1.
Procrastination
saved my life, or--
There's
nothing more pathetic
Than a
procrastinating suicide
We'll
either do it or we wont
But the
depressing thing is
Every
possible method has been done
And done
to death.
Our
suicide says nothing
Our
attempt to stylize our death is meaningless
Our
attempt to get the timing right
To
execute the details
Causes us
to delay and say:
If it
were only 1850 again
And a
romantic suicide were still possible
If only
the motivations were still pure and honorable
Like they
were for Tchaikovsky
Whose
homosexuality and deep melancholia
His
creative genius and his bad forced marriage
Swirled
together a tortured brine
In the
river of his mind
Who can
imagine this scene without the theme
To Romeo
and Juliet?
As
Tchaikovsky wades out into the freezing torrent
His large
muscular wife striding after him
And
fishing his skinny ass out by the trousers
She
pulled him back and made him live
Wouldn't
let him go.
But
eventually some years later
Death and
Tchaikovsky found each other
After a
second attempted drowning failed similarly
He
contracted cholera and went out on his back.
Even in
the modern era
An
artistic suicide was still possible
Vachel
Lindsay reaching for a bottle of lye
And
drinking it down.
A
horrible death. Unimaginable suffering.
His poems
out of style, himself defenseless
Against
criticism and poverty which is criticism.
A country
bumpkin in an urbane era
What it
must have been like to realize
That no
one cared about your work
Or about
your lifetime that you spent
Singing
and preaching the gospel of beauty
To an
ugly generation.
By the
sixties Hemmingway's suicide
Had taken
years to accomplish
When his
bottle of gin was no longer accommodating
His
favorite shotgun was.
Whatever
else can be said
A shotgun
suicide is at least not vain
Harboring
no pretension concerning
The state
of one's corpse
But every
suicidal artist is finally
A
variation on the theme of Thomas Chatterton
Whose
suicide by arsenic in 1770
Accomplished
the goal of all his plagiarists,
That is,
he shamed his society
Into an
admission of guilt.
Into an
acknowledgment,
Not that
the artist has trouble adjusting
To the
way the world is
But that
the act of adjusting to the world
Requires
a sacrifice that some are unwilling to make
And those
of you who have made it should be ashamed
Of what
you've become.
The boy
Chatterton just eighteen when he died
In
desperate poverty
Being
ripped off by his publishers
Literally
starving, he finally spent his last pennies
On the
poison that killed him.
2.
“The
dead are just dead,”
My friend
Harry Haller used to say,
“The
real suicides are the living,
For whom
the thought of death is a continual comfort
The
suicide knows death is available to him
If he
turns the knob and opens the door.”
But what
is behind the door?
No one
can say
And the
finality of the thing
And the
mess we would leave behind
The
financial mess and the moral mess
And those
who would be inconvenienced
By the
bloated corpse of it all
The image
of the Mexican steel worker
Crazed
with jealousy
Who drove
his wife at knife point to the mill
Embracing
her he jumped into the smelting furnace
With its
radiant molten ore
A leaping
flame
A brief
puff of steam
And a
steel a little richer in carbon
Than the
engineers had intended
One
possible definition of living
Is
putting off death for another day.
Each
breath pushes death back a step
Into the
future.
3.
In the
garden at night
A young
man in anguish
Sweating
big drops of blood
Prays
while others sleep
What is
the source of his conflict?
His
spirit at war with the will of his flesh
The flesh
that wanted to live on
To bib
wine and eat great portions
Against
the gnosis of his father's will for him--
His
conscious choice of death
And who
can guess the motivation of his betrayer?
Who spent
the silver pieces on a bit of land
On which
to wring his neck and spill his guts.
An old
man centuries earlier could have escaped
The death
proportioned for him.
His
friends had made everything ready
A prison
guard could easily be bribed
A boat
was ready to whisk him away
Under
cloak of darkness
But he
preferred a dignified death
To an
undignified life
Though
his arguments ring hollow
And tinny
to our ears
For his
gift was not reasoned argument
But rank
stubbornness
He drank
the hemlock and paced
The floor
of his cell
Until he
went cold
4.
“A gift
of figs I bring,” the Clown said to the queen.
And in
the basket find a remedy
For her
who asked of the physician
An easy
way to die.”
“Put
your basket down,” said Cleopatra to the clown.
“The gift of figs you leave with Aspic venom found
Whose
bite will leave no mark upon my breast or wrist
Whose
kiss will leave the bloom of death cold upon my cheek.”
