Audre Lorde on Pain

…truth is never without pain, because if you are seeking it, it means you do not yet know it. And if you do not yet know it, you are functioning in its lack. And if you are functioning in the lack of truth, there is an adjustment when you begin to know. So there must always be one kind of pain or another, if only that which we call work. Hard work.

Then perhaps we will begin to distinguish between what is hard work and what is pain. I use the word pain to cover those things that one would avoid, as well as those things that are such hard work that they try you past your utmost. One gives results. Right? One is a learning experience, and the other is a waste.

How? Useless pain is the biggest waste. Which pain is useless? The pain that is a distortion. The pain that comes from a lack of truth, that comes from things out of kilter. The pain which comes from a disorder. That kind of pain as opposed to the pain which comes from being tried beyond your utmost. Eventually, that pain mutates into knowledge. The other pain may end or mutate into something else, but one frequently doesn’t know. So I call it waste even though that may be shortsighted of me.

Of course, I am speaking of it in larger terms that just of us as writers. As writers we share a double knowledge that is both tortured and triumphant. Right? A knowledge that is both hard to bear and yet is our salvation. In a sense, our writing is only a vehicle or a tool. Is that not so? Art is purpose. One’s art and purpose in living being the same…

_______
From “I am Black, Woman, and Poet: An Interview with Audre Lorde” by Anita Cornwell in Black Lesbian in White America (Naiad Press, 1983) p. 39.

Filed under: words from women by Amy's Brain Today