Psychology | Anti-suicide note

A suicide note in reverse.

Tom X Hart
Jul 28, 2017 · 14 min read

I saw my body swinging from a noose behind the bathroom door, or lying under a tree with wrists slit.

The latter image came in my early twenties; it was — accordingly for a younger person — romantic, my body was bathed in a very pleasing honey light, and all was preternaturally peaceful.

Would this be so? Of course not. Depart from romantic idealisation and consider the butcher’s mechanics required to sever an artery alone, and afraid.

My latter fantasy was a colder, harder death. I was living alone in London, a recent arrival. The bathroom door was visible from my bed.

I could see my body there, a few feet away.

This image had the dark heft that comes with age.

There is no rational thought process that I can relate as to why I did not elaborate these vivid images into a well tuned fantasy, and from perfected fantasy into concrete plan.

I am quite a lazy, physically cowardly, and impractical person. These are considerable bars to advancing towards a suicide.

But if anything dissuaded me it was doubt, and its attendant openness.

Doubt. It sounds negative, and most people probably think that negativity is the last quality a suicidal person needs.

Doubt is exactly what they need.

Online forums occasionally see posts from people who claim to be suicidal.

Those of good will take these posts seriously. They can do no other. The person at the other end of the keyboard may be larking about, or steel serious about suicide.

We are not willing to risk the former when it may be the latter.

Avatars present reasons to live: They say that the situation will get better; they say that the person threatening suicide should consider the wonderful aspects of the world, such as puppies; they remind them — this is a crude and dirty blackmail— about the pain they will cause to others by suicide; and, they — very sensibly — advise the person to speak to somebody else about how they are feeling, preferably a medical professional.

The assumption generally seems to be that reasoning a person out of suicide is like talking them out of following a football team, a religion, or political party.

This is a misconception because one is dealing with — as in the case of football, religion, and politics — a person’s desires and emotions, not their intellect.

One may make a reasonable case all day long that Chelsea is a poor team, Sikhism a misguided religion, and the Conservative government bad for the country; but, however brilliant your dialectic, it will make no progress if a person’s heart lies where it lies.

The difficulty here is not so much in talking a person out of suicide as the idea that the solution is to talk them into a life-affirming world view.

But, as Milton said, “The mind is its own place and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”

A puppy. What could more adorable than a puppy? So soft. So cute. Look at the way his ears bounce when he runs! Look at him gambolling with the other pups! Adorable!

A puppy. What could be sadder than a puppy? He’s born to die and doesn’t even know it. The bigger puppies bully him. They bite his ears. He can’t fight back. He’s not the alpha dog. He only licks my hand because I have food. If I died he’d chew my face off for dinner.

And so, through a glass darkly, we can see any event, person, or object in the world as we wish to see it at that moment.

What is also frustrating is that although we are aware of the relativity of views, we cannot simply change our views at will.

Strangely, it is only when we give into the worldview that predominates in that moment that it can transmute into a new worldview.

But when we see the world darkly the most sincere declarations of love can be interpreted as empty and malicious.

Quite often, of course, those declarations of love are empty and malicious.

But not always.

That is the problem, especially for the depressed; they are usually very intelligent. They see through the social game better than most.

What they see horrifies them, and often other people cannot see it. They are, perhaps, better at maintaining the illusions that make human social life possible.

This means that the depressed are at once trapped with an acute and accurate analysis of the world that is at the same time denied by people around them.

“What do you mean nobody likes you? Of course people like you.”

Intelligence also grants the ability to create abstractions that are then taken too seriously — even the most apparently harmless pursuit can become extremely damaging if it is taken too seriously, if we are too sure.

The ability to take the gravest moments in human experience with a deftness that pays due to the situation’s gravity while maintaining a wry detachment is manifested in an ineffable grace.

But to take a situation too seriously for too long while building an elaborate abstraction around it can be to risk fanaticism, or depression.

Suicide is related to how sure we are that current conditions will continue indefinitely.

This is why a diagnosis with a terminal illness may provoke a person who had never contemplated suicide before to attempt the act.

What has changed is that the person is now quite sure that each day will be worse than the next, with the final outcome set to a definite point of months or years.

Bone cancer. This is similar to having toothache — among the worst pains a human can experience — diffused throughout the entire body, with little or no rest-bite save death.

Palliative care may — or may not — alleviate the pain, though reversals in pain levels are always possible, since the human body is whimsical in illness.

But the picture for a patient with a terminal diagnosis is quite surely that each day will become increasingly painful, or at the very least less rich than the day before until experience spools to a drug induced stupor.

Given these conditions, and given that a person can have high confidence the situation can only get worse, suicide’s pathway opens.

What is less well understood is that people with depression or mental distress are in a similar position to the terminal patient; it is that their distress is not visible, and superficially resembles a cussed refusal to play along with society that causes us to forget their position.

Marcus Aurelius counselled, “Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.”

But for the terminal patient quite often the only event that can make the pain pass is death; while the problem for the mentally distressed person is that their very mental state convinces them the emotional pain they are feeling will never, ever pass — except with death.

And so, as with a terminal illness, the path to suicide is opened not so much by the presence of pain, but the burden of certainty.

“The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames.” David Foster Wallace Infinite Jest (1996)

I was reluctant to quote David Foster Wallace. I do not enjoy his fiction, though his essays are superlative.

He strikes me as a man who muffled his punches so far as his intellect went, and suffered for it. His fiction is false to me; it is fiction written by someone trying to be nice, trying to fit in, when their position to those around them is superior in perception and intellect.

Perhaps this is the burden of genius in a democratic society such as America, a man may not be too distinguished.

He must conceal, dissimulate, and identify with the mob — be a regular guy — in order to function within the society.

This condition is quite likely to make one feel despair.

Americans are terribly nice people; frighteningly so, I think.

This is democratic niceness, a welcoming attitude that genuinely beguiles— until the requirement for niceness is filed to rage, which is externalised in a gun conducted blood bath, or internalised as suicide.

It is in his essays that Wallace becomes frank and interesting. This is when he allows himself to dissect others rather than himself.

“Self-contemplation is a curse that makes an old confusion worse…dissection is a virtue when/it operates on other men,” wrote Theodore Roethke.

The novelist dissects his own consciousness in order to create a distorted and exaggerated representation of the world that delights its audience in its peculiar familiarity; its joy is similar to the model village that recreates our world down to the potted plant on a balcony.

This act of self-contemplation combined with a deep knowledge of human affairs can make for a painful existence. This is an existence where the writer is aware of the tragedy embodied in the social world but is powerless to change it, or awaken other people to this condition.

A situation such as this is enough to turn a person to drink or drugs to provide distance from, and control over, the social game.

The suicide is, as Wallace says, like the person trapped in a burning building — they are sure as to what will happen next.

It will be more of the same, and worse, unto the grave.

This is real closed-mindedness.

§

We live in a society that has become a victim of its own success in control.

Science and the state allow us to make the world much more predictable and controllable than ever before. This gives us material comfort, along with the illusion of security while simultaneously creating a strain on us to maintain the control system itself.

Our adherence to even petty regulations is considerable: Stand left on the tube escalators; drive on the left; cut the potatoes that way; Sarah doesn’t eat chocolate biscuits; tax is due April; this band is in, and that band out; apply pressure to the injury; operate the machine between 7.00–17.00 only…

Failure to adhere to the control systems can result in prison or death in the worst cases, and social opprobrium in the more moderate cases.

We become terrified that we may be out of control.

We know we will die, but we do not know when.

Here, amid a society of control, we are out of control.

What a relief to know when we will die; this unknown can be enough to make one consider suicide. We must know and know for sure — we must control the moment, we must know.

But the prospect of total control is as deadening as the fear of being out of control is terrifying. The more we attempt to be sure the less open we become, and the less open we become the more our world ashens.

So run the bulls and bears of the psychic stock market.

One way to feel control is to drink or take drugs. These are excuses from the pressure we feel to control what cannot be controlled.

This what people mean when they say civilisation is built on tobacco, alcohol, and other drugs.

It is not really that these stimulate us to build, but rather that our intoxicants allow us to repress and endure the control necessary to construct civilisation.

We are so very keen to know what happens next, and one can be absolutely sure one knows what happens next only in one situation: death.

§

Love is a dangerous word to write about because its nature is similar to God, whose name — as Jews know well — must be disguised.

Words fix, words create abstractions, words — if you are not very careful — will pin you as surely as a lepidopterist’s needle through a coveted butterfly.

Write about love too much, say the word too much, and you will forget love and be talking about the word, ‘love’.

And then you will wake up one day and wonder, “Where did love go?”

Nevertheless, one can say that for love to be present control must be absent.

This is a difficult trick to manage, for when we love somebody we usually decide that we want the best for them — even that we know what is best for them (by which we mean what is best for us) — and so allowing them to range becomes a nervous strain on us.

The desire to control another’s behaviour is usually self-interested, and there is nothing wrong in that of itself; if we did not act in self-interest we would make no relationships, build no cities, and write no books.

But when our self-interest masquerades as disinterested concern for another, it can turn from the necessary means for connection into a mantrap.

“If you cared you wouldn’t do this.”

“How could you contemplate suicide? How could you do that to your family?”

Such words will probably have the effect of making the person to whom they are addressed redouble the activities undesired by the speaker.

The words come not from a place of love, but a desire to control a person — and so even at the lowest level our human relations replicate the control systems of civilisation, and so destroy love.

We even utter these words after a suicide “How could he do that to his family?” partly to control beyond death, but also in the belief we can control those still alive.

Doubt is the beginning of wisdom.

Doubt is the antithesis to control.

Absence of control is a precondition for love.

The beginning of doubt is division.

§

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Crack-Up, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

Intelligence is not quite what Fitzgerald is describing here; he is more accurately describing thought.

Thought is not simply intelligence — although intelligence is a component of thought — rather it is the existence of an internal dialogue. Hannah Arendt identified this aspect in human life as being important for authentic ethical action, and a preliminary requirement for compassion.

We do not think when we proceed in a linear way through a problem, or adopt an unwavering worldview.

We think when we act like Socrates, when we are in dialogue. This dialogue, if it occurs within us, is in essence the ‘two opposed ideas’ that Fitzgerald writes about.

When we achieve the dialogue we are not simply saying, “This is the right action, and here is the justification.”

Instead, we allow movement for our mind. As we hear the dialogue speak, we develop an ethical dimension to ourselves beyond duty — compassion.

This allows us not merely to argue for what is right, but inhabit two different conceptions of the right.

If I think in this sense, I am in a doubtful state. Socratic dialogues often trail off with no real resolution either way, as is so often the case with real life conversations.

I am also open, moveable — aqueous.

Note that the river and water run through philosophy, literature, and religion.

Heraclitus, among the earliest Greek philosophers, asked us to consider the river that we cannot step into twice.

Marcus Aurelius, as quoted above, tells us that all is change, and no sadness or happiness endures because life is like a river.

John the Baptist brought people down to the Jordan.

The Muslim wudu, ritual washing, makes the adherent ready for prayer.

Ted Hughes quotes the Buddha in his correspondence: “Live like a mighty river.”

When I walk over the Thames, I look at him and know that the more he changes the more he remains the same.

You cannot close Father Thames.

Look at the water! Look at the turmoil, broil, and spume that the human eye can never reduce to measured motion. No sooner does the sun shatter on the wave than it splinters in the cataract.

What we cannot capture about water is why we are compelled to watch it.

This liquid meditation breaks our rigid control patterns. This is the opening that drives us to beaches, yachts, and promenades.

We are looking at openness.

We are looking at free control.

We are looking at a concept I mentioned earlier that would be spoilt if I wrote it again.

You know what I mean.

§

An internal dialogue sounds very fine and noble — but consider what it involves. If I think about anti-Semitism, I must be prepared to allow a ‘Nazi voice’ to dialogue inside me. If I think about Islamism, I must be prepared to dialogue with an ‘Islamic State voice’ inside me.

Although we live in a secular and rational age, when we consider this idea all our superstitions about bodily possession and the persistence of evil spirits return.

This is because these spirit tales contain a certain truth, when we invite these ideas into us we do — in a sense — risk possession.

However, the reward for this risk is the cultivation of reticence. We are not so sure anymore.

And it is very hard indeed to commission great crimes — against ourselves and others — when we are not sure.

Arendt’s point was, in part, that ethical behaviour is not about establishing rules as such, or following particular rules — but rather training humans to live in a state of suspension where it is inconceivable to want to blot out another person. That other person has been integrated into oneself through internalised dialogue, and so to destroy or harm them is to destroy yourself.

She was alert to the way that any ethical system or code — no matter how rational — can become a pretext for great crimes, if it is not grounded in dialogue.

She learned this at the trial of SS officer Adolf Eichmann, who claimed in part that his involvement in the Holocaust stemmed from his particular interpretation of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.

That is to say, a philosophy that embodied the cleanest reasoning could be bent to wicked purposes — if taken in monologue.

The salience here is that the cultivation of doubt is more than merely an ethical stance; it is also a means to live.

To live without being sure that control is possible is excruciating for many people: As discussed above, our need to be sure as to when we will die, and that pain will end, can catalyse a desire to die by our own hand.

Philosophy is often ridiculed as having made no progress. This is because philosophy’s role is not to progress society — whatever that means, anyway — but to cultivate doubt through rigorous thinking.

Religion serves a parallel purpose; its core lies in dissolving the ego in a moment that allows to see that we are not in control, and do not need to be sure.

We are, as they say, in God’s hands. Insha’Allah.

But this cannot be appreciated in words, for religion only functions in this way when we participate in its rituals. These rituals — singing, praying, recitation — are designed to dissolve our ego into a temporary state of oneness with God.

The relief is similar to drugs and alcohol, though without the body cost.

This is why those in religious ecstasy are often said to be drunk on God, and why Alcoholics Anonymous uses the disciplines of religion in its programme.

It is the path to control — always necessary — without being controlled by control.

We are told to be bold. We are told to be confident. We are told to have self-esteem. We are told to be kind. We are told to have compassion. We are told to be good.

Very well.

I say, however, we have nothing without our doubt.

Sources

Aside from my own experiences, this article represents thought from the following: Hannah Arendt, Brad Blanton, RD Laing, CG Jung, David Foster Wallace, Marcus Aurelius, Diogenes of Sinope, Heraclitus, Fritz Pearls, Alan Watts — and, of course, Plato (though it seems silly to credit him).

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