What pain would you elect to keep you company in the bed of your desire? Climb a cliff face, run an ultramarathon, fast for weeks: at the farthest edge of the present moment soaked in a pain of your choosing, you might touch the hem of transcendence. It will fill you up with its dopamine, its message that the mind has won over the body and its cracked palms, its gangrened fingernails, its toes bent and bleeding from fouetté after fouetté on a lit-up stage. But what of the kind of pain for which there is no cure, that one day chooses you for no discernible reason; that brings you understanding of the differences between chronic, intractable, unyielding? The line between pleasure and pain is sometimes blurred, sometimes clear as a blade in this world of beings which must devour each other to survive: the cricket and the mealworm in the jaws of a frog; the frog in the mouth of a vole. The snake in the grass intent on working out the skin of its own brilliant transformation snatched up by a sharp-shinned raptor— which comes from the same root as rapture: meaning seize, abduct, ravish.