The Rigors of Dolorimetry

By
J.E. Surez

Quito, October 2014.

Utopia flows without moving, writhing in place as it forever

folds over itself. Cradled by coils smoothly entwined, we
find ourselves nestled in its glistening womb, where the
walls are embossed with words like "Justice", "Safety", and
"Happiness"; and you can taste the oily tang of perfection
in the very air. Like Gasoline.
I uncurl from the foetal position long enough to jot down my
praises for this: our finest -and final- achievement, to
stare in wonder at it, and to wonder how the fuck we have
come to this.
"Viva Utopa."
Having done this, I count my work as finished and begin
retreating back into myself. I am stopped by a taunting wink
from the paper, flutter of a single scrawled line in
whiteness. The pages mock me, remaining in practice
obstinately empty while still teeming with the nightmares of
all unwritten memories. My work is not done, no. Nor am I
ready to do it, but I reach for the pen nonetheless.
It began, I suppose, with Dolorimetry.
Present since the torturers of time immemorial tried to
gauge their labours, it is only in the past few decades that
this dubious study has been perfected, and its status as a
science validated.
It was a brave undertaking. Were they to read this text,
todays children would probably find the initial taboo
surrounding dolorimetry incomprehensible. After all, it is
moralitys yardstick! Can we even imagine a world where we
do not have the dols steady hand to guide us in matters of
right and wrong? The notion is pointless and terrifying. But
although we are now culturally erudite in pain and
sensation, we must remember that once, not long ago, the
merest look at that discipline was an almost sacrilegious
endeavour.
The problem was that dolorimetry was marred by its
practitioners; its instances coated in furtive cruelty,
science to justify sadism.
Once, I had seen the half-academic twisted smile of the men
behind the sun, a smile that was behind only the sun of a
glaring operating light and hovering above a scalpel as it
sheared, unanesthetized, into screaming fabric. And the
smile nodded slowly, listening. Some consideration is
given... yes, I believe this is 100 dols. We have Agony.
A success in measurement.

2.

Many were they who set out to test the depths of those
physiological hells: the extremes to which the human being
could be brought and still carry back the mangled remains of
her life. In the mad twilight years of WWII, it had been the
pursuit of many forgotten camps and labs, in one continent
as much as the next. But if the Nazis and their allies had
occupied themselves with the measure of pain, it was, sadly,
a work that sputtered and halted under less outwardly brutal
regimes. That is, until the Early Autumn of 2016.
A date painfully cleaved into our collective memory, for the
Early Autumn brought much. So much, in fact, that
achievements in obscure scientific fields were hardly
noticed amidst the nuisances: first-world starvation,
pseudo-biblical floods driven by Mindless Nature in place of
Moralist God, sea-level lands like Bangladesh and Holland
erased; humanity turning to a surge of mad prophets and
cartoonish cult leaders. Even the title we gave it -a
misplaced season- celebrates what the era meant: Cycles
reversed. The faade of order upturned... the climax of
environmental catastrophe and the last great salvo of the
war on drugs. It was easy to miss, but while we were busy
eating each other in the Americas, in Taiwan the first
edition of "The Intensity of Sensation: a Revised
Neurological Application of Dolorimetry" was just being
published.
Following in the wake of that groundbreaking work a whole
new discipline sprouted up; its task nothing less than the
culmination of neurology, phenomenology, and moral theory.
The timing was perfect. The world was nailed to the TV
watching as people smoldered in a coat of burning rubber
tires on the streets of Bogot, meanwhile the scientific
community also shifted its gaze to pain. Given freely by
soldiers and riot police, doctors instead turned their knobs
and dosed a trickle sagely, noting increments; both tribes
unknowingly joined in this Great Endeavour. The
dolorimetrists set about mapping the human psyche and the
matter on which it rested, dissecting to first put a precise
finger on the scale of pain- and then to push onward. To
find those subtle links between sensations, knife edges
whereat pleasure became pain, or the mental became physical.
Unexpectedly, it became apparent that this strange 21st
Century science was fulfilling an unspoken necessity. Always
entranced, at that time entranced by the live feed of the
first masscres in china as population control took off, we
were like children confused by death. Well, the void beyond
life remains unknown to the unfortunate who must answer, so
she lies. It doesnt mater. A lie is enough, for we must
have comfort. Some sort of processing mechanism for horror,
even if it turn is only more horror.

3.

In retrospect, it seems obvious. We had shed the morality of

our fathers religions, whatever they were, but somehow still
bore their ingrained sense of shame, and now uphill slung
heavy buckets of guilt that would salt the ground where
drops spilled. We had the age of pop culture and prohibition
upon us, where our lust for sensation was more than our good
friends K and H could sate, and our thirst for death more
than Mexico and Gaza combined could quench. I remember
sitting, poised, ready for that blinding light that would
issue from our screens to desensitize those that it did not
strike mad, and leave still others enlightened.
It was not far from what happened.
That summer, when Autumn and the cold came early, culture
finally overflowed. And of those of us that were no longer
in civilizations small container? The millions, left
swirling outside in a mass of lives unreal; abandoned by our
three idle guardians- norm, law, and consensus reality. Only
madness could remain, to speed towards the threshold of the
last truth left to dismantle, beyond which we all become
fiction. We did not find ourselves lost because of politics
or world conflict; it was simply suffering that dumbfounded
us. Suffering, so we searched for reprieve in the study of
it; for the leap from understanding something to nullifying
all its properties is a small one.
We would study and Reduce the horror, Reduce it to ciphers
and statistics. For to Reduce is to Transcend.
And so, the project of dolorimetry became global.
We thought of the DOL: a unit of pain, the brains response
to electrical stimulation.
We turned emotions into numbered things to comfort that
modern mind that loves notched poles. We took up its lust
for the absolute. We took up its dream, to remake this place
in the image of a philosophers picture-book Virginal
Reality, immutable and everlasting. And we heard its mantra:
so set you mind at ease, for the Truth is Simple and One.
The significance of the Dol was not merely that Pain could
now be known through the rigorous scriptures of the god of
science, but most of all that it could now be quantified.
And I reel.
A hammer of disease and rank saliva swats me away from the
pages over which I am hunched, and the drained face I stare
into leans in close to peer at my work. The sickly breath is
the scent of death biding its time, but the eyes are bright
and the expression inscrutable. Fortunately, it observes my

4.
bizarre performance -writing in a place such as this- only
for a moment before loping off.
Resumed narration eludes me, for my eyes insist on wandering
up at that face, it and those thousands it is
interchangeable with. I waver between the pages and the
people, the past and the present. And while the ones reflect
my downward gaze and promise truth if I consent to fill
them, the others are, I think, more honest, having no truth
to offer, only reality.
They are this Perfect Place as it is: built by people, from
people. A many-faceted maze of bodies that shifts and
rearranges. In their stillness or their pacing, they betray
nothing but resignation, until occasionally, something else
crawls across them almost too quick to be seen. Emotion that
scuttles out of an open mouth, grins, and disappears into a
nostril, remaining nameless. Was it Fear? Anger? Corner of a
cynical smile? Maybe it was never there at all.
I am now at odds to say which of the expressions that I read
-indistinctly- in the surfaces of insensate objects and
human beings are actually there. I rub my eyes and shy away
from the scene at hand. This madness -undoubtedly one of a
methodical sort- should be confined to the pages.
In context, though, whether or not I am deluded matters not
at all, for Utopia has already been given its simple answer.
Not only does this scene, this world, have no more truth to
give, it has no use for it either. Those bodies -standing
there, contemplating lives they are somehow conscious of but
can do nothing to end- would they benefit from answers? Just
a tonic of words, useless words that would soon join the
voices, but do nothing to sooth them.
No, it is only I who craves that panacea.
And I reel.
So pain could be counted?
Then was any one unit of it interchangeable with any other,
no matter the subject, the quality, the cause? Then does it
matter?
Could the inflicting of pain even be considered right or
wrong?
If even thinking about dolorimetry once caused a thorn of
discomfort to prickle our sides, then I think the distress
provoked lay not in the thought of systematic wanton
torture; but in the notion that pain, so bright and terrible
and soaked deep in bloody emotions; could become two or
three digits.

5.

But the trajectory of progress is straight, its momentum

unstoppable.
Finally, the doloriometrists concluded that there really was
only one sensation: from excruciating ache through numbess
all the way to unbearable orgasm, the sensation was felt to
different degrees or in different directions, but it was in
essence, and in practice, the same.
And seeing as how the discipline had begun as the study of
pain, well then, that was how it stayed. There was no new
term for this ubiquitous sensation; never mind the myriad
ways it was experienced, or that it coloured every instant
in shades of misery and bliss. No, it was simply Pain:
positive pain or negative pain, but pain nonetheless.
One precious DOl after another we measured the force needed
to make our neurons tense and burst, and one precious dol
after another, we realised that by picking at our brains we
also dug at something deeper. So one DOL was one unit of
pain; was it also one unit of being?
When science confirmed -or dictated, it was hard to know
which- that the status quo of the human being was to suffer;
then that idea could do no more than become Real. Ratified,
the theory turned to Truth and became that long sought-after
simple answer that would deliver us from horror. And yet, in
our hedonism we had spent the last century making
masterpieces of experience... was that only for it to be
revealed to us that those were in fact masterpieces in pain?
Was that what we all along had been chasing? But I thought
it was death.
This morning a mirage Piet lay before me, roles transformed
so now tormentor, not mother, wept upon the slack body. He
eased his hand from the lash -now the shock-button- and with
it cradled his victims head and wept, letting tears fall
into the others open mouth. Perhaps compassion is made
worthless by guilt, yes; but it is there nonetheless, and if
it ever was beautiful, it remains so.
Sense, laden with meaning sprinkled with inexplicable
humanity... all this, it cannot be the same as mere degrees
of agony, can it? It seemed real, more so than the quivering
needle reading 0 dols: no emotion, no sensation.
I deny again as I once did, before this promised land was
realised, but my surroundings once again steal my attention
and refute my point. It is not easy to deny in this place.
Here, where I am part of the maze unfolding, the living
camouflaged with recent martyrs; where all are united in
indifferent experience.

6.
If he can bring himself to love his victim, it is because
there is little to set them apart. At negative 100 dols,
sensation makes the tortured weep, and at 100 it may make
his captor laugh. But still, he must know as he rocks the
wretches head: in the end they feel the same thing.
With that, our quest to Reduce is almost over. Dolorimetry
had robbed slaughter and injustice of their power to
disturb. Now we could look at death in the face, or under a
microscope; talk to it at the coffee table over pleasentries
and pastries, or on a dissecting table with its skin pinned
and organs exposed. Horror was no more a threat.
However, though science had eased our minds as the world
held hands and plummeted, it had done little to solve our
concrete social problems. But the next step is obvious: if
something can be counted, it can be traded. The
commercialization of suffering was nothing new, for we have
long traded in such goods. Yet those who most reaped the
benefits of the packaging of pain were not the dealers of
suffering we might think. Not defense contractors, gun
makers, purveyors of snuff films, nor even killers for hire;
but courts, prisons, and policemen.
You see, years of life incarcerated had too long served as
the clumsy equivalent for the dol; for they were units of
time used to measure not time, but suffering. It was the
method of the law: to return pain to people who had given it
to others out of turn, but who should decide how much? Some
arbitrary judge, keen on dispenseing what he deemed
righteous holy fire? No. Now human misery was standardised;
its weight in time nothing but a precise mathematical
conversion! Finally, punishment could be proportional and
just.
Take, for example, a bullet through a skull. Give it not to
a jury to invent some absurd span of time. Instead, our
exact doctors can run a computer model simulating the skull
cracking upon impact and the consequent neural response,
appropriately translated in Dols; add to that a projected
amount of potential pleasure (negative pain) lost with
death, calculated taking into a account the victims
lifestyle and age; finally add an approximation of the
mental pain inflicted upon close friends, family, colleagues
and significant others, minus the pain the deceased would
have also inevitably caused them during her remaining years;
and this figure (precise to within 100 dols) would become
the killers sentence, no more, no less.
What a fantastic way of making the punishment fit the crime!
Yes, we could appraise how much an inmate would suffer
through a life behind bars, how much it would hurt to have
ones arm cut off. Even, apparently, what it feels like to
bury ones child.

7.
Behold, I have Reduced my enemy.
Pain has been brought low, castrated, ridden through the
streets and finally enslaved and put to work for its
masters. Now wondrous years dawn. Utopia is erected, and it
is the land of justice, absolute equanimity.
And like any history, this tale finds its end in the
present. The words, though strung together, remain broken
chain links until their string comes back around to meet
itself, tied to a close at the moment of recounting. Now the
narrator overlaps her own utterance, quoting herself even as
she speaks. And so we come to the midst of this maze, these
humans, for they and I are finally the characters of this
story. We are non-agents enacting a role: the aggressor,
then the victim, the delinquent and the martyr.
All of us here are being administered amounts of pain
equivalent to our crimes. Here, we rub, and rub, and scrape
to bloody cleanliness our quilt of shame, stitched upon at
the moment of birth. The convicts, of course, have a hand in
the creative process of their own punishment, working
together with the authorities to design how their quota of
dols shall be inflicted upon them. Most, of course, would
not survive the experience of all their crimes turning
snarling upon them at once, hence the punishment is spread
out over a few months or weeks.
Alternately, a cowardly few sometimes plead to have their
sentence converted into time, and serve some years at a
antiquated jail instead of enduring various types of
therapeutic purgatories.
As for me, here is my torment.
Consulting with my supervisor, I envisioned this futile task
to satisfy the requirements of my sentence. This text will
be burnt before it is ever read. I will wallow in doubt and
regret. Senselessly plough through the ache of my memory,
relive and relive, and each time reach no conclusion but the
cell that now holds me. All this I will go through again -my
hellish childhood and the dark adolescence of the world- and
for what? Nothing. 200 dols off my sentence.
And yet, I am convinced that for all my madness, there is
something other than reassurance through fantasy in all this
rumination and history.
If, with its flood of pain, it would perhaps bring me also
some sniff of understanding. . . well then, with that I
would go, should I say, content, to face the rest of my
disciplining. I believe the next phase consists of intense
physical retribution with evenly spaced doses of mild mental
strain via humiliation.

8.

I hope I shall be more cheerful about it this time.