Suicide

(December 25, 1992)

by David B. Rhaesa

Styron writes of brainstorms and suicides mostly— with a short appendix describing how one may infer the hospital and treatment saved him from the darkness of suicide. Suicide is a trap which many of the broken paths out of the haze leads. The trail of transformation of transcendence constantly brushes the suicidal tendency. The trap is even greater when I recognize months later that suicide is not simply a physical phenomenon. All around us we are told who we should be. If that being does not directly correspond with our self our "I’s" as opposed to our "Me’s" I think as Mind, Self, and Society melts in my soul in a reflexive passageway from Chapel Hill to River City and the music man in me plays a symphony in A-minor on a $25 cardboard box guitar in Saint Louis Missouri round the world from the Sunshine Inn. We constantly are asked to kill parts of our self to marginalize our existence our being to conform with the realities and ideologies of others. The schizoid nature of this culture that condemns suicide on a physical level but encourages almost requires it on a metaphysical one is in and of itself enough to drive one to the brink once a week on bowling night. Darkness Visible is an easy read – two sittings is plenty – and intriguing in its investigation of the relations between biochemical induced madness and suicide. Beyond this the book provides little – but it is thought provoking . . . . . For example, Styron cites Camus’ claim that the question of suicide is the fundamental philosophical question. One may imagine a torment great enough that even the worst theories of intolerant Christianity concerning suicide would seem like blessings. One can as Camus ends his parable imagine Sisyphus happy. Imagination is the key to this phrase. One can imagine Sisyphus daydreaming of other places as he rolls the stone. One can imagine Sisyphus noticing different details with every trip and constantly perfecting the task of stone pushing. Imagination is certainly a tool which can make the depths of hell seem less than the tunnels of torture and doom one finds in his life. But this imagination then should also be able to free one from the tunnels themselves. Perhaps. Unfortunately the imagination has an equal power to build prisons, traps, and torture chambers. If the mind spins in its "brainstorm" in this direction the key which unlocks one’s mental prison cell may open the door into a room of far more horrible torments. Hamlet opined that "for in that sleep of death what dreams may come." He rejected suicide for fear of post-mortem nightmares. But why should one expect post-mortem dreams to differ substantially in horror from the dreams of life. And if post-mortem nightmares are more powerful in their horror might not post-mortem dreams be equally wonderful in their splendor. What is the key to channeling this force, this imagination, which can simultaneously unchain and enslave? Perhaps this is just as central a question for philosophy. If there is hope in Styron’s essay it is in the medical control of biochemical processes. Perhaps the chemical composition of the brain can be regulated so as to retain the creative, imaginative power which lifts the spirits of humanity and restrain the depressive, imaginative force which impels humanity into darkness. I am not educated in the sciences. I do not know if scientific knowledge has reached a point where the horrors of depression can be extracted without sapping the creative juices that makes the hard path of believing in living possible. I am willing, like Styron, to participate in the experiment --for the time being— as a subject rather than as a scientist. Standing at the crossroads, I’m about to lose my mind. Faustian bargains surround me like blue light specials on a snowy December afternoon. Sisyphus rolls by I ask how it is today and he shows me the Buddha in his stone. Imagine finding Quality in your pet rock. As you roll it up a hillside named Eternity somewhere west of Denver. I have read Haller’s Diaries of the Steppenwolf within us all, the House of Mirrors that is our soul, and I understand that suicide physically or mentally is not an answer. Somewhere amidst the darkness each lonesome traveler may find a path a secret pathway that twists reality like turnip stew makes the phrase on earth as it is in heaven meaningful --not just some words recited on the way to the Sunday Afternoon Football ritual. The path to bliss and the path to death run side by side for much of the route. It is all too easy to confuse one path with another. Whether it was Fate or just the Luck of the Draw that leaves me here still among the living to share these words I can’t be sure. I guess it doesn’t really matter anyway.