It’s remarkable how much primary knowledge we glean from the secondary arguments against it—a kind of negative proof—and from the procedural mechanisms intended to stamp it out. Joan’s trial was nothing if not a procedure, an exercise in deep administration as a means of reining in a person deemed out of control. Of the hundreds upon hundreds of pages that make up the official record, Joan’s words amount to only a small fraction. Epiphanic, resistant to standardization, full of lyric logic and lyric leaps, they are the swerving atoms, the collision-creations in an otherwise-sterile rain.
Constantly reasserting its own argument through persistent, plodding, painstakingly unoriginal form, procedure has a funny way of highlighting the very resistance it quashes. At least, within the confines of its dimly lit chambers, flashes of autonomy and originality seem to glimmer more brightly than just about anywhere else. Mapped onto body and mind, then, is the normal our procedural, a dull sky across which the abnormal flares? Such as inspiration? Such as pain?
The word pain derives from the Latin poena (penalty, punishment, execution), which itself derived from the ancient Greek poine (penalty, fine, blood money). Only later did notions of grief attach; later still, sensation. Here is the current order of meanings according to the Oxford English Dictionary:
1. Suffering or loss inflicted as punishment for a crime or offence, a fine.
2. The state of or condition of consciousness arising from mental or physical suffering, an unpleasurable feeling or effect.
3. Bodily suffering, strongly unpleasant feeling in the body, such as arises from illness, injury, or harmful physical contact (a single sensation of this nature) (such sensations experienced during childbirth).
4. Trouble taken in accomplishing or attempting something; careful and attentive effort.
Is this the order you would have thought? This is not the order I would have thought. So much intermingling of category and implication of value, so many ghosts right there in front of us in the biography of the word.
“Ghosts may be grief gone awry,” remarks Audrey Niffenegger, author of several collections of ghost stories, to explain their appeal. I’m not partial to ghost stories, but I love thinking about ghosts and grief in this way, and, more generally, about how one thing becomes another, especially by means of going awry.
For one thing, this is metaphor. And far from being frill on the surface of language, metaphor is fundamental to our ability to communicate, to know anything at all. For another thing, maybe this isn’t metaphor. Alchemy, chemistry, translation, transformation, transmutation: one thing causes or becomes another (or seems to) around us, in us, all the time. Most compelling is the way these planes and processes intermingle and overlap: the figurative and the real, the mental and the physical, procedure and our resistance to it.