'I'm A Man of Constant Sorrow'....

...well you've heard that from Woody Guthrie, from Bob Dylan and any number of blues-based singers.

Actually you could and should go back the original blues singers who mourned what they really knew they'd lost. Sorrow was in the music of the sorrowful in order for them not to succumb to sorrow. Fidelio music from an enslaved people yearning to be free.

...Fear not though that this is to become some freedom rant at this late hour.

On the contrary, I am asking myself whether the ringing poignant phrase would have had half the force if it had been rendered 'pain' not 'sorrow.' It might have been for there was actual physical pain in that suffering and sorrow.

There is a reason why I have been reflecting on the matter, for it is now very nearly seven whole years that I have been in constant physical pain, the result of some significant and necessary medical past events. (Go look them up if interested. The cause though is not the purpose of this late musing.)

It - the pain - does become, in and over time, a bit like that funny clock in the parlour that ticks audibly all the time and then every once in a while lets out a mighty, yet random, great clatter. Sometimes nothing for a week, then days of clatter, clatter, clatter. The unpredictability of that can be so wearing!

When guests to the house fidget we know they are being distracted by the loud ticking. When seen to be leaping from their chairs in some alarm then we inhabitants know that they have heard - in every sense - the clatter. We, as we are so used to the thing, hardly hear it at all relying on the reaction of others to remind us that one day that clock must go!

I am somewhere between host and guest on this pain thing. Sometimes utterly oblivious in any conscious sense and other times all too acutely aware of both the 'tick' and the 'clatter'. Aware too, on reflection, that my particular clock is for staying not going. When it stops then so do I. That is a matter of some sorrow from time to time. So yes, I could write the new blues number 'Man of Constant Pain.' Wouldn't catch on though. I wouldn't even want to buy a copy.

We are taught to 'offer up' our pain and our sorrow to God the Father, as His Son once did in fulfilling His Will. Now there's a thought to put an end to pain and to sorrow.