby the cause or by a metaphor (as it occurs in phobias), guilt and shame. These last two seem incomprehensible from outside. We must walk in the shoes of those who suffer and be familiar with the prejudices of the society surrounding us to understand them.
And what have you found when trying to understand them?
Most of the interviewees in Everything is true share keys with me and that has made dialogue possible. They start in ancient philosophy, go through the Bible, and end in psychoanalysis and its drifts (with all its strengths and weaknesses). The fit with a school of thought can be found in each of the testimonies. The most obvious example is Te recuerdo, Amanda (I remember you, Amanda), recounting a patient’s relationship with her psychoanalyst, but there are more lateral examples, such as the stoicism of the two narrators of Parallel lives, or the vitalism of the last testimony: El camino del chivo expiatorio (The scapegoat path).
Another of the mantras concerning pain is that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”, and that suffering brings teachings or “lessons”. Do you agree? Or with pain we just suffer?
It depends on the intensity, the duration or the endurance of the person who suffers. If the pain is psychic, one of its benefits is the constant search of its cure. In that search, surprising and enlightening ways and people can be found. The greatest harm of pain is not our own suffering, but the one we inflict on others. Vilas affirmed in Ordesa that the tragedy of trauma is that it converts the victim into an executioner. However, perhaps the suffering is not so negative: it is worse to refuse to feel it and let it accumulate under the mask. A very high percentage of the world’s misfortunes is due to the masks of pain.
And there’s also the pain as a concern for the return of the formally vanished misfortune, which is nothing similar to an attenuated pain.
Paco Bescós, whose testimony appears in La hija (The daughter), mentions the chronified concern that accompanies those who suffer it as their shadow, from morning to night, and cannot conceive an alleviation. However, there are solutions, at least partial. Two of them are meditation and the support in a religion. However, any exit becomes a simple temporary relief if it is not accompanied by a decision making.
What do you think of dignified death? Or, bluntly, of euthanasia? There are precisely those who oppose radically when speaking about the teachings of pain.
It is a thorny topic that cannot be summarized in a tweet or a paragraph. I am against its trivialization but also against the unnecessary pain caused by therapeutic cruelty. Suffering often comes not from disease but from attempts to cure the incurable. Of course, I have no idea what I will do when the time comes, but I would not like to assign a greater value to time of life than to its quality. In summary, and always bearing in mind that there are nuances and exceptions, I am in favor of the passive euthanasia and against the active euthanasia. Getting prissy, I believe in the natural rhythm of life. As for the teachings of pain, they certainly exist, but we cannot force anyone to seek them.
To what extent do you believe in the promises of transhumanism against suffering? Do you see a horizon there?
The question is what is lost in return. That is, if the medication, the implants, or the genetic therapy putting an end to suffering also put an end to creativity, love, or compassion… with everything that arises around pain. If the removal of traumatic memories causing anxiety and her sister, depression, is precise and limited to erasing certain events, I think it will change the lives of many people for the better. In fact, it will entail an infinite relief. However, I suspect that such approaches are not viable and come close to the plot of a beautiful and postmodern film, Spike Jonze-style.
It is not the first time that the writer and lawyer Recaredo Veredas (Madrid, 1970) explores death and pain, and writes about it. He did it before in his essay No es para tanto. Instrucciones para morir sin miedo (It’s not that bad. Instructions to die without fear) (Sílex, 2016). The difference is that this time he did so at the gates of a global pandemic that, by way of its macabre balance of suffering, would remind us of our fragile biological condition as mortals. A few days before the coronavirus outbreak in Spain, the book ‘Todo es verdad. Historias de amor y supervivencia’ (Everything is true. Stories of love and survival) (Silex) was published; in it, the author collects the testimony of different persons who have suffered or are suffering traumatic illness or mourning experiences; experiences that our societies tend to hide and that Veredas insists on looking at the face as the only way to overcome trauma.
It is not the first book you devote to death, although you have done it from different perspectives.
Everything is true is a journey through the ability of the human being to survive impossible situations, get hurt, and yet, not hurt. One of those situations is death, of course, whether it’s someone else’s or our own. I mention our own, because we die several times during our lives before the final disappearance. Such death, as it happens in the tarot, implies the choice between changing or falling. Those who choose to change are those who appear in Everything is true.
Although, in the end, we will all fall.
Such a fate is everyone’s, not that of just a few. As soon as you search, just a few centimeters behind the surface, you find out the obvious: almost all of us have faced difficult situations and, with more or less ease, we have overcome them. The point is to make these incidents interesting for the reader, that is, to find those links making them universal. Exciting material can be extracted from any life, but, on the one hand, it must be that of someone giving enough value to his/her experience to tell it and, on the other, whoever wants to polish it, look for those universal links and make it public. Of course, at the end of the road there is always death, but that is a condition common to any story and to any life.
Do you agree that society turns its back on death? It is a recurring criticism, and it is often insisted that before it was common to see children at funerals and now they are not.
One hundred percent. We consider ourselves immortals, an idea that favors routine, submission and spending and, on the other hand, that generates intense anguish and a persistent background noise. However, the denial of death and the pathologization of suffering are not conspiracies, but inertias promoting a false comfort.
Death is what happens to others.
Serious illnesses and death are considered surprises, unusual events. Those who suffer them are considered unfortunate and therefore guilty, when they are simply humans who follow the human path. Becoming aware that we are beings for death, as Heidegger would say, is not a fall into the sinister but the entrance into the vital. Only those who know that they will die any moment can fully enjoy life.
And the children at funerals?
As for children, they are considered much weaker than they really are. They accept death with a normality that astonishes the adults, obsessed in detours and circumlocutions which include the sky, the eternal journey or the Stalin-style erasure. Such is the case, I suppose, because children are not afraid of what they consider so, so far away, that it should not even be taken into account.
Have you found some common feature, a shared way of looking at the world, among those who have gone through similar extreme pain experiences?
Extreme pain and its cause, trauma, do not make up the entire person but only part of it. Almost always there are fire-free zones left which define the difference between those affected. Since anyone can suffer extreme pain, diversity is as enormous as humanity itself. The proximity between those affected depends largely on the method that each of them uses to address that pain. This method usually involves a look at the world, sometimes a narrative, that the affected person internalizes and makes his own. For example, psychology—either gestalt, psychoanalytic, behavioral…—provides resources to those who undergo a treatment that makes possible dialogues with their own keys. Other proximities are fear, which is triggered nearby the cause or by a metaphor (as it occurs in phobias), guilt and shame. These last two seem incomprehensible from outside. We must walk in the shoes of those who suffer and be familiar with the prejudices of the society surrounding us to understand them.
And what have you found when trying to understand them?
Most of the interviewees in Everything is true share keys with me and that has made dialogue possible. They start in ancient philosophy, go through the Bible, and end in psychoanalysis and its drifts (with all its strengths and weaknesses). The fit with a school of thought can be found in each of the testimonies. The most obvious example is Te recuerdo, Amanda (I remember you, Amanda), recounting a patient’s relationship with her psychoanalyst, but there are more lateral examples, such as the stoicism of the two narrators of Parallel lives, or the vitalism of the last testimony: El camino del chivo expiatorio (The scapegoat path).
Another of the mantras concerning pain is that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”, and that suffering brings teachings or “lessons”. Do you agree? Or with pain we just suffer?
It depends on the intensity, the duration or the endurance of the person who suffers. If the pain is psychic, one of its benefits is the constant search of its cure. In that search, surprising and enlightening ways and people can be found. The greatest harm of pain is not our own suffering, but the one we inflict on others. Vilas affirmed in Ordesa that the tragedy of trauma is that it converts the victim into an executioner. However, perhaps the suffering is not so negative: it is worse to refuse to feel it and let it accumulate under the mask. A very high percentage of the world’s misfortunes is due to the masks of pain.
And there’s also the pain as a concern for the return of the formally vanished misfortune, which is nothing similar to an attenuated pain.
Paco Bescós, whose testimony appears in La hija (The daughter), mentions the chronified concern that accompanies those who suffer it as their shadow, from morning to night, and cannot conceive an alleviation. However, there are solutions, at least partial. Two of them are meditation and the support in a religion. However, any exit becomes a simple temporary relief if it is not accompanied by a decision making.
What do you think of dignified death? Or, bluntly, of euthanasia? There are precisely those who oppose radically when speaking about the teachings of pain.
It is a thorny topic that cannot be summarized in a tweet or a paragraph. I am against its trivialization but also against the unnecessary pain caused by therapeutic cruelty. Suffering often comes not from disease but from attempts to cure the incurable. Of course, I have no idea what I will do when the time comes, but I would not like to assign a greater value to time of life than to its quality. In summary, and always bearing in mind that there are nuances and exceptions, I am in favor of the passive euthanasia and against the active euthanasia. Getting prissy, I believe in the natural rhythm of life. As for the teachings of pain, they certainly exist, but we cannot force anyone to seek them.
To what extent do you believe in the promises of transhumanism against suffering? Do you see a horizon there?
The question is what is lost in return. That is, if the medication, the implants, or the genetic therapy putting an end to suffering also put an end to creativity, love, or compassion… with everything that arises around pain. If the removal of traumatic memories causing anxiety and her sister, depression, is precise and limited to erasing certain events, I think it will change the lives of many people for the better. In fact, it will entail an infinite relief. However, I suspect that such approaches are not viable and come close to the plot of a beautiful and postmodern film, Spike Jonze-style.
Source: El Asombrario
https://elasombrario.com/mirar-a-la-cara-el-dolor-y-el-sufrimiento-para-superarlos/
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