SUICIDE
RANT
A little learning is a dangerous thing. Drink deep or taste not that Pierian
spring. Where shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking deeply
sobers us again,"
I can't remember who said that, probably a romantic poet, they were, after
all, tossers. I remain intoxicated with lips cracked parched unquenchable
dire thirst and must read read read until the earth opens for me or I
dissolve in enthusiastic flames of cremation.
I have three wishes. I had them worked out by the time I was ten or so:
1. Immortality.
b) Eternal youth.
iii) A nice bit of invulnerability so that I don’t end up some freak-show
still living even though I was decapitated in a really unlikely meerkat
mauling. Though being a zombie may be cool. No dress standards,able to
wander up to women unknown to me and bite them!
I decided this well and
truly before I could even form the questions that would sear me for the
rest of my life, before I could pretend with oh such conviction that there
were any actual ANSWERS.
There are the reasons for this desire that I have scraped from the dignity
and pain of my life. And they are not astonishing or even very profound.
And each step each click of understanding a chill wash of almost holy
wonder. Always shadowed by the destroyer, the ruination, the eater of
our lives and the only teacher any of us will ever know: time.
I would like to keep learning, forever. I like learning.
I would like to know the far future, enraptured and in awe of what I cannot
possibly imagine in the present.
I would like to live through ages, (oh ages yet!) and watch suns devour
themselves before me. Watch worlds collide. To have my skin burned by
a supernova, transforming and dying in the ultimate immolation.
What we are is constructed of such a bare and empty portion of the reality
that we can perceive through our hand-slights of reason, mathematics and
machinery.
Even the time that we feel passing us as we wake and sleep and eat and
fuck is unlikely to define anything but a perception evolved; constructed
as a useful evolutionary salient. Our perspective, our mind more miraculous
than anything else on this earth, is a production of an ugly succession
of eliminations. What fools we are. Left to this earth, our minds left
to us, a great reptilian power still swaying what hold and choice - whatever
grip we might have.
But let it continue. Let the illusion persist, and the pain. I want to
live.
" Give me life, give me pain. Give me my… self again."
Tori Amos. Give me her too.
If I had even the least shred of belief in dark and hungry gods…
if I could believe in the existence of Satan rather than having learned
some of the archeological history behind his name... Then perhaps I would
deal with them. Or believe that I did.
It does not matter, for I have no such belief, nor could I ever apply
myself and dissemble in some dark coven of internet idiocy. Not without
the explicit purpose of making fun of them as much as possible as often
as possible.
I have spent some effort
trying to commit suicide. Most of it has been in the depth of dissociative
psychosis, but some of it has been deliberate and thought out.
There are, according to me, four kinds of suicides:
The first suicides I will
discuss I will not dwell on. They are the suicides of the very young,
and the very foolish. They are also a real component of our contemporary
lives. The child or the fool imagines themselves at their own funeral.
The absolute nature of what they do is lost to them, and they go blinded
and innocent before their own bloody hands.
However, I believe that
the most common is as a result of a momentary, even if recurring, definitive
madness of pain.
I think… the despair takes us in sudden gulps and sucks the sanity
from us; the frail bubble that it is bursts for a bloody but succinct,
specifically human succession of moments. Twenty minutes. An hour. Long
enough.
The pain… spears and punctures what we are. Our ecstasy of existence,
the supremacy of our essential drive to live is swept into the wilding
deep by it in savage sudden stabs. The pure violence of it, that something
of this scale can even exist within us fills and covers us until that
is what we ARE.
Terror is the answer, our reeling cramping minds’ answer. A devastating
shudder of fear locks so many into death.
It is not the pain itself. It is that the pain may continue.
It is terror of the pain, you see. That it will not end. That this will
go on. The moment cannot be prolonged, for it is untenable. It must be
ended. The means are visceral, ancient and brutal. Because, in the end,
so are WE.
Probably the rarest of
the four is that of a reasonable, rational suicide. Hannibal, old and
surrounded, finally, by Roman soldiers, taking poison in a final “fuck
you!”
Socrates, perhaps. Yes. A considered death. And ultimately more successful
than he could possibly have imagined. Cleopatra. Kurt Kobain. No I should
not count that here… I think it belongs to one of the other categories.
He had no need to die. The nazi party members. Cheating responsibility;
crawling despicable craven men that they were, it was still something
that could be constructed from reason in the sewer of their minds.
People who are in the last stages of their life and in useless pain, who
wish to die with clean reason and simple inarguable logic. Unless you
count religion in that particular choice, of course. Hang on, I said logic
and reason didn’t I?
This last is perhaps a
combination of the latter two, I suppose. It is when we have fought, and
fought, and fought, throughout our lives. It is when this fight has returned
us, old with years and pain: to a point that we can, finally, recognise.
When it returns us, beaten and old, to the point at which it began. When
we know, in a chill that drops us to our knees - that we have been here
before.
We know the way. We know this suffering, we know it intimately with each
scratch burn and old bruise on our bodies. We stretch out our aching fingers,
recognizing, in extremis, in terminal horror, upon the sharp cutting stones
of the steps of this road our own footsteps.
Some courage is only truly born of ignorance, and it was armed with this
– with this innocent expectation of an eventuality ending in salvation,
in succour - that we walked the road before it led us to its inception.
It is then that exhaustion complements pain and despair. The wanderer,
the bruised and weeping one, succumbs to a fatigue of despair and understanding.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky said that tiredness is a kind of madness. It is here
that his words find form, here that the iron spike of exhaustion finds
its ultimate, deadly purpose.
In this, this last kind
of suicide, is offered a combination of the second and the third kinds.
It is a rational suicide, but it is a madness of pain. In this final act
they join hands. And they kill us.
|
