TOMOGRAPHYmeetsMASOCHISM

Salvador Dali - Un chien andalou

PAIN

'Hence pain is the general condition of being alive, a state of sensation,  a sensual monitoring of the body, a care or awareness of its health and its status, an attention to what are sometimes known as 'raw feels'. A pain displays a neurological concept, called proprioception.'

Proprioception is among the body's fundamental senses - it is the body's internal muscular and organic sense of itself.

Pain signifies that mode of awareness that listens to the body and is aware of its feelings - whether that feeling is the low-level muttering of a body in good health or the high pain of illness.

Proprioception names the sensation, or memory, or incipience, of motion.

Robert Vischer can be mentioned in this context as he observed how formal arrangement in works of art elicited muscular and emotional reactions and concluded that we are deceived into attributing those reactions to the object.

This 'Einfuehlung (feeling-in or empathy) is an 'involuntary' act of transference.

Vischer noticed how the body 'swells' when it enters a wide hall and how it 'sways', even in imagination, when it sees wind blowing in a tree. 

Proprioception demonstrates that the body has sensation within and of itself, with only minimal input from the outside world. But empathy reaction can also echo forms and events in the outside world: the swelling elicited by the hall is felt inside my body, not as a force on my body. In conjunction with proprioception, empathy can help us understand how our bodies are partly our own, and partly owned by the object we see.          (p. 24)