ABlog

Stories of suicide are big these days. I happen to be writing one (my novel The Company of Cannibals, about a charismatic performance artist/spiritual leader who ends her own life after asking that her disciples consume her remains); perhaps this helps to account for the fact that I approach ubiquitous stories of suicide bombers as stories of suicide, in addition to their obvious status as tales of dreadful carnage. While the political rhetoric and intense public concern relating to these events mostly swirl around the specter of violence directed against “innocent” citizens, I wonder if we shouldn’t devote more alarm (supposing we have any to spare) to the fact that we are becoming a regular audience for this theater of people destroying (also) themselves. What sort of planet are we living on in a time when blowing oneself to smithereens in an effort to force others to change their behavior has become not freelance lunacy, but a social role? Despite all the “othering” indulged in by the news media (“it’s that fundamentalist Islam, an evil ideology,” “they hate our freedoms”), can we entirely suppress the suspicion that what we are seeing is an image of our species self-destructing, like a body ravaged by an auto-immune disorder?

There are other signs and symptoms, perhaps more closely related than they appear at first glance. It hit me recently that, among my young undergraduate students, the suicide of a friend or acquaintance is not an especially rare phenomenon. I teach at Lang College, with NYU a close neighbor, and when NYU was going through its trauma of clustered student suicides not long ago, I wondered why we’d been luckier. However, a colleague recently reminded me of an incident in which a student leaped to her death from one of the New School dorms in the weeks following 9/11/01. I’d conveniently forgotten; the small, individual horror was so easily overshadowed by a larger, more public trauma. Last semester, a student who was writing a novel about an adolescent who experiences a friend’s suicide remarked to me, in connection with her story, “There’s this idea that it’s romantic to die young.” (It was clearly an idea of which she disapproved, but she thought it influential enough to have to be countered.) Another student wrote a nonfiction piece about young women’s self-destructive tendencies; it featured an incident in which a friend bought a T-shirt inscribed with the message: DIE PRETTY—STAY YOUNG.

Once I begin thinking of examples, they come thick and fast. A little while ago, I had an older student who worked in the Yukon, at a boarding school for Native Alaskan youngsters. One semester, several students committed suicide within a space of time so short it felt like an epidemic. The surviving students and staff must have been terrified at the thought of who might be next.

Obviously, any individual’s suicide owes a lot to personal psychology and local social networks. But in the wake of the endless yammering from the media about the sinister novelty of suicide bombings in Europe, I find myself focused on the larger social dimension. Doesn’t the spectacle of a world in flagrant self-destruct mode give a dangerous push to anyone for whom the choice to end her/his life has ever seemed even fleetingly attractive?

I read the following messages into the actions of those who might be tempted to use any form of suicide—homicidal or not—as a form of political protest:

1. There is no hope; it is not worth living in a world such as this,

2. There is hope, but, as Kafka said, “not for us.” In other words, change isn’t out of the question, but will only come if we are prepared to hold back absolutely nothing.

3. The world holds my life at naught. I resolve to make something of it, and get back control, by performing on myself the ultimate violence, thus depriving the world of the opportunity to make me its object.

On Sunday, in the midst of debilitating heat, Winston and I escaped (?) to the movies. We saw Gus Van Sant’s “Last Days,” inspired by the death of Kurt Cobain. I have to say I sort of loved it, even though I don’t dare recommend it to anyone else. A friend told me she found it awfully tedious, though in its way memorable. In my own case, its appeal was overdetermined by my nostalgia for the Pacific Northwest white boy dead end post beat anomie that Van Sant specializes in, coupled with the thing I have for storytellers with the chutzpah to deny audiences their fix of customary narrative ingredients (rising action/climax/resolution) doled out in the customary proportions.

I know nothing about Kurt Cobain other than that he was a Seattle-based musician who killed himself, an act that aroused an intensely emotional response in a lot of young fans. I didn’t need to know any more than that because the movie presents such a powerful image of a personality in total self-destruct mode. No explanation is necessary, nor could any suffice. Self-destruction is a hermetically sealed environment, with its own airtight logic. (Now I’ve been on Google, and know a little more: Cobain’s music was called “grunge”—oh, yes, that may account for the filthy T-shirt worn, to Winston’s disgust, by Blake, the Cobain-like character; also, Cobain’s band was called Nirvana.)

“Last Days” is visually very beautiful, a homoerotic extravaganza in the lineage of Genet and Mishima, a celebration of and eulogy for gorgeous male flesh on the edge of martyrdom.

As an apparently eminently sane minor character observes, Blake is a “rock ’n roll cliché.” In other words, his suicidal bent exists beyond motivation. Not unlike the suicide bomber, he is enacting a role so thoroughly recognizable, so expected, that it doesn't need accounting for: the artistic soul too fine for the squalid compromises imposed by the world. Of his self-termination, one might say what some wit once said of men and sex: “Women tend to like sex in a context—for men, sex is a context.” For the descendants of Young Werther, ending one’s life is a context. And so it may be, after all, a bit inaccurate to say that Van Sant eschews the expected narrative conventions. The familiar structure of this movie is that of a scene in which a crowd stands beneath a skyscraper, watching someone dangling his or her legs from a high window ledge and yelling, “Jump! Jump!”

A proposition: Suicide is the “logical” reply to a social order whose local rationality equals global madness. If there is [to be] no world, then everything is allowed.

Another proposition: suicide is (always?) an imaginative way of creating meaning for one’s life, not simply terminating it. If, by whatever delusional mechanism, suicide can be positioned as a way of continuing the world, then its allure may become especially potent. (Van Sant’s character Blake sings a song about the journey from death to birth; in my mind, the one off-key image in the film is the one that seems to show Blake’s naked spirit escaping from the husk of his corpse.)

As may or may not be apparent from any of the above, I’m against self-destruction (except that I think every person must have the right to decide the level at which his or her own suffering, physical or mental, has exceeded acceptable bounds). This is, of course, a difficult position to argue, since it’s hard to avoid noticing that a planet in the grip of suicidal ideation is setting a very poor example for its offspring. I offer as just one case in point the following harrowing passage from an article by Philip Geraldi, published in The American Conservative and quoted by Justin Raimundo on Antiwar.com:

The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, has tasked the United States Strategic command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons….Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing—that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack—but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections.

And yet, there are alternative stories out there. While they are not as sexy as even the most pedestrian tales of young white men or young Arab men or young South Asian men doing away with themselves, they do point to the inspiring fact that some of the planet’s least privileged inhabitants are prepared to risk everything—not only their own skins, but their fragile hopes—to defend, quite simply, the possibility of ongoing life. Some instances:

PERU: INDIGENOUS SEIZE OIL COMPANY
On July 8, some 300 Shipiba Coniba indigenous people from the community of Canán de Cachiaco (or Cashiyacu) entered the Maquillas (or Maquías) camp of Maple Gas Corporation in Ucayali province, in the Peruvian Amazon region of Loreto. Led by 80 Shipiba warriors armed with machetes, spears, and bows and arrows, they proceeded to take control of at least nine of the 27 oil wells on the company’s lot 31-B….Roberth Gimaraes…said the Shipiba seized the camp to protest the environmental, social and cultural damage done to their communities by Maple Gas. Gimaraes said that in recent years an epidemic of stomach infections has affected the Shipiba communities, killing an average of five people a year. The Shipiba believe the stomach infections are caused by the company’s dumping of toxic waste in the Cachiaco river.
--Nicaragua Solidarity Network Weekly News Update, Issue #806, July 10, 2005

ECUADOR: ANTI-DAM ACTIVIST MURDERED
On June 20, the body of Ecuadoran community leader Andres Arroyo Segura was found in the Baba river near the community of Seiba, in Los Ríos province….at the site of a planned hydroelectric dam….Arroyo headed a local committee of campesino organizations which is fighting the dam because it will cause environmental destruction and negatively impact local indigenous and campesino communities. The dam would divert two rivers to serve as irrigation for agribusiness interests.
--Nicaragua Solidarity Network Weekly News Update, Issue #806, July 10, 2005

IN A LOGGING WAR IN MEXICO, FORESTS’ PEASANT DEFENDERS ARE BESIEGED
Zihuatenejo, Mexico, July 12--Felipe Arreaga, a farmer-turned-environmentalist, has been sitting in a cramped, squalid jail here for eight months, charged with murdering the son of his nemesis, a wealthy land-owner who brokered the sale of much of the lumber in the nearby mountains.
Mr. Arreaga, the 56-year-old leader of a peasant antilogging organization, said he believed his real crime was trying to stop the destruction of the forests in his state and stepping on the toes of a local political boss….
Mr. Arreaga shares a 15-by-18 foot cell with 10 other men….He limps from back pain when he walks. Even if the judge frees him, he acknowledges that he, too, may be a target of assassins.
“My life is not so important,” he said, smiling shyly. “For me it’s very important to leave something for those who come after us.”
--New York Times, July 13, 2005

I think of the poem by Osip Mandelstam that says, “We will remember even in the Lethean cold/ that the earth has cost us ten heavens.”

Running Tab

7/23/05: “Maybe there really is some kind of greenhouse effect,” the optician muses as he checks to see if my new glasses are going to stay on my face. “You have to wonder, with all this heat.”

7/05: I’m walking down 7th Avenue in Park Slope on an ordinary day and the normal-seeming thought crosses my mind: good thing I’m pretty old, don’t have to stick around forever. There’ll be an end to watching how much worse it gets from here.