Pio's Proverb 135: SUICIDE: Questions and Answers

My Dear Readers,

I have invited Benjamin Bourlier, Composer, Musician and Philosopher to a sit-down discussion on suicide so that many who are tempted in this way will hear some wisdom from this young man who has dealth with this issue from many perspectives and knows first hand the mechanisms of the mind that occur in people who are tempted to suicide.  I believe you will soon see that he is not only an expert in this field but also has a great compassion for those who are so tempted to suicide. He hopes and prays that many will be helped by his words.  My own prayer is that those so tempted will trust in God and not give into the tricks of the evil one who wishes to destroy people who are made in the image and likeness of God.  All those so tempted should also ready my Pio's Proverb 132: "How beautiful are you?"  You are precious. You are beautiful because God willed you into being, and God is Beautiful. He wants you to live and live to the fullest. St. Iraneus said: "The Glory of God is a mad or woman fully alive!"  Please stay "alive" for God, for yourself, and for your family and for your future family. If you have even one child, you will produce 25 ato 50 thousand people from now to the end of time. So, to kill any person is to kill 50 thousand future persons as well.

I will be making some comments during this session in  [brackets] as Pio's comments like a dialogue to Benjamin and you.

Here is Benamin Bourlier Wisdom as he answers questions I have asked him and more:

Peace and love, Pio Peter Zammit

Ben: On Suicide (for “Pio's Proverbs”)

            “Bottled up for days

in great sweat of being, seeking

to bind in speed – petere – desire,

to construct knowing back to image and

God's face behind it turned as mine

now is to blackness image shows

herself, desire the light

speed & motion alone are, love's

blackness arrived at going backwards the rate

reason hath – and art her beauty God the Truth”

- Charles Olson

Ben: Pio has again invited me [Benjamin Bourlier, 24, composer/pianist/writer] to compose a post as an extension of a conversation we had, or are having,  concerning the question of suicide. Pio was asking me a series of questions attempting to gain an understanding of the experience of suicidal thinking, of the desire – or as he called it, “temptation” – to die, which he explained is a desire he's never had, and which I admitted I've had (for better or worse) many times, as recent as a few months ago, and he suggested I write a post in the form of a question and answer, a format he believes reveals more of what's “in the heart”. Some of these questions are ones he asked me directly, some are ones I might expect him to ask, but all are questions someone who is considering suicide will likely confront in some way or another, I think it's safe to say.

Q: What is suicide? What is suicidal thinking? Why is there even the temptation of suicide?

A: My simplest answer, which is of course biased in its language re: my role as a creative artist but I think generally true: suicide is a poverty of the imagination.

[Pio's comment: If you read my "Pio's Proverb #162: "Imagination: How our's mirrors God's" aa well as read Benjamin's many comments on this particular blog, then you will see the depth of Benjamin's definition of suicide as: "suicide is a poverty of imagination" - as an bad use of imagination or a poor use of imagination since suicidal thinking is a separation of ourselves from all the possibilities of our own personal good and the good of the universe as a whole as well as the Goodness of God who put us here to "imagine more beautifully"! -- to see and "image" our being more beautifully.]

Ben: To my mind, suicidal thinking is the process of the imagination exhausting itself to the point of ruin, to the point of being incapable of at all conceiving of living consequence, of the most fundamental continuity (this can be within, without, by no means necessarily private or public etc). You'll notice many deaths conventionally/legally considered suicides aren't exactly suicides-as-such under this definition – many euthanasia scenarios, for example, the reasoning often being so much simpler and commonsensical (it is easier to understand, at least, why a ninety-year old patient dying slowly of terminal cancer may want to die peacefully than it is understanding why a seemingly healthy, promising fifteen year old may want to). Because, the truth is, when we bring up suicide, I think what we're really most disturbed and challenged by is this latter case, the suicide-via-depression, or suicide as the result of some outwardly inscrutable inner logic. Depression and this exhaustion of the imagination are perhaps synonymous this way. I don't accept that suicide can be called a “temptation”, having lived through depressive suicidal episodes, though in the case of familiar euthanasia scenarios the option becomes more basically tempting, simpler on account of the inevitability of an otherwise cumbersome death. Suicidal thinking while clinically depressed is very different, far more existentially exhaustive, where the reality of suicide is the reality of the imagination's fragility, its countered responsibility to articulate the world and overwhelmingly probable failure to do so, worn at the “rate reason hath”.

[Pio's comments: euthanasia be it at age 90 with a patient of terminal cancer is still suicide with just different reasons. But the result is the same: volutary termination of life before natural death. I believe that at age 14 or 90, this imagination of dying and carrying out is a temptation to escape some form of suffering that seems or is imagined is a greater suffering than the death imposed on oneself. Both in self-inflicted suicide or by a doctor inflicted it upon oneself, the result is the same: to escape where death is imagined the less of two evils. In both instances of these forms of suicide, the temptation is real. The imagination that present this escape could be not only from the self...but the fact is that Satan does have great access to our imagination. He has no access to our will or actions as such. He can only suggest pictures or thoughts to our mind that cause our emotions to awake. Suicide is an emotional reaction to these imagination. I deeply believe that suicide is very oftern suggested by the evil one because he knows this is a sin that does not have time to repent of...But only God knows if such an act is truly a willed and free act. Still the evil one will still try to see if he wins the soul or not. Bishop Sheen said it most succinctly: "At the end of the road of life, no matter what road we take, at the end of our life we will see one of two faces: Jesus' or satan's. Both will say the same thing to us: "Mine! Mine!"  Suicide for whatever the reasons has the same result: our seeng one of two faces and being eternally possessed by a loving Savior or a hateful devil. Suicide stacks the odds in favor of the devil winning.]

Q: Why wouldn't you consider it a “temptation”? Doesn't it wipe away all of one's earthly problems? Isn't it a tempting solution?

Ben: A: It is a solution only in the most impoverished sense. If you can recall ever being very deeply stumped by a question on a test, not because you simply didn't remember the answer but because the very logic of the question seemed inscrutable and absurd, where you get that sinking, cold-sweat feeling of isolation in your inability to proceed as classmates hustle through briskly all around you: the experience of depression and of suicidal thinking generally is much nearer, I think, to this event than to the event of a calculated solution. It is the kind of logic one invents for one's self in the event of absurdity.

[Pio's comment: Benjamin's insight in his analogy of isolation in one inability to proceeds as classmates hustle through briskly all around you is worth noting. It is a flow of insight into the mind that is faced with a world that is perceived as absurd and inscrutable which causes a depression that leads to the image of suicide...that is opting out of the test by leaving the testing room. But this imagination is a false one; and if one acts on a false belief (a delusion), then the results can be castastrophic for the person in that is death is eternally final. Such a extreme decision needs to only be pre-anethezied by surrounding that person with a loving family. When one of my three sons was tempted to suicide very seriously, I took him to Europe to show him to see the larger picture. He noticed and told me he never knew there were so many people in the world. When later - after much fatherly love and attention - he had to go on business to another state in the US after we came home. He told me later that he again was very tempted to sucide when feeling "ISOLATED."...I asked him, "How did you handle that temptation, son; and he answered deeply and heartfully: "I would never leave my family." So, the only way to help suicidal person, I believe, is to give them large anti-suicidal doses of great family love.]

Ben: I shared a quote from St. Augustine that had struck me with Pio: “My heart is much busied...amid this poverty of my life”. In Augustine's terms, suicidal thought is a heart made idle, un-busied, collapsed irretrievably. The outer poverty of one's life, as I read it, is a kind of blessing, a struggle in the classical cynic sense of redemptive, valuable experience. It is a simplicity or uniformity of obstacles. The capacity of the “heart”, to triumph over the obstacles of life without is probably the most powerfully redemptive feature of consciousness, the will to not only persevere but project one's inner light, to heal – the quote struck me as an ecstatic projection this way. One can think of the familiar stories of bravery and perseverance in the face of all kinds of worldly struggle, of people finding meaning in misfortune. The un-busied heart, though, void of its ability to form this meaning, standing emptily against the weight of indifferent worldly struggles, is quite literally the worst condition, it seems to me. There are so many times in life where all one has is the resilience of one's inner will, where one is totally, empirically lost without it. The depressive truly stands alone, in their vulnerability to any and all trauma. 

[Pio's comment: Isolation seems to be a recurring theme as Benjamin tries to share his insights with us. There is a part of the brain that detaches us from others as separate from others. If this part is stimulated too much, then this separation becomes "isolation from others" which becomes all the more acute. That part is called: "pareital lobe"     Also, the "limbic system" - is the most primitive part of our brain - the "fight or flight" mechanism and here is harbored anger, fear, resentment and depression. Neuro-theologians (MD's) say that prayer turns off the limbic system for our good.]   

Q: What is the benefit of suicide; what is the person looking to get out of it? And what about the soul? It seems to me, if someone didn't believe in an afterlife, they would want to stay alive as long as they could, because their body is their only vessel of awareness. But even if they did believe in an afterlife, they would they not want to treat life with as much respect as possible in preparation for the afterlife?

Ben: A: Well, honestly I don't know how to accept the categories of “body” and “soul”, especially in specifically religious terms. Do I believe in an afterlife? Well, no, not in the conventional religious sense of a sustain of my ego-identity beyond my body somehow, no, that doesn't make sense to me; my identity is so wholly dependent on my body; one might think of someone who, say, loses an arm at a young age, entirely the same in every other respect, but whose experience and emergent identity thereafter is significantly altered, so that if we imagine them sustained on into an afterlife without their body, we still have to conceive of them being shaped by their life with only one arm – they enter the afterlife differently, the same as any differentiated identity, organized in Dantean strata or however. Well, if that loss of the arm's so significant (and it is), what about this loss of the body itself? How can we conceive of the identity at all, it's been so radicalized? I don't think we can, not in the conventional sense. But neither is death the end. Which I say as much commonsensically as mystically. It simply isn't. I might say to myself that I'm presently experiencing the pinnacle of awareness the otherwise unconscious materials of my body can hope to achieve as it were, the peak of this wave of material sentience I enjoy as a human. I'm the arrival, continuously, of materials into the vessel of consciousness. But this arrival is something I'm mostly unconscious of, which I can't discretize in terms of my unitary, cyclic perception of reality. It's happening all around, constantly, the reformation of materials into what I recognize as other human beings and reality generally. My empathy with the species is an empathy, quite literally, with the all, with the continuously associative connectivity of material into and out of conscious states capable of specialized empathy, which is itself dependent on the transience and fragility of my ego. Scientifically speaking, material presently constituting me will be reconfigured into other conscious states, even within my lifetime.

Empathy is a radical experience, I understand this more and more every day. It is not mere social awareness or embracing one's responsibility to others etc, but insight into this continuous extension of consciousness, something one might very well access alone; thoughts that are new and fresh in me I understand now to be thoughts that must not have been any more evident in the world than that I would realize them just now, which I see has to be the similarly buried experience of other humans experiencing these thoughts and then struggling to articulate them in the world so that they would be any more evident than they are, for me, and in a sense failing to. I catch myself now, when I have a flicker of a new thought, gaining an insight into the sadness of this thought's ex materia human history, of the others for whom this thought was privatized because of its being no more evident in the world than that I thought of it just then. Language has made it thus.

My point in this re: suicide is that suicide is simply not the end. It's a strange irony to me that so much of the attitude of religious ritual is supposedly a process of coming to terms with death, an acceptance of death – in all religions, though one surely grieves the loss of loved ones, there are rituals of burial and of mourning and of acceptance – but yet somehow suicide is less acceptable, even a mortal sin. On a particular basis it may or may not be tragic, but it's not the end it's made out to be. It's the ego acting on itself, the thought the material uptake eventually has of limiting itself.

And again, we see how this confusion is essentially that of language itself; it should be clear that the Catholic notion of a judgmental afterlife where one's suicide because of its being a sin would limit access to paradise etc is something I can't accept – believing in such an afterlife at all, where your earthly life is at all relevant or even known, is already so inconceivable to me, why not believe in an afterlife you simply gain access to after-life, regardless of how you died?

[Pio's comment: quoting Ben above he says: "it should be clear that the Catholic notion of a judgmental afterlife where one's suicide because of its being a sin would limit access to paradise etc is something I can't accept -- believing in such an afterlife at all, where your eathly life is at all relevant or even known, is already so inconceivable to me, why not believe in an afterlife you simply gain access to after-life, regardless of how you died?" Please accept these loving comments, Ben, as offered for your consideration specifially. First of all, the "Catholic notion of a judgmental afterlife where one's suicide because of its being sin would limit access to paradise" is not what the Catholic church teaches. We must look at the notion of personal sin as "objective sin" and "subjective sin" to understand what the  Catholic Church fully teaches as to suicide. Objectively, taking anyone's life is against the Fifth Commandment: "Thou shalt not kill." Therefore, to kill an innocent person who is not threatening your own life would be an objective sin against the Fifth Commantment. However, suicide is hardly able to be very objective because the person is so destraught, so emotionally exhausted, so depressed, so stressed that objectivity is just not possible. Therefore, a suicidal person in commiting the act of suicide is not really committing a human act --"actus humanus". Rather the person who commits suicide is only commiting an act of a human -- actus hominis".  Suicide is not a fully human act because at that distressful moment, the person is not fully free to choose between right and wrong. Yes, he does know there is something not right about suicide; but to say he or she has committed a mortal sin that would exclude that person from paradise, would not be Catholic theology at all. It would be bad catechesis and not what the Church teaches. The Catholic church allows the Christian Mass and Christian burial in holy ground of a person who has committed suicide because the Catholic Church does not judge that person's action as objectively sinfull but more subjectively sinful if sinful at all. Sin presupposed a fee act of the will. A suicidal person does not have much control over his faculties of the will because emotion and depression or stress preclude such freedom. Secondly, Ben's comment "why not believe in an after life you gain access to after-life, regardless of how you died?"

Well, let us consider three examples of "how you die". 1) say a criminal kills a classroom full of kids and then -- when confronted by the police -- evades capture by killing himself (much like Hitler did to evade the Russian army occupying Berlin). Well, this suicide was not done to escape punishment and may be more responsible than a teen under depression. Still even in this case, we cannot be sure that person went to hell. Only God knows all the facts; but the point is this, how that man died does matter at to his access to the afterlife. He will have access to the afterlife no matter what. But in what state of happiness or not will he enjoy is another matter. 2) Say, a person in a holding up a bank and killing the manager, then gets killed in a hail of bullets, how this man dies does have a bearing on his afterlife. Should he have access to paradise? He will have an afterlife, because his soul will not be taken out of existence by God. The soul God gives us is forever. It has a beginning but never an end. 3) Say, a little girl like St. Cecelia get three blows from an executioner's ax; and when she was found recently, her body was incorrupt after nearly 17 centuries. Her fingers are placed to signify "three in one" image of the Holy Trinity. She witnessed (was martyred) to the Holy Trinity by her own blood. She lay for three days until she died. Her neck shows a deep gash -- the one that took her life. Now, how Cecilia died does have a very great bearing on how she will access paradise. So, how we die is very important.]

I  can accept the states of being and consciousness attributed to an “afterlife”, it has to be as a “through-life”, as it were, a “supra-life”, something need sentience, a body, and egoic self-awareness to access, but which you access through some epiphanic transcendence that glimpses the transience of the body, the ego, sentience itself. Death, for this experience, cannot be the finite barrier or entrance gate it's taken to be by so many religions. Death does not qualify bliss and agony and universal communion, awareness does. Think of any transformative experience you've had: did your death have anything to do with it? No, empirically it couldn't have. Death is not lived through. You wouldn't have consciously transformed if you hadn't come out on the other side of experience.

Q: What do you mean re: language? How is suicide a matter of language?

A: What comes to mind for me by way of illustration is the issue of animal – versus human – euthanasia. Now, with recent “species-ism” theories like Singer's, we can see how this distinction is an irrational bias to begin with, re: what we as humans see as the discrete hierarchy of life where human interest sits unchallenged at the top of the pyramid in all circumstances; the supposed incomparability of killing, say, a severely, morbidly deformed infant human versus, say, an adult pig, being a biased presupposition, since we know rationally speaking the pig's nervous system is just as much and very likely more capable of registering pain and suffering and awareness of its own murder than the human's – it is by no means necessarily more humane in the pig's case, that is. But overlooking that even, it seems to me the euthanasia performed at everyone's local veterinary clinic every day is justified (as humans reason it to be) only by the insurmountable rift of language. That is, you just can't explain to the abandoned dog that because it's considered an unfriendly breed and hasn't been spayed/neutered etc that it won't be adopted and you see how crowded the shelter is and all so we're very sorry but (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jJZaR_Irxc).

Significantly, the drug used to perform pet euthanasia, generally considered in fact the most humane form of euthanasia (nembutol/pentobarbital), is almost everywhere illegal for humans to obtain for the same purpose (you can evidently get it in Mexico). I read of an eighty-year old man who knew he was going to die a slow, painful, and expensive death from terminal illness having to travel to Mexico and essentially smuggle drugs back home in order to die in peace, while down the block a family dog with a brain tumor (or whatever) is put to sleep with the very same drug, that family convinced of this being  humane. Such is the irrational taboo re: suicide.

I haven't read enough Singer to know if he deals with this, but I feel thinking about suicide in terms of Marxist theory, and vice versa, is something that logically follows from Singer's ethical positions on euthanasia and infanticide, specifically the emphasis on quality of life and one's right to, in a clear-mind, decide whether one's life is worth living. If we look at oppression and exploitation in a global capitalist system, we inevitably encounter problematic issues of quality of life the same as considering the severely deformed infant: a severely, inhumanely oppressed worker in an Apple factory in China has very little prospect for living a fulfilled, quality life. The system of their oppression is so elaborate and inescapable that suicide becomes at once a viable revolutionary and existential response (more and more workers at these factories are in fact committing suicide due to severe exploitation); even though bodily and mentally they may very well have prospects for living a quality life, only by overthrowing the mechanism of their capitalist exploitation would they be able to – which, if we thus engage the complexity of Marxian revolutionary theories (Gramsci's theory of hegemony in particular), we see is impossible without revolt, of which suicide becomes the most immediate and (what's more re: the social whole) possibly the most effective expression.

Which, if we expand it, would open up a discussion of what most people consider the deeply disturbing idea of revolution-as-mass-suicide, the taboo of which we again see is simply irrational. Why, in other words, would this be any more disturbing than the tremendous violence and bloodshed so common to past revolutions? And how is it not a kind of powerful extension of what is otherwise humanity's most sophisticated form of protest, civil disobedience? Suicide under capitalism is a far more complex discussion than it appears, and is mostly skipped over as taboo, in deference to the obligatory life-affirming spirit of so much revolutionary rhetoric.

There are many such taboos and misconceptions. For example, the phrase “someone who is seriously considering suicide”. We all understand this means someone who's perceived to be gravely nearer to executing suicide, someone who might be on what prisons and hospitals call a “suicide watch”. But the truth is, all consideration of suicide is “serious”, we are all gravely implicated. We see the very worth of living come under question, fluidly, the stability of a reassured existence more alarmingly remote, difficult to conjure. Camus famously said the question of suicide is the only primary question in philosophy, as even asking any other suggests we've already answered this first one. We see the seriousness of the subject, the difficulty, isn't only in its solemnity but also what's revealed to be the deeply intense, concentrated intellectual exercise of cross-examining it. The commitment is severe, total, absurd.

Q: Is suicide absurd?

A: You might say absurdity is to suicidal thought what abstraction is to infinity: the conception of the former two, which requires a certain committed awareness, gives way to a profound, disturbing inner experience of the latter two, an experience for which there seems to be, for the person, no apparent end. The failure of language to keep up with the demands of this discussion is in my experience the most absurd and troubling aspect of waking existence in this regard, truly. The thought that experience is limited in this way, and that there exist questions the urgency of which language cannot satisfy, is for me inextricable from suicidal considerations, which makes such a conversation as Pio and I were having and such a post as this extremely delicate, as it is at its core both absurd and infinite (endless).

Q: What causes suicide?

A: Another stigma, the causal. The idea that suicide is something one conceives of as a “solution to life's problems”, a response to those problems, and that it is in this way a “temptation” with a traceable causality, is not generally true. Again, because of language limiting what we can knowably articulate, itself as much a cause as any. Suicidal thought and depression do not necessarily have to do with objective, eventual personal trauma or “life problems” in the ordinary sense, and can have as much to do with (for example) the abstract consideration of the absurd and the infinite, with an existential awareness. Much frustration has come about from well-meaning counselors/therapists/etc overlooking this, as a patient anxiously tries to answer the enormous question “what's wrong?” There are things our minds are just not mechanically set up to think about, yet we find we can direct the light of thought into these dark corners, these blind-spots, with great effort and discipline. All this effort can be in a sense its own trauma, a kind of exhaustive misapplication through which the self-regard necessary to go on living is exhausted out of its relevance. One finds an awareness so far beyond the local needs of the body, those needs become an absurd nuisance. Suicide by self-neglect – rather than self-violence – is thus the most common form, so much so it's often not even seen as such. Many people around you at any given time are likely committing some form of fatal self-neglect, convinced then at least of the limited relevance of their survival.

Q: You've mentioned forms of suicide. Why does suicide take different forms?

A: Aside from obvious opportunity, I don't know. The form of suicide is this absurd creative act. You hear kids jokingly come up with elaborate suicide plans where you really “go out with a bang”, the joke being putting all this effort into something that will ultimately kill you (of course this is less and less a joke in 21^st century America). Wittgenstein often mentioned a perfectly serious philosophical investigation that could be written entirely through jokes  (Why didn't he write it? Alas, he was unfortunately without a sense of humor, the joke goes).  And in this juvenile joking there's a disturbingly real sense of the more elaborate the plan the more worthwhile the act, that this is how the world truly evaluates suicide, as tragic only in its potentially melodramatic banality.

I can tell you from experience that I think of suicide as instantaneous. The point as I see it, being that you are going to die eventually anyway, is that you want to die right now, and so the form should be as near to instantaneous as possible (I won't bother with a list of such forms). Interestingly, these are often construed, in an effort to persuade against them, as more cowardly for their being more instantaneous. Which, as I see it, is nonsense – it's amusing, even, the way prolonged violence is perversely respected in human culture, even in this way. Suicide of any kind requires a kind of concentrated commitment that at least resembles courage; I think it was Hemingway that once defined cowardice as an inability to “suspend functioning of the imagination”, which is perfectly in line with my notion of suicide as a poverty of the imagination (acts of courage near suicide in this suspension, which will inevitably wear out if stressed enough), so that the notion that suicide is cowardly is definitively untrue – I think of Hitler's supposed suicide, for example, which more than anything seems just a way of further sensationalizing his villainy (that he was a coward too), and like so many rhetorical invocations of Hitler just smacks of un-truth, of conceptual fetish – to put it another way, how can we not afford ourselves the right to our own lives, yet claim Hitler denied us the right to his (to punish/kill him how we'd like etc) and was thus a coward?

There is no one form of suicide as there is no one essential suicidal thought, of course. Only an inscrutable result. There are common tendencies and complex patterns, but it's the particulars, the stuff of depression and suicidal thought, the day to day details, that matter most to the person experiencing them. My experience with depression, which began when I was very young, is particular and wedded to my unique experience, but is something I understand to be in many ways common to anyone considering suicide. We want to exaggerate our empathetic relationship by way of consolation, but this often does the exact opposite, trivializing the inner logic of the suicidal person, which – and this is extremely important – is not necessarily irrational. David Foster Wallace notes how people with an inability to overlook the reasonable consideration that their airplane may crash, for reason of logical consistency, are often described as having an “irrational fear of flying” (irrationally described thus, that is). In fact, these people may simply have an inexpedient rationality.

There are aspects of suicidal thought common to or engendered in human experience, and ways in which it is tremendously particular and individuated and craving precise definition; the nausea of waking, conscious life has to do largely with its insistence, its consistency and intensity and tyrannical indifference to subjectivity, and any consolation speaking from beyond this intensity – bland platitudinal warning and argument and moral judgment and so on – appears profoundly, disgustingly irrelevant, because the inner logic is so taught, so thorough in a suicidal state, far more so than we're accustomed to being when we're non-suicidal, as it applies to (truthfully) all waking life, all experience – you can't so much as lift a finger, for reason of the sudden absurdity of doing so (or if you do, the pain of this absurdity is deeply felt). 

Suicide is an existential epiphany. As you stare terribly at the blank you've left on the inscrutable test, you realize this blank to be the most elegant and honest answer imaginable. You accept your inner logic.

Q: If the discussion of suicide is so limited by language and categories, how does one go about talking to someone considering suicide?

A: I think if there's anything to be said to someone considering suicide, it must be said in such a way that contends with the intensity of the experience, while at once relieving it of some of that intensity through empathetic broadening. But can this be done? Do we gauge the success of this simply by the person's not committing suicide? Have we, I mean, genuinely helped them or have we just talked them down from suicide, because suicide is considered a heinous illegality or sin or whatever. In this way speaking to a suicidal person teaches us how perilous speech is generally – it's as much about the taboo of the illegitimacy of conversational language for dealing with the question as it is the taboo of morbidity. We want to know that we are not alone in life but that we are also somehow in control, that we are neither so-alone as to be lost to the suffocating responsibility of selfhood nor so-not-alone as to be indistinguishable and without privacy and sensitivity to self. If you've experienced suicidal thinking you know these twin macro-micro fears are essentially the same, and that there is no essential for/against argument for suicide as it can only be generalized in a way that doesn't speak to the experience (not to everyone's), the way blank or incomplete answers on tests are (illegitimately) generalized as wrong answers.

So I just have to say: I have no set moral stance concerning suicide. I do not think it's necessarily immoral, nor is it necessarily tragic, justifiable, avoidable, painful, painless...Successful suicide results in death, but death, as Wittgenstein says, is not an experience, as it is not lived through. Whether one believes in an afterlife of whatever kind, whether one understands death as finality or transformation or transfiguration or whatever, it is still “not lived through”, it is not framed on either side by waking worldly experience. This is very important: death (whether the result of successful suicide or otherwise) does not ultimately qualify suicidal thought, nor does it anything else. Death conceptually lends a significance to waking life that, yes, it otherwise might not have, but neither is this the only significance it might have.

Which is why when Pio suggested calling this post “Thinking of Suicide? Read this”, I asked it be reconsidered, as that title already suggests an argumentative stance that, to the reader in a suicidal state (at least, it would be for me in that state), is unattractively resolved, convinced. The most productive conversations regarding suicide, for me, have begun with mutual irresolution. Suicidal thought is at once tremendously dynamic and hugely stubborn, fixated, and can be, as Camus says, a following of logic to the point of death – which we forget is essentially the arc of life itself, the logic of transience, of mortality, and so not necessarily at all extraordinary, statistically or conceptually, not necessarily irrational if one broadens the scope beyond mere human concerns. Argumentative stances that appear rigidly convinced can seem by dint of their conviction either irrelevant or, what's worse, tragically vulnerable in their insufficiency.

Q: If you can argue your point on this, as you did in asking to rename the post, isn't that ability itself something to live for, something to flesh out and prolong? Surely there's no exhausting the intellect if it's aware of inexhaustible questions and conversations?

A: One of the worst feelings when suicidal is the awareness someone's conviction that suicide is empirically wrong is itself empirically wrong, that their logic is flawed or that you can easily dismantle it if called on. You don't want to, you don't want to be powerful in this way, not necessarily. You don't want to explain to someone who's convinced you simply don't understand that you do in fact understand, that that's precisely it: this burden of understanding, of awareness, of consciousness itself, and the enveloping burden of going on trying to communicate this consciousness somehow to others, others who are differently conscious and likely unable to receive the articulation as you privately conceived of it.

The truth is, intellect, regardless of the inexhaustibility of the subjects its versed in, is absolutely exhaustible, absurdly, as so often contradicts and is thus a liability to a growing global capitalist system that requires it not only be exhausted but that it be exhausted in an ever-predictable ever-refined way. Everything is increasingly set up against intellectual exercise, it's the plain truth. 

Which is why, ultimately, Camus' most-compelling opening gambit for this very conversation – that there is only one primary philosophical question etc – has, while it continues to impress me as a compelling argumentative strategy, left me unconvinced. We do not necessarily experience life this way. We do not necessarily wake up and consciously make the decision whether to live or die, that is just not the experience. That decision, in either case, is in fact very rarefied and deeply conditional, in ways that don't extend to all parameters of our conscious life. That we go about our day does not necessarily mean we consciously decided sometime before that the day was worth going about, any more than a person who lives with constant, suffocating thoughts of killing themselves (but hasn't yet) has chosen to live. Existentialism as a philosophical-literary tradition has always had, it seems to me, this problem of confronting only a few derivative tiers of absurdity, the tiers that are most attractive and of conventional literary interest. Confrontations with the absurdity of absurdity (of absurdity of absurdity...ad absurdum), because this becomes increasingly implausible and unsexy and disturbing and long long long, are extremely rare – David Foster Wallace's last, unfinished novel, The Pale King, is a sublime example of such a daring confrontation, which was in fact interrupted by Wallace's own suicide, very significantly.

Q: Alright, so if suicide is not necessarily right or wrong, why is it perceived as such a tragedy in society? Why is it widely considered a problem, something to be avoided at all costs?

A: Taboo, basically. The discussion of suicide often ends up just being a discussion of death. And one might say that death, something we collectively, fundamentally fear, and which we thus fetishize as taboo, is profaned in suicide by this seemingly absurd acceptance by another mortal soul supposed to fear death above all else. How can one accept what one is programmed to fear? The thought disturbs us, in its morbidity and perversion of will. But I think, more to the point, it disturbs us inasmuch as it's a failure. It's a failure not only to survive, but a failure to even want to. The urgency of the survival instinct and the prolonged effort of survival are doubly insulted. Here the species is, suffering and subsisting and reproducing, and the suicide seems to subvert the whole project. It offends us.

Q: So then does it offend us more in terms of death or in terms of the individual's decision to die?

A: Well, not only that, but, again the confused language of the categories: to what extent does the person die (even this, given all the religious assumptions of an afterlife, is not certain in conversation) and to what extent did they choose to die? The classic question of free will: alright, so the person kills themselves: to what extent? This seems absurd, but such is the discussion.

We can commonsensically perceive the man wavering on the building ledge is about to jump, not merely fall, but we wonder whether the rescuer next to him speaking calm life affirmations isn't nearer to suicide, figuratively and literally, than we are on the ground – he has, after all, willfully stepped out onto the ledge into the situation, without any expressed desire to die, but has, we think, “come to terms with death” in order to perform his task. All of us, on the ground and the ledge and anywhere, are mortal beings coming ever closer to death, yet we perceive these two up on the ledge as being temporally and conceptually closer to it. I think this is essentially an absurd illusion, the clear Hollywood distinction between the two. The roles of the jumper and rescuer are nowhere near as discrete as Hollywood would have us believe, but are rather continuously, fluidly exchanging. The rescuer might, for example, slip and start to fall, and the jumper might reach down to help them. The jumper might slip accidentally and, because of it being an accident, ask to be saved. One might think of that scene in (I hate to mention this movie, but) Titanic, where some officer compulsively shoots a passenger, and, consumed with shame, promptly shoots himself – the atmosphere of the situation is so urgent, rushed, and “nearer death” that one doesn't perceive this as a suicide in the ordinary sense. There are “just” suicides, where someone kills themselves in order to save another person, which are lamentable but accordingly less troubling than were someone to kill themselves for private reasons. That is, not all suicide is offensive even.

You hear people describe suicide as “selfish” which, again, is just absurd. This reaction is at most a form of “what's in it for me?” – that is, every bit if not more selfish than the act. 

In Bergman's film Winter Light, a man commits suicide, ostensibly shattered by a loss of faith, a sense of cosmic abandonment (he confronts a priest with his fears only to have the priest share his own fears and uncertainties with a terrifying and un-vocational honesty), and thus abandons his pregnant wife. The reality of worldly atrocities instills fear of a godless world of incomprehensible suffering in the man, which instills in the priest an intense urge to share his awareness of the same, which sures the sense of abandonment in the man, who resolves to die, thus tragically abandoning his wife and child.

(here is the clip, beginning after the spoken letter circa four minutes in: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AYi5YW66sA&feature=related)

This circular abandonment, God of the world, the world of its people, the priest of his vocation and faith, the man of his will to live and of his wife, is tautological. There is no point of selfish perversion, rather everything unfolds out of itself. The sentiment of the suicide is one of absurd fatigue. The man hasn't simply ceased to love his wife and child, but has lost touch with (rather, seen beyond) the whole strategem of tautological relationships that enabled meaning at all for him. The relation of the abandonment no longer exists, he is incapable of himself abandoning or being received at all.

Q: What is the benefit of suicide? If you were in the position of that man in the clip, convinced of a cosmic pointlessness, how would it follow that suicide is the answer? Why wouldn't suicide, like anything else, appear meaningless and impossible to justify?

A: I think the basic answer is that one cannot empirically benefit from suicide. It's impossible. One cannot stand by the suicidal decision, one can't even receive relief – the whole mechanism of benefit is worldly and bodily and conditional. But I can say that I think the nature of this question – which is probably the best question one can ask re: suicide – is still overlooking something very crucial. The kind of pro's/con's delineation it suggests is requiring a kind of critical faculty, an imagination that suicide exhausts as absurd, impossible. Again, suicide is not necessarily a “solution”, it is just something that happens. It is one of many ways to end up dead. One might realize the absurdity of the question if you also ask: what is the benefit of death?

Q: So, if you were in the position of Bergman's priest, what would you tell the man?

A: What makes that incredible scene so painful, is that the priest is essentially brutalizing the man with honesty, and we realize that, in the language of the film, the man had come to the priest to be consoled with lies, lies no longer any more distinguishably profane than honesty. The priest is like a doctor bearing bad news to a dying patient, realizing in the process that he too is dying in exactly the same way, and overstepping all professional decorum needs to commune with the patient in exactly the vulnerable way the patient does him. The truth is disorder.

[Pio's comment: "Truth is NOT a 'disorder'; but the utterance of it in the mouth of fool is disordered." (A the Book of Proverbs states)  More precisely for our discussion, St. John said: "Do the truth; but do it in charity." So, the truth is not a "disorder" but the truth must be like a diamond that has the right setting. Peter told Jesus: "Far be it that this would happen to you. ...Do not go to Jerusalem!"  Peter was telling Jesus the truth and even seemed to think that he was being charitable; however, Peter was repeating the temptation from the Evil one to tempt Jesus to NOT go to the cross and redeem all mankind. Jesus respond quite strongly to Peter as He was really addressing the Temptor who stirred Peter's imagination to say these things. By giving voice to the voice of the Temptor, Peter gave life to a mere idea..but by speaking out the words of the Temptor, Peter gave life to them. Jesus response therefore was the Truthful one: "Get behind me, Satan!" I am sure Peter was taken aback!  The truth here was "brutal" and in this case should be.  However, Benjamin is right in saying that kindness should come first while speaking the truth to a man who is tempted toward suicide. The word of truth to a man who is tempted toward suicide must be a word of Love not merely facts or reasoning. How does one show love to a man tempted toward suicide? BY LISTENING NOT SPEAKING. BY LISTENING IN LOVE..WITH GREAT CARING AND UNDERSTANDING..EVEN REPEATING BACK TO THE TEMPTED MAN WHAT YOU HEAR HIM SAYING IN TERMS THAT ARE CLEARER THAN WHAT THE MAN IS SPEAKING TO YOU. THAT IS LOVE!] 

So, I don't know. I could only say this: because I have some juices of imagination still flowing at present, because I have investigations I still have the feel of continuity for, because moments of consciousness can still appear to me consequential, connected, ordered, I do not want to die, and don't want to see you die, because I am still capable of finding you interesting and relevant to my experience in ways you apparently aren't. But the truth is that you are not necessarily wrong. I feel, if anything, if you haven't experienced suicidal thinking, you're (for lack of a better phrase) missing out, whether your life is full and appreciative and aware or not. I think there is a severity and absurdity to waking life you either haven't recognized or haven't confronted yet. Suicide is very much about what it really is to examine a life and to require ecstatic deliverance. One's life is already on a mortal course. And contrary to the cliché that we have an innate desire to learn and to understand, we have a far greater innate desire to sit tight and unquestioningly accept the world, where no examination is ultimately necessary. You're exercising the most powerful critical mechanism you have, and whether you live or die you are presently accessing something of the best of you. Suicide, tragic or not, denotes a kind of investment or sensitivity one has to be alive enough in the first place to experience. And the truth is nothing I say will convince you to not commit suicide unless it strikes at some latent imaginative capacity that is far too much your inner property for me to be able to predict or indicate. Art has, I think, statistically higher chances of accessing it. You need good art.

- Benjamin Bourlier

[Pio's comment: Did you hear this profound statement from Benjamin -- these words of Hope -- which all young people should hear:

"Because I  have some juices of imagination still flowing at present, because I have investigations I still have the feel of continuity for, because moments of consciousness
can still appear to me as consequential, connected, ordered, I DO NOT WANT TO DIE, AND DO NOT WANT TO SEE YOU DIE, BECAUSE I AM STILL CAPABLE OF FINDING YOU INTERESTING AND RELAVENT to my experience in ways you are apparently aren't.....You need good art!"

Yes, Benjamin feels that if we truly confront life, then the concept of death will appear as a reality. That is true; but the Psalmist addresses this issue thus: "I PLACE LIFE AND DEATH BEFORE YOU; CHOOSE LIFE!"

These are my final words of comment for this magnificent discussion that came about by a simple dialogue between Bejamin Bourlier and me over a coffee table in my home. As I listened to the answered to my questions that I lovingly and caringly presented to Benjamin, I instinctively knew that his answers - [and my comments] were not meant for us alone...but all to be shared with YOU."

Peace and love,

Pio Peter Zammit  God bless all of you with abundant LIFE and HOPE, abundant imagination! ]

[See Pio's Proverb 162: "IMAGINATION: how ours mirrors God's" Please see Benjamin's comments on this blog which shows he is listening to me and I am listening to him: which the true antidote to suicide. Benjamin so much appreciated this blog on imagination as to write these comments from his heart:

"Pio, I think this may be your best blog entry! Certainly my favorite so far. I'm very fond, as an improvising musician, of your notion of the big bang as an improvisational spontaneity, and your notion of an (ever) accelerating universe as creative anticipation..."

 -- The end -- .or better said...The beginning...of a new life for all of us: you and me! Amen. And Tiny Tim really got it right when he said: "...God bless us all!"  God has! And says to you and me right now: "I gave you your life because I thought you would like it!"]

Again: Peace and love, Pio