Monk

We have covered the increase in suicides in Europe, and it seems that this long economic downturn has also had the same effect in America, with suicides now surpassing deaths by car accidents. The modern world is a fantastic achievement, but in it money is like blood - you gotta have it to live.

(Source: LJ - Daily Mail)

“No one kills himself who has never wanted to kill another, or at least wished the death of another.”

-- Wilhelm Stekel

Thus Mr. Alvarez lays out the root of the famous proposition that suicide is violent anger directed inward. And perhaps this inversion is most successful when we realize that our anger is not really about any particular others, as one begins to see that it is oneself that is out of place, that does not belong, that is too weak, too ugly, too tired. How do you kill a country or a culture, the world?

Mr. Alvarez continues to expound on the inherently personal and mysterious nature of suicide.

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Suicide often seems to the outsider a supremely motiveless perversity, performed, as Montesquieu complained, “most unaccountably … in the very bosom of happiness,” and for reasons which seem trivial or even imperceptible. Thus Pavese killed himself at the height of both his creative powers and his public success, using as his excuse an unhappy affair with a dim little American actress whom he had known only briefly. On hearing of his death, her only comment was, “I didn’t know he was so famous.”

There is even a case of an eighteenth-century gentleman who hanged himself out of sheer boredom and good taste, in order to save himself the trouble of putting on and pulling off his clothes.

In other words, a suicide’s excuses are mostly casual. At best they assuage the guilt of the survivors, soothe the tidy-minded and encourage the sociologists in their endless search for convincing categories and theories. [...] The real motives which impel a man to take his own life are elsewhere; they belong to the internal world, devious, contradictory, labyrinthine, and mostly out of sight.

-- A. Alvarez, “The Savage God”

A biography of David Foster Wallace is coming out. I am putting it on my 'wanna read' list - a portrait of the suicidal artist sort of thing. I still have yet to bust my cherry on Wallace's fiction, but the fascination continues to grow strong, with the only problem being that the fascination may be more for the artist and his tortured life than for his art, which itself seems kind of torturous.

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In “Infinite Jest” David Foster Wallace described clinical depression as “the Great White Shark of pain,” “a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it,” a “nausea of the cells and soul,” a sort of “double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency — sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying — are not just unpleasant but literally horrible,” a radical loneliness in which “everything is part of the problem, and there is no solution.”

Such passages underscore the deep, molecular sadness that permeates so much of Wallace’s work and the emotional turmoil he suffered himself, though even in retrospect they do not blunt the terrible shock of his suicide four years ago at 46. In his revealing new biography, “Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story,” D. T. Max gives us a sympathetic appraisal of Wallace’s life and work, tracing the connections between the two, while mapping the wellsprings of his philosophical vision. The book captures the heartbreaking struggle Wallace waged with severe depression throughout his adult life, and his battle not only to write — to capture the frenetic debates in his head on paper — but also to navigate the humdrum routines of daily life, while feeling perched above “a huge black hole without a bottom.”

-- Michiko Kakutani at The New York Times

The economic plight in Europe is so devastating that many people are committing suicide over it. I'm a little surprised that there has not been more political radicalism with circumstances so poor.

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IN ATHENS — Antonis Perris, a musician unemployed for more than two years, was desperate. Perris wrote in an online forum late one night that he had run out of money to buy food and cursed those responsible for the economic crisis in Greece. “I have no solution in front of me,” he typed.

The next morning, Perris took the hand of his ailing 90-year-old mother. They climbed to the roof of their apartment building and leapt to their death.

[...]

So many people have been killing themselves and leaving behind notes citing financial hardship that European media outlets have a special name for them: “economic suicides.”

-- Ariana Eunjung Cha at The Washington Post

“An act like this is prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art.”

-- Camus

In this extraction from Al Alvarez’s “Savage God”, we are still dealing with the idea that even the best of social theories that seek to explain and resolve suicides cannot really get at the heart of the problem, that it is too central a part of the human condition, the pain that life means for us. As he writes:

Perhaps this is why the more convincing the social theories, the more independent they seem of the material on which they are based. They are superstructures, often elegant and lovingly detailed, but built on simple misery, a terminal inner loneliness which no amount of social engineering will alleviate.

Of course, the problem is worse for some than for others, but everyone presumably has their moments of feeling crushed and abandoned, of feeling that life is a tough game they just were not built to play.

“At some stage of evolution man must have discovered that he can kill not only animals and fellow-men but also himself. It can be assumed that life has never since been the same to him.”

-- Professor Stengel

Yes, and we have been a very emo sort of primate ever since.

And, no, I don’t know who Professor Stengel is, either. This quote was extracted from Mr. Alvarez’s “The Savage God”. Alvarez is arguing against the idea that suicide is a problem of conditions, such as being too isolated from society for instance, but that it is an inextricable part of human nature - not a problem that can be solved. We, each and every one of us, feel the weight and burden of our existential struggle, and sometimes a person decides that he or she no longer wants to bear that struggle. Once we get past the innocence of childhood, that question is always before us: is life worth living? This question itself becomes part of our existential struggle.

I am surprised by how many articles or essays or blog posts I continue to come across on David Foster Wallace, and they seldom fail to intrigue, which is why I follow them, even though I have yet to read any of his works. You might say he is my favorite author of those I have not read.

This one is about his commencement speech that he delivered at Kenyon College in 2005, and which has been adapted into a book titled "This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life". Our writer du jour, Jeremy Lott, tees off on the angle that Wallace spoke about suicide in his speech, which was delivered only three years before he committed suicide himself.


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It’s a morbid interest of mine to see what writerly suicides had to say about ending it before they ended it. “No I don’t have a gun,” sang Kurt Cobain, but it turns out he did.

In the Kenyon speech, Wallace speaks of suicide. It is hardly a coincidence, he said, that most “adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.” (Though when the time came, he personally reached for the noose.)

Wallace used suicide as a pivot, telling the students that the “real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone…”

He didn’t suggest religion as a remedy, but he came close, telling the crowd “there is actually no such thing as atheism” in a practical sense. “Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”

He nudged them further. “The compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles,” he said, “is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.”

Exhibit A: “If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough.”

Exhibit B: “Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.”

Exhibit C: “Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear.”

Exhibit D: “Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.”

-- Jeremy Lott at Patheos.com

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And sometimes it doesn't matter what you worship, I guess. Sometimes suicide is just physical, as life and living day to day just seems to hurt too much: A failure of brain chemistry, a kind of brain cancer that keeps the light out and the darkness in.

"Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair. When it comes, it degrades one's self and ultimately eclipses the capacity to give or receive affection. It is the aloneness within us made manifest, and it destroys not only connection to others but also the ability to be peacefully alone with oneself.

Love, though it is no prophylactic against depression, is what cushions the mind and protects it from itself. Medications and psychotherapy can renew that protection, making it easier to love and be loved, and that is why they work. In good spirits, some love themselves and some love others and some love work and some love God: any of these passions can furnish that vital sense of purpose that is the opposite of depression. Love forsakes us from time to time, and we forsake love. In depression, the meaninglessness of every enterprise and every emotion, the meaninglessness of life itself, becomes self-evident. The only feeling left in this loveless state is insignificance."

-- Andrew Soloman

Our intelligence requires a reason for us to go on from day to day. It's a little scary how hard that can be sometimes. You have to sort of pump yourself up for life. In my own case, for instance, I usually think that literature is enough for me, so long as I continue to have the sense and wit and comfort to read and write it, but there are times when all the words seem as lifeless on the page as rotting bones in the grave, and then I am horrified to think that I could have ever believed this could be the passion of my life - what a pathetic joke! Fortunately, this has never lasted more than a few days, and I just do more chores, maybe go out on walks, and spend more quality time with my pets, with pets also being a source of love-energy for me, and I write my way through the mood, describing it and wondering what I am going to do with myself, if anything. Like I said, I always come out of it, but when you are in that emotional quicksand, you cannot be certain that you will indeed come back out this time.

“Nature proceeds by blunders; that is its way. It is also ours. So if we have blundered by regarding consciousness as a blunder, why make a fuss over it? Our self-removal from this planet would still be a magnificent move, a feat so luminous it would bedim the sun. What do we have to lose? No evil would attend our departure from this world, and the many evils we have known would go extinct along with us. So why put off what would be the most laudable masterstroke of our existence, and the only one?”

-- Thomas Ligotti, "The Conspiracy Against the Human Race" (2010)

You first, Mr. Ligotti! This can seem like a squicky way to make money: selling people on the idea of killing themselves. But he seems to be a genuine writer, with some real skill and craft in the art. Maybe he is letting his horror fiction bleed into his non-fictional philosophical thought. Still, he can seem as though he is part of the conspiracy he writes of.

I can appreciate the exercise of the suicide option; we can never know where another is at in his struggle and pain. It's just that I suspect suicide is often a tragedy that should have been averted, if only there were the right help and the needed attention.

As much as I can sometimes fancy the idea of suicide, I also cannot help thinking that death will come soon enough, whether one invites it or not. So why not make the most of this weird occurrence and fantastic accident that is our life, while we have it, this wondrous dream born out of nothingness? It will not be very long before we have no choice but to let go of life and fall back into that empty and utterly dreamless nothingness.