“He was wise in the ways of pain. He had to be, for he felt none.” Thus opens James Tiptree Jr.'s 1972 science fiction novelette “Painwise”—a story about an unnamed protagonist who doesn't feel pain, his pain circuits having been disconnected by scientists. The man is sent from planet to planet to be injured by the locals as part of some unknown mission, held hostage by the ship, his sole companion. Wanting out of this unending cycle, he begins to self-injure—tearing out his eyes, breaking bones, and mutilating his limbs—only to be patched up again by the ship's program. “I suffer,” he wails to the unfeeling ship. Eventually, he's picked up by pleasure-seeking empaths (the “Lovepile”) teleporting through the universe to try various galactic cuisines. The empath's nickname him “No-Pain” and give him a new role—their painless grocery shopper—and our protagonist is now bounced from planet to planet to bring back exotic foods to the aliens. A new cycle begins—one of unrestrained eating and orgiastic cuddle puddles. But No-Pain wants to feel pain again: he doesn't feel real without it. “You want to feel pain?” The empaths screech. “Pain is the obscenity of the universe . . . You are sick.”
No-pain people do exist in real life. Congenital Insensitivity to Pain (CIP) is a rare and life-threatening condition where people are born without the ability to feel pain. Without pain response, injuries rack up. Children with CIP horrifically poke out their eyes, bite through their tongues, and gnaw their fingers to the bone—compulsively self-injuring with no pain feedback to tell them to stop. Parents place their no-pain children in makeshift restraints to protect them from themselves, at least until they're old enough to understand that they shouldn't place their hands in pots of boiling water or smash their heads repeatedly into the wall. “We have to feel pain for her by watching her all the time,” one of these parents explains. (Feeling pain for their no-pain children is a weird kind of empathy.) The moral: We need pain to survive.
Margaret Price, a disability scholar at Ohio State University, asks, “What shall we do with pain?” Disability activists have yet to grapple with conditions like pain syndromes, where people feel too much pain and will do anything to get away from it. How do we attend meaningfully to pain, then, pain that may be distressing?
There is no room for pain in the Lovepile, however. The alien empaths psychopathically toss people out of their spaceship when their guests feel too much, leaving them to die. Bad feelings are met with bad endings. The empaths, unprotected against negative stimuli, become pain avoidant beings. (I admit that part of me finds myself on the side of the empaths. I say this as someone with a pain syndrome. I can’t take on anymore pain! I am pain avoidant!)
Tiptree’s “Painwise” is not great and is actually kind of bad. Being painwise, for one, does not mean learning from an absence of pain. Being painwise means being receptive to what pain is trying to tell us. There’s more I could say, but I’m lazy and have been shirking my other responsibilities to write this. (Are pain syndromes also empathy syndromes? The answer is probably yes, but again, I’m too lazy to expand on this here.) The point of this post is to disclose where I got the name of this substack from. Welcome.
Image description: A photo of me holding Tiptree's Ten Thousand Light-Years from Home where the story "Painwise" can be found.