Eula Biss raises many fascinating point in her essay "The Pain Scale", but the most fascinating topic that I find is her allusion to hell. "The deepest circle of Dante's Inferno does not burn. It is frozen. In his last glimpse of Hell,... sees Satan upside down through the ice (172)," as I read this line I became quite facinated and intrigued to learn more about what exactly is Dante's Inferno is and how does Biss allude this ideal to her essay about pain. The most that I knew about hell and pain, is about the eternal suffering you receive for not repenting for your sins.
As I looked up Dante's Inferno, the one thing that stuck out to me were the levels of hell. Never in my life did I think of hell as a place that consisted of a level, I always thought hell was just one place crowded with sinners and evil people who are being tortured, laughed at, and abused by demons and devils for their own cruel behaviors on Earth. But then I began to realize, is Biss trying to say that pain is hell? Dante's Inferno has nine levels, each worse then the previous one and some levels are even divided into a sublevel. The essay is divided into a threshold number for pain, with zero being no pain at all, and 10 being an unbearable pain. You have 11 numbers for pain in Biss's essay, but only 9 levels in Dante's Inferno. So if I mix the ideas of this allusion to Biss's essay, 0 pain must be Earth in Dante's Inferno, and 10 in pain must be being the actual Devil.
But the biggest question of all is why hell? How is hell like pain? Then I realized that each just gradually gets worse and sinks you in deeper to a point where you cannot return; you cannot even tell the difference because of how unsure you are of where you are and how you feel. The torment is so great that you cannot possibly try to leave behind this torment. Whenever I have a serious pain, that feeling of being stabbed by a knife I recall that I always somehow say "I feel like hell, like I'm in hell!" The funny part is I have never been to hell and I have never been stabbed by a knife (nor do I want to). So why is it that pain and hell always correlate. Of course one does not cause the other; is it an ideal that we all just grow accustommed to. Growing up around a religious point of view, you know what or learn what hell is and what happens there. Torment and pain is what happens in hell, so is it an automatic ideal that pain is hell. Does our cultural assimilation make us view this very idea as one?
But then you have the idea that pain is a natural thing, you cannot live without it, it is a pleasure seeked by some. A pop-cultural example are the guys from Jackass, they entertain themselves with wild, crazy stunts that clearly cause bodily or physical harm. Yet they continue to perform these crazy stunts as if it gives them pleasure. There are also sexual forms of pain that people find pleasurable, this is known as S&M, a very popular pop-singer even sang a song about this art form. Biss may argue that the pain scale for these people is a simple game of how far can you go, or it can be how they just don't feel anything like how her father when he "broke his collarbone it didn't hurt (180)." So could pain actually be bearable and a way that makes you feel alive and adventurous. Or does it have to be only for torture and making your life miserable? Some may argue one, some may argue both. However, pain is a natural human phenomena that can be taken in many several ways.
I like how you point out that hell is an "imaginary" place. There is a section in the text I"d love to return to where Biss discusses the many people who tried to "map" hell, assuming that it was real but having no real access to it excepting their imagination.
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