What tortures me? Surprisingly in this life, not a lot of things. Sometimes my body tortures me, (but then who is this me who is not my body?) and sometimes my failures torture me (ditto—who is the me who is not my failures?), failures in writing, in love, in generosity, in courage, in fidelity, in adherence to principles, in having principles. It tortures me that when I was seven I stole the shoes of a dear friend’s barbie doll, and to this day I cannot tell her I took them. It tortures me that I didn’t visit my grandmother more when she was dying or speak to her when she couldn’t speak anymore. Jackhammers torture me and jackasses too, and I am not too thrilled by the shape of my knees, but I guess that’s not really torture. In an imagined life the scale of the world’s violences tortures me a great deal more than it does in this life, which sort of tortures me.

I don’t think there’s such a thing as relative when it comes to severe pain. To me severe suggests the loss of the scale, the singular bubble that pain can form around you, erasing everything else. Comparison stops because there’s nothing left to compare to. Severe pain is almost by definition a kind of isolation, the fading away of the And and the Or.

What would no amount of torture attain? Hm, what does this question mean? Does no amount of torture mean the absence of torture? Then no amount of torture would attain a certain pleasantness. Or blankness? A kind of default, unquestioning autopilot? But if no amount of torture means the most extreme imaginable torture, then the question asks what is safe from torture. Only truth is safe from torture, I imagine. No amount of torture can ever attain truth because facts are not the same as truth. Facts are unhinged bits of data. Truth is something about the world. A person on the edge of fear and pain has nothing to say about the world. The world is lost to them.

What is severe? A hardness, a texture that doesn’t have any give.

And pain is the forgetting of all but one place and one moment. Pain is when your body thinks and your mind shudders. Pain is the warning that will not stop warning.

I didn’t used to believe in mind over matter until I met Master Shin, my brilliant Korean yogic cult leader in Seattle, with the black eyes you could fall into they were so very very dark and deep. He told me that my body is a rock but that my mind is the heat at the center of the earth that melts rocks. And he was right. And then I believed in mind over matter until I moved to Ithaca New York, which was sort of a rock that fell on me and squelched me and I didn’t melt it. Nope. I fled for my life.

I don’t know. To conceive of torturing…I want to say that nobody can conceive of torturing, that it’s something people do, and not something people think about. But I know that’s not true, otherwise that new movie ‘Hostel’ wouldn’t exist, nor the whole field of horror, I suppose, nor Sadism. And then, that’s just physical torture. There are a lot of other ways to torture people that don’t involve the body at all but that can be thought about, planned out. I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.

This is too hard to think about because I don’t know.

Well, maybe the answer to the last two questions is that we cannot reconcile human violence. For all our modernist revolutions, our angst, our resignation to fragmentation, we can’t help believing still in some kind of progress, at least I can’t help believing that there in every place where people are killing people there is a reason that doesn’t have to do with the killing itself, and if the reasons were fixed, the violence would be too. I don’t believe it when I think about it, but I believe it when I turn my mental gaze away.

I do not think that humans are particularly resilient. It’s much easier to stop being human than it is, say, to stop being a mountain. It’s much easier to stop being the sort of human I think I am or seem to be than it is to change the sort of cat a cat is, or the tree a tree. Memory provides certain biological advantages but I think it is a bit like a kudzu tree, growing up over the self, overtaking the self, eventually remaking a self out of the past. Human beings seem to retain everything that touches them, to carry it with them, to be marked by it.

What tortures you??
In this life? In an imagined life?
How relative is severe pain?
What would no amount of torture attain?
What is severe? What is pain?
Do you believe in mind-over-matter?
What is the difference between a person who cannot conceive of torturing and one who can?
Why is it so difficult to think about this?
How can we reconcile human violence?
How resilient are humans?

Text:

The key statutory phrase in the definition of torture is the statement that acts amount to torture if they cause "severe physical or mental pain or suffering." In examining the meaning of a statute, its text must be the starting point.... [The statute] makes plain that the infliction of pain or suffering per se, whether it is physical or mental, is insufficient to amount to torture. Instead, the text provides that pain or suffering must be "severe." The statute does not, however, define the term "severe." "In the absence of such definition, we construe a statutory term in accordance with its ordinary or natural meaning." ... The dictionary defines "severe" as "[u]nsparing in exaction, punishment, or censure" or "[i]nflicting discomfort or pain hard to endure; sharp; afflictive; distressing; violent; extreme; as severe pain, anguish, torture." ... Thus, the adjective "severe" conveys that the pain or suffering must be of such a high level of intensity that the pain is difficult for the subject to endure.

Congress's use of the phrase "severe pain" elsewhere in the United States Code can shed more light on its meaning. ... Significantly, the phrase "severe pain" appears in statutes defining an emergency medical condition for the purpose of providing health benefits. ... These statutes define an emergency condition as one "manifesting itself by acute symptoms of sufficient severity (including severe pain) such that a prudent lay person ... could reasonably expect the absence of immediate medical attention to result in placing the health of the individual ... (i) in serious jeopardy, (ii) serious impairment to bodily functions, or (iii) serious dysfunction of any bodily organ or part." Although these statutes address a substantially different subject from [the anti-torture statute], they are nonetheless helpful for understanding what constitutes severe physical pain. They treat severe pain as an indicator of ailments that are likely to result in permanent and serious physical damage in the absence of immediate medical treatment. Such damage must rise to the level of death, organ failure, or the permanent impairment of a significant bodily function. These statutes suggest that "severe pain," as used in [the anti-torture statute], must rise to a similarly high level -- the level that would ordinarily be associated with a sufficiently serious physical condition or injury such as death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions -- in order to constitute torture.

Literal interpretation:

The text appears in a legal memorandum prepared for the White House several years ago. The text gives an interpretation of part of a law (the "statute") passed by Congress to create criminal penalties for torture. The law's definition of "torture" has five components; the one being discussed is the level of physical suffering required to meet the threshold of "torture."

The text begins by stating that in interpreting a law, the first step is to read the words of the law in question. The law defines torture as the infliction of "severe ... pain or suffering," but does not define what "severe" means. In such a case, the text states that the next step is to interpret the undefined words by looking to their normal meaning. It finds the normal meaning of the word, "severe," by looking it up in a dictionary. The text quotes a definition of "severe" that includes the words, "severe pain" and "torture."

The text then seeks for further clarification of the meaning of "severe pain" by searching for similar language as it is used in other laws. Without saying how many other laws it consulted in this search, the text notes that the phrase, "severe pain" is used in laws that relate to medical care and health benefits. In this context, the words, "severe pain," indicate one of the symptoms of an "emergency medical condition." The first part of the definition cited by the text indicates that "severe pain" occurs when it seems that the person in pain will die, suffer organ failure, or be disabled unless they are given immediate medical help. The text takes this definition of one of the indicators of an emergency medical condition and uses it to help define torture. If, in "substantially different" circumstances, someone would need emergency medical attention, then they might be being tortured. Torture therefore requires someone to be in so much pain that it is as if, "ordinarily," they were dying, having one of their organs destroyed, or being disabled. Any pain that falls below this threshold is not "severe," and thus causing such pain does not, according to the text, trigger the criminal sanctions of the anti-torture law.

Implicitly, the text argues that standards of treatment of persons in US custody abroad may be formulated based on this definition of "severe pain."

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