Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.00.1209201150010.23724@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Thinking about suicide *
Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2012 11:51:18 -0400 (EDT)
Thinking about suicide * ( Note: This is not personal; I am not contemplating killing myself; I am contemplating the subject. ) We have all been here; we have all been there. Thinking about suicide is suicidal; already a disruption has occurred. But thought accomplishes nothing; there is always a surplus, something else to be done, something inconceivable, impossible. Suicidal thought organizes around anguish and a kernel; it is haunted thought; it is neither private nor public; it is held close; it is repetition without origin; it is universal; it is thinking through ellipses... featureless little stories. Life is watching life slip away, and the habitus one took for granted. Suicide is accompanied by a life led under erasure, by a lack of attentiveness, by the withdrawal of support. Suicidal tendencies are accompanied by new environmental stresses. It's the personal history, as (re)constructed, that tells itself repeatedly, to the exclusion of everything else. Suicidal thought wants to bring itself to an end. Suicidal thought is accompanied by regrets that are always already without closure; staying alive is being accompanied by a permanent wound. The stories one tells are always obsessive, always degrading, not worth their retelling, not worth a listening; keeping one alive in the midst of these stories is itself suicidal, the suicide of the suicidal. The primal scenes aren't sexual, but everyday, and they occur constantly, coming into decay before they begin: suicide is a condition of the defuge of the narrative. One counts the summers one has left, one lives in the regret of abandonment, just as much as being abandoned. There are no actions in suicide, there are just dark thoughts without end, that ruin and collapse the human project. For the suicidal, time compresses, affect flattens, it is as if living is a matter of tallying integers. Right now, the violent noises in the street drown out every possibility of clarity of thought; the result is a searing of affect that cuts through, an external life that refuses flattening by flattening itself. The suicide never has a choice, and it is not the end of a journey; suicide is the journey itself. To be suicidal is to be among nothing whatsoever; there is no cure because there is no disease, only corroded stories, within which corrosion itself rises to the top. One might speak of the sludge of suicide, its abject nature. The curtain has been drawn down long before the curtain has descended. It is neither in the process of descent, nor a finality, and it is this stickiness, this paste, that is at the heart of suicide. To refuse to listen or view the work of an artist is already the gate through which she steps, as the words, tones, and canvas collapse around her. Such collapse is continuous; like paste, it has no beginning and ending; like paste, it is always in the process of drying. Sooner or later one is exhausted by all of this repetitive symptomology, and that is the suicidal, not the relief of suicide, but suicide itself. Suicide might not be a a death, but a living in the abject of death, the decay and distancing of narratives that once gave meaning; meaning without recognition and affirmation is meaningless; meaning depends on the cauterization and separation of states; the suicidal has no such things; what remains for the suicidal is junk. It's important for the suicidal that the stories are never new, that they're never stories, that they're endless, torn apart like flesh; always whole. The worst thing in the world is one's thinking; the best thing is its release; like a bubble it might go elsewhere and grow. For the suicidal, thought decays into stutter, and his permanent traumas, doomed to repeat, lose their status as emotional leverage; they collapse, creating a floor of debris: one crawls. For the suicidal, a cry for help is already somewhere else: an act, an object with boundaries, a decision. The cry works against suicide, and the suicidal fights that with all her strength, which is failing; the fight is won by being lost, by being within a continual state of being lost. Debris is the condition of unrecognized collapse; the one who kills himself is exhausted or idiotic. The latter is an accident who has not lived or died her suicide; the former is existence itself, always unawake, prepared. Time is on no one's side; time is only a prolongation of the state of suicide; it is never a resolution or denouement. The suicidal never dies; there is no ending for him; what occurs is always before the curtain; the halted curtain is in continuous and soft motion; it is the slow descent of a viscous fluid on an unreadable and violating surface of constantly erased inscription. For the suicidal, to speak is to gag; there is nothing to say; everything is sickly sweet; and uselessness has occupied the remnants of a world beyond recognition. For the suicidal, there is nothing to be said; it is as if the suicide note were written as an object for others, guaranteeing for them, the others, what appears to be an object, a death. But for the suicidal, there is no such thing; it is always and forever a prolongation... ================================================================== * Sandy Baldwin and I are co-moderating the empyre email list for October, on Pain, Suffering, and Death in the Virtual; the above is a meditation on the subject.