If we imagine that Iris was frozen into a pillar of salt because of overwhelming pain she felt upon looking back, I would like to suggest -- taking this image a step further -- that for most women, involvement with pain, physical or emotional, is often a tempting lure that should be resisted.

Pain Is a Mystery

Although everyone (with certain quite rare exceptions) has felt physical pain, it is not at all clear what pain is. Medical researchers have found that describing pain simply in physiological terms as the transmission of nerve impulses does not adequately explain the perplexing, contradictory ways people actually experience it. Even the seemingly natural distinction we make between physical pain and mental or emotional pain is not actually natural, but belongs specifically to our modern mode of perception.

For most of history, pain was considered an emotion, not a physical sensation; in fact, before the dualism of mind and body was invented, there was no reason to distinguish between pain that afflicted the one as opposed to the other. To the ancient Greeks, for example, pain was not something to get rid of, as it is for us, but a necessary component of experience, the inevitable counterpart of pleasure, a signal of a cosmic flaw in the universe. Consequently it had metaphysical meaning, and learning to live with it was simply part of life. It was not until Descartes split mind from body in the seventeenth century, conceiving the body as a mechanism separate from but managed by the mind, that pain was reduced to a sensation notifying the mind that something was wrong with the machine.

The definition of pain as a sensation is the foundation of the contemporary medical approach to it, although by the end of the twentieth century researchers increasingly recognized that emotions and thoughts are integral to the way pain is experienced. Nevertheless there is still a gulf between the modern approach to pain and the older understanding, which becomes evident when neurologist Oliver Sacks contemplates the 11th-century abbess Hildegard of Bingen, a remarkable literary, scientific, and musical genius widely respected in her time. Throughout her life Hildegard had mystical visions, which she depicted in both words and pictures. She saw these visions not in sleep or madness, she says, but "wakeful, alert, and with the eyes of the spirit and the inward ears." In one vision, "The Fall of the Angels," "I saw a great star most splendid and beautiful, and with it an exceeding multitude of falling stars, which with the star followed southwards."