Pain: it may seem like a word that is not very suitable for the week in which the Italian song celebrates (or the Italian song is celebrated: all jokes and bad thoughts are allowed in this case) and yet the Sanremo festival itself, after some cases of national news and the reflection, ferocious, hasty or painful as the case may be, on the international situation, has brought the word and theme of pain back to the foreground, among many other things.
The word appeared, alongside respect, on a banner displayed against the media near the home of the restaurateur from Sant'Angelo Lodigiano who committed suicide after responding to a review from a customer who complained about the presence of homosexuals and disabled people in the his place, which later turned out to be false.
A few hours later, Roberto Baggio remembered Gigi Riva by combining the words love and pain to underline that they were precisely the ones that united them.
And after a few days, the judges recognized the mitigating factor of the woman's 'pain' for a man who had suffocated his wife with a pillow, killing her, to put an end to which the man had decided to commit murder.
For further information ANSA Agency The word of the week is FACTS (by Massimo Sebastiani) - Indices - Ansa.it (ANSA)
Then came Sanremo: blender, cauldron, bulimic container of anything as well as more or less questionable music depending on one's point of view and taste: and Giovanni Allevi spoke, having returned to playing the piano after two years and an aggressive illness like myeloma, and Daniela Di Maggio, mother of Giogiò Cutolo, the young musician killed in Naples in an argument.
And again, thanks also to the power of the epiphany of pain in the two different choices made by Allevi and Di Maggio to talk about it in public (an epiphany that never seemed like a gratuitous exhibition, rather an appeal: to find gifts and joy even in pain, to not
forget and transform to avoid the repetition of episodes that cannot be dismissed as fatality.
Not to mention the words, the lyrics, the performance of BigMama, an example of pain overcome (perhaps) and in any case reconverted into artistic creation and affirmation.
What exactly is pain?
There are, as they say somewhat rhetorically in these cases, entire libraries on the subject.
And the extension of these libraries depends first of all on two elements: pain is at the same time an individual and universal experience but above all it crosses different regions.
What we know with certainty is that there is a physical component of pain and therefore a physiology of pain: it was a Nobel Prize winner, Sir Charles Sherrington, doctor, neurophysiologist, pathologist and poet, who introduced a term and developed a concept, that of nociception.
Nociceptors are nothing other than pain receptors.
Which is an alarm bell sounded by our body to try to remedy pathological situations of various kinds: myocardial infarction, trauma, colic, so-called headaches and many others.
Pain, as it has been written, signals us of danger and pushes us to seek help.
In essence we are in the presence of communication, from the outside to the inside, from the body to the mind.
And it is no coincidence that physical pain is not the only one: there is a double register, physical and moral which in some increasingly frequent cases is intertwined and which is studied by what is called psychosomatics (and which had its first formulation thanks to a philosopher, not just any one but one of the greatest, one of the founding fathers of modernity, Baruch Spinoza, who in his Ethics speaks of the pain of melancholy).
So physical or mental?
This time the etymology, which is never everything, comes to our aid and actually enriches the reasoning: the Indo-European root of the word pain is dar- or dal- which refers to the idea of engraving, cutting, breaking, cleaving.
In Greek dero means to flay and dolare in Latin means to cut with an axe.
On the other hand, the feeling of being pierced by something when we feel pain is difficult to verbalize, perhaps because, as the Eurythmics sang, no one told us we should feel something like this.
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