Masochism and Hot Sauce
My style book says that good writers keep themselves in the background and focus on something or someone else. That dude probably hates blogs.
I've always been a picker and a poker and a scratcher. I pop my zits and my blisters, pick my scabs, and rub my sore muscles. I locate my pain and touch it. It's a primoridal masochism, the motivation of which is at least partialy obscured from me. I know that it has to do with desires for healing and understanding. If I touch it, if I exacerbate the pain, maybe it will make sense? And maybe, if I can understand it, I can heal it? Or maybe, I can just get lucky and press the right nerve to send the right signal to initiate self-healing. But these thoughts are never conscious. They're blended together with whatever else is happening in my psyche, and all of these are hidden from me. I can only analyze them ex-post facto. In real time, they manifest in a mindless and irresistible impulse to poke, squeeze, pick, and scratch, to feel the pain, to make it worse.
The consious mind knows...this will not help. It will just hurt. It will be pointless hurting. Never have I been able to fix my sore back by pinpointing the epicenter of the pain and rubbing it. Am I such an idiot that simple operative pavlovian conditioning will not work on me?
Why do I do things that bring me pain? Is my reservoir of hope so deep that I sincerely believe that just one more little repetition of the same action that has brought me pain will, this time, bring me satisfaction, will this time make me whole?
My mind turns, as it often does, to thoughts of hot sauce. Delicious, yes. Red, yes. In a bottle, sometimes. But also painful. How much pain will a man endure for the culinary joy of a fine hot sauce? There are many palatable sauces, and only some of them are painful. In a world where sauce consumption if finite and sauce availability plentiful, only a true hot sauce lover will consume it over its milder counterparts. The pain is inimical to its competetiveness, right? Unless the pain is precisely what makes it delicious in the first place.
posted by Joe @ 9:13 PM
2 Comments:
Say at some point in your life you find a delicious and very spicy hot sauce. You enjoy the pleasures of this sauce for some time, it becomes habit forming, and then... inexplicably you're unable to consume the sauce but instead feel driven to pour it in your eye. The pleasure is absent but the pain of the burn, while more acute and intense, is familiar. Would you keep pouring the sauce in your eye?
No, but if I was compelled in the first place, am I to assume that I am now a free actor, no longer held hostage to the hot sauce-in-the-eye-impulse? I'd like to unmask that culprit.
Perhaps the initial pleasure (that from taste) has simply been replaced by other pleasures (that of eye-burning). In both cases, the question pertains, "how much pleasure is worth this much pain?"
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