‘The need to go astray, to be destroyed, is an extremely private, distant, passionate, turbulent truth.’
‘We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.’
‘When people concentrate on the idea of beauty, they are, without realizing it, confronted with the darkest thoughts that exist in this world. That, I suppose, is how human beings are made.’
It is not a mystery to me why men kill themselves. I’ve told my readers before that everything is sex, an exchange, a motion of energy. In a world which consists primarily of routines, structures, and has ignoble demands for you, I understand why some wish to opt out, seeing no other way. For most people, in every moment they suffer silently in a system which cares for them only in order to extract energy (labor, attention, loyalty). It is difficult to say that such a man is free, that he is not a slave, like those of ancient Egypt, who built those pyramids. Of course, the grandeur of humanity at scale is always built on the back of something. And so, the noble animal, we all know, in captivity, refuses to be bred. The logical extension of that is indeed a kind of suicide. But is there a way out—not from life, but from the cage, and into life? An extremely complex question, the answer to which isn’t necessarily a political solution, as some provide it, in the form of Marxism, Communism, Egalitarianism et al. No, it is something much closer, nearer, like the tanned skin of one who knows to lay under the sun.
For close to 10 years now, I have read extensively into occult mysteries. I don’t mean a historical reading of the various groups, Rosicrucians, Freemasons, The Golden Dawn etc., but I mean books of occult philosophy and technique. Something that caught my eye in particular was alchemy, and the Phoenix especially. That bird has been a recurring motif in my life, in the form of dreams, visions manifested while sober and other times under the influence, in moments of strange synchronicity such as certain groups approaching me who just happened to wear symbol. But not only these moments, but what the symbol means. Everyone basically understands what the Phoenix signifies, that it is a bird that is immortal, but how can it be? Well, at an old age, it will burst into a bright flame until it withers into ash, from whence it will rise again, as a youngling. Ad infinitum. It occurred to me that life is such a thing—and that we, individuals, are the same as well. What magic!
Why, then, to address the central question of this article, do men kill themselves? An interesting comparison made by David Foster Wallace is that it is a matter of apprehension, or anticipation. Using the workers of the World Trade Center during the 9/11 attacks as an analogy, to explain those who chose to throw themselves out of the burning skyscrapers, to a swift meeting with the ground, the only rational reason for doing so was to avoid being burned alive. Obviously, this scenario is an extreme one, but it isn’t unreasonable to say that in more commonplace scenarios, the fire isn’t physical, but metaphorical, and that there isn’t a choice between ‘a slow, agonizing death, and a quick death,’ but instead ‘a slow, agonizing life, and death,’ and that those who kill themselves choose death over what life they could have (which, presumably, is not a desirable one).
And what kind of life is so bad that one chooses nothingness for eternity over it? More than a question about the world we live in, it is a question about what kind of suffering it makes us feel that is unendurable versus a more natural kind of suffering. What is that unendurable suffering? To skip a systemic interrogation, for which maybe there isn’t one, I’ll deliver us right into the answer—at least the one I have. Worse than death, which is silent as a dark night without wind, where we are not aware of our own death, where we aren’t even ‘dead,’ where we simply don’t exist at all and only are known in the memories of those who still live, is perhaps a life where we already feel dead. Where we live as ghosts, invisible to others and witnessing life around us but not feeling it, not reaching for it, ourselves. Such a thing is intolerable for biological reasons, considering that we are animals who need a community, and more than that, hugs, kisses, conciliation for our angst. And if we are denied such a thing, for so long, and see no way back, for reasons we come to through rationale, then perhaps the reasonable thing to do is to become distant to ourselves forever—two escapes: to the left, community, barred off, and to the right, death, which waits for us since birth. Yes, one could argue that suicide is even logical, in a way. Which brings us to a more dangerous, interesting question…
Who are you? Tell me—describe yourself…
This to me always seemed to be an impossible question. How can I define myself? What attributes are essential, and which are meaningless? Where am ‘I’ located? In my body, or in the arrangement of my body? It’s an important question, and in some ways, your identity is the most crucial aspect of yourself, the one that suffers, as well as the one who dreams, who loves and wants. Understanding this might lead the way, the escape from suicide, and death, and all things that are final, closed-off, evil…
I have for a long time now attacked myself. Any weakness, insecurity, or shyness has been eviscerated—or still I go to war with them. These are things that keep a man from living, they lean towards stasis, death. I refute it from myself. On these same grounds I refuse photographs—I do not take selfies, I do not ‘photobomb’ others, in fact I hide away, or more often I am the one taking the picture for the group I belong to. When I see a picture of myself, I do not see me, nothing that matters. Photography provides a description of everything that fades away. The body, like a building, from the moment it stands in the world, immediately begins to decay. Before you think I hate the body, let me tell you that I don’t! It is beautiful precisely because it does not last, because it fades, because it, like the sea, waves and laps and storms and fights in the spinning of the world with itself. The most beautiful moments in the history of sculpting is precisely in depictions of this finitude… in Michelangelo’s Pietà, the impossible limpness of the body of Christ, or in some old Grecian statues, the ripple of a shawl wrapped around a nameless girl, those ripples feeling wind across timeless, unmoved skin, those ripples never like that! again, no ripple the same ever again, like, for instance, long Thessalonian wild grass reaching backwards under the same wind, or, more humanly, a beautiful lover’s hair sea-wild and wet as she emerges from the sea towards my eyes waiting for the closeness of her smell of sun and salt, her laughter, even, breathing out in mirth with air supplied from the intestate Earth, no breath ever again the same, it all dying always, and because of this, beauty… yes, that to me is Life! No photograph is like this!
Now think! Of so-called intellectuals, philosophers who tell you how to live. Sitting in ivory towers or, these days, in cheap room and board attics, fumbling over themselves writing long doctrines on life—on what is. What would they know about life? I think the same of people who spend all day on social media, like some undeserving creature in search of unearned celebrity: everything that happens is just fodder for a feed, for a story, for recognition. This is disgusting to me, in the same way when, for instance, during a long youthful night of drinking with friends outside, when that one friend who cannot handle silence and discomfort interrupts the laughter to say, ‘I’m having a great time… isn’t this great?’ Such a thing annoys me, because it thinks where one should feel. There is a great, mysterious truth in feeling the world, in a sort of ecstasy of the moment which lasts, life nothing but an interlinking of such moments. There is a wisdom to the wild horses who run free like spirits of wind, anemoi, that humans too can reach at the heights of drug, sex-warranted benders, and for the especially genius of us all, the poets, sober and free and soaking in the marrow of life. You could be like this too! But how, you might ask? How, reaching over and bending, scrunched glasses and leaning and wanting and yearning and distant from all-things, how could I be like that!
I think of the world in terms of rhythm. I see it all around, I know it in the ways of the world, and which the Gods speak. But this same rhythm is not just of the world, it is of ourselves too! This inner rhythm, this arrangement of our memories and desires and passions, the space in between them and the moments they leap above the surface of the violent sea like a primordial whale who resonates deep under the tide and can be heard for miles, like smoke from a forest fire seen from the distance before it is smelt, like a crack of wide lightning across the dark sky-storm which illuminates the bending Birch tree, this arrangement around these timeless instances of otherworldly beauty and wisdom, all this too is inside you… it beats and pulps like a bleeding heart throughout your body, it moves, this is life. Whence comes suffering, then? Stasis, stillness, yes, but also when you move to a beat that is not your own. No wealth, no sex, no achievement can make you feel whole, because that satisfaction is not an arrival, a ceremony, a moment where, like a king, you are finally crowned by a pope. No, if there is such a moment, it is surely like that of Napoleon, who took from the pope the crown and placed it on his own head. The power rests not from the outside, from a system, from a church, but from myself! Such is strength that seeks no permission, such is beauty that does not seek a suitor but just is, such is music in fact—it is resonance, it goes outward, it exudes, it beats and wails into space. Do you see the way then?
This is passion, the thing which will not die, or the thing which I won’t let die. I remember you, I await you. This is the means by which to survive many a terrible night. Those nights where you feel as if you are suffocating, choking on tears of your unknown song, grieving for those now gone. I do not need photographs—either I am meant to remember you, and you me, or I will disappear like a drawing on the shore, swept away by the sea. I do not need to interrupt a moment of goodness, to acknowledge it—I trust that there will be another good moment again, and that we all nonetheless feel it now.
I do not loathe desperation! It is a powerful mover of men, and by this feeling much beauty and greatness is achieved. I am not like you, you so-called men who spend their time criticizing things, to prove how aware, or real you are. I do not care for how I am viewed. I have no peers. All my idols are long dead. You cannot ‘check’ me, put me in line, shame me. I am not playing the same game as you. No, I am chasing something, I am in pursuit, and by this I have all I need.
If you stand at the heights of despair, and you feel an inconsolable wind which threatens to rip you out like a strong tornado does a tree with weak roots, let go. You are alive, which means you are already dying, and in this lies all the meaning that you need. In a lonesome forest with no humans around, yell a wild howl and run until your heart bursts, through the thickets which scratch your legs, past the hanging cloud of dense tree branches of shade and finally, some day from now, you will emerge into a sunlit field, which waited for you, but not today, now you must run while you still can. This is the great secret! The alchemical gold, it is the process, it is the endless dying of all things that live—change is the only constant, it is the only way you will survive. Do not be afraid, this is what you were made for.
Even writing this I find myself ready to leap up and go run. It makes me remember all that I have lost, all those moments and memories, like a blinking starlight far overhead. Sometimes I think and wonder of all the things yet to come, which aren’t here quite yet. All the laughter that awaits, moments of furious exasperation, great whispering flames of love for the girl that is out there somewhere, who will one day bear my children. It is irrational, yes, but something in me knows that we are already in love, that I have already accomplished everything, that it is all written, foretold, all of it, in my favor—for me, it waits. I see its revelation in every beautiful girl I see, in every moment of struggle and despair. I have been told that I have a wild, mad shimmering color to my eyes—this is true, in that they are storm-grey and hazel with flecks of gold that change iridescence according to the light, but what they really see, perhaps, is my soul, which at all moments is remembering everything that was once good, and is awaiting all that is good which is yet to come. Yes, such is a lust for life, and like the wise among us know, this look alone brings what we wish for nearer to us, like moths to a bright flame in the dark. I am very irrational yes—I wonder, as my heart beats now, how far does it echo? Far, very far into unknown ears that feel something stirring in the distance… I am on my way.
Lightning only strikes those out in the rain.