November of the Soul

by George Howe Colt

  Many suicidal people unconsciously fantasize that they are killing others. They may even feel that by completing suicide they are not killing themselves but killing the entire world. This is a dynamic described in A. E. Housman’s poem “I Counsel You Beware”:

  Good creatures, do you love your lives

  And have you ears for sense?

  Here is a knife like other knives,

  That cost me eighteen pence.

  I need but stick it in my heart

  And down will come the sky,

  And earth’s foundations will depart

  And all you folk will die.

  While suicide is often motivated by loss, real or metaphorical, for many people it also represents, simultaneously and paradoxically, some form of psychic gain. The suicidal terrorist’s religion tells him that earthly existence is but a prelude to an eternal afterlife in which he will be revered for his deed. The bereaved widow kills herself in the belief she may rejoin her lost love. Other gains are less conscious. The suicidal person described by Litman kills himself in the hope that his idealized image will live on; the speaker in the Housman poem perceives of suicide as a trump card enabling him to triumph over a world that has rejected him. Like the drowsy person who pinches himself to see if he is awake, some people kill themselves to prove they are alive. Suicide may be the only way they know to assert order or control over a situation in which they feel trapped. “If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again,” wrote Antonin Artaud, the avant-garde dramatist who spent much of his life in mental institutions. “Suicide will be for me only one means of violently reconquering myself, of brutally invading my being, of anticipating the unpredictable approaches of God. By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature; I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will.” (In the end, Artaud’s death was shaped less by his will than by his ailing body; he died of rectal cancer in 1948.)

  “Suicide always seeks to achieve something, even if only peace or an end to pain,” observes psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton. In The Broken Connection he suggested, “Killing oneself may appear to be the only way to break out of the ‘trap’ or ‘encirclement’ and assert whatever it is one feels one wants to, or must, about one’s life. One lacks the power to express that assertion in living, or even the power that certain forms of madness, or extreme psychological disorder, provide for alternative forms of assertion that at least keep one’s life going.” And so suicide seems the only way to survive. Lifton further wrote:

  Despair and hopelessness are associated with perceptions of the future. One’s ultimate involvements are so impaired that one is simply unable to imagine a psychologically livable future. Whatever future one can imagine is no better, perhaps much worse, than the present (“However low a man has sunk, he can sink even lower, and this ‘can’ is the object of his dread” is the way Kierkegaard put the matter.) More specifically, the suicide can create a future only by killing himself. That is, he can reawaken psychic action and imagine vital events beyond the present only in deciding upon, and carrying through, his suicide. And for that period of time, however brief, he lives with an imagined future.

  The search for self-knowledge is the essential motivation for suicide, according to James Hillman. In Suicide and the Soul, the Jungian psychologist argued that we must experience death in order to understand and fully experience life. “The impulse to death need not be conceived as an anti-life movement; it may be a demand for an encounter with absolute reality, a demand for a fuller life through the death experience.” The soul can experience death in ways short of suicide: depression, amnesia, intoxication, exaltation, failure, psychosis. Hillman, however, asserted that “for some, organic death through actual suicide may be the only mode through which the death experience is possible.”

  Although Hillman seems to have gone to an almost absurdist extreme, his basic premise—that suicide almost always involves an attempt at transformation—seems essentially true. Many people who survive a suicide attempt speak of its cathartic effects—a dynamic perhaps analogous to the truism that an alcoholic can begin to recover only after he “hits bottom.” “The suicidal attempt may express a fantasy of returning to infancy for the purpose of living life over again,” wrote Lawrence Kubie, one of whose patients, after making several attempts, told him, “I wanted to go right back to the very edge of obliteration but not over the edge. Then I could start afresh.” It is also evident in the calm that many suicidal people feel after making the decision to kill themselves—what the Viennese psychiatrist Erwin Ringel called an “ominous quiet.” A twenty-five-year-old man who survived his suicide attempt recalls the triumph he felt when he decided to take his own life: “It was like being in class and everyone around you is giving the wrong answer, but the teacher isn’t calling on you. But you know you have the answer. Blowing your head off is the answer. The answer to life, the answer to your identity, the answer to your self-preservation. That gun to your head is the most beautiful answer. And even as you are thinking of killing yourself, you can be full of passion, full of life. I think for many people it’s that zest to live that makes them keep wrapping the noose around their neck. They’re saying, ‘I’ll show you how much I want to live.’ “

  For some, suicide may itself be a kind of achievement. “Is it conceivable to murder someone in order to count for something in his life?” wrote Cesare Pavese. “Then it is conceivable to kill oneself so as to count for something in one’s own life. Here’s the difficulty about suicide: it is an act of ambition that can be committed only when one has passed beyond ambition.” For whatever reason—a father dead when he was six; a strict, demanding mother; the suicides of two close friends in adolescence—Pavese had a lifelong preoccupation with suicide. The idea of self-destruction—he called it his “syphilis”—runs like an underground stream through his diary, The Burning Brand, bubbling to the surface at moments of rejection, loneliness, and disappointment. “I know that I am forever condemned to think of suicide when faced with no matter what difficulty or grief,” he wrote at age twenty-eight. “It terrifies me. My basic principle is suicide, never committed, never to be committed, but the thought of it caresses my sensibility.” Although the “trigger” was a brief, unhappy affair with an American actress—the last of his many failed attempts to achieve an enduring relationship with a woman—his suicide had been percolating for his entire life. “Today I see clearly that from ’28 until now I have always lived under this shadow,” he wrote in 1950. Ten days later, a month after winning Italy’s top literary prize, he took a fatal overdose in a hotel room. In his last diary entry he wrote:

  The thing most feared in secret always happens.

  I write: oh Thou, have mercy. And then?

  All it takes is a little courage.

  The more the pain grows clear and definite, the more the instinct for life asserts itself and the thought of suicide recedes.

  It seemed easy when I thought of it. Weak women have done it. It takes humility, not pride.

  All this is sickening.

  Not words. An act. I won’t write any more.

  Although the causes of suicide are infinite and unique, suicidal people share a common denominator of pain. “When I was nineteen, I had my first deep depression,” says Anne-Grace Scheinin, a middle-aged author. “I was terrified. Everything—the way I walked, the way I talked—slowed to a crawl. I felt empty, like everything inside me had been cut up and pulled out. It was as if something had died inside me and was disintegrating. I couldn’t concentrate. Reading a book, I’d find myself skimming the same passage over and over until I’d realize I had read the same paragraph sixteen times. After eight months I began to wonder whether my depression would ever lift. I envisioned spending my whole life like that. The feeling that it was never going to end is what made me think of suicide.” Scheinin made six attempts in two years before being diagnosed with bipolar disorder. By the time I met her, thanks to lithium and periodic hospitaliza
tions, she had not made an attempt in more than a decade.

  Some describe that pain as a prison, a tunnel, a blizzard, a desert, the bottom of a well. In Darkness Visible, William Styron compared his suicidal depression to “being imprisoned in a fiercely overheated room.” In The Bell Jar, a fictionalized account of her breakdown and suicide attempt in 1953 at age twenty, Sylvia Plath, in the words of her heroine, Esther Greenwood, described her gathering depression as feeling “as if I were being stuffed farther and farther into a black, airless sack with no way out.” After Greenwood’s suicide attempt, her patron financed a stay in a private psychiatric hospital. “I knew I should be grateful to Mrs. Guinea, only I couldn’t feel a thing,” comments Greenwood. “If Mrs. Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn’t have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.” Her mother suggested they pretend that her breakdown and suicide attempt had all been a bad dream, but as Greenwood observes, “To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.”

  In that state the outside world gradually seems irrelevant; the person’s focus narrows like the lens of a camera. Clinicians call this tunnel vision. Erwin Ringel called it the presuicidal syndrome, a state characterized by constriction, inhibited aggression turned toward the self, and suicidal fantasies. He described it as “an experience of harassment, of being surrounded from all sides, and of being ever more intensely squeezed into a steadily tightening space.” In Edwin Shneidman’s Voices of Death, a young woman recalls her feelings the moment before she jumped from a fifth-floor balcony: “Everything was like a terrible sort of whirlpool of confusion. And I thought to myself, ‘There’s only one thing I can do, I just have to lose consciousness. That’s the only way to get away from it’ . . . everything just got very dark all of a sudden, and all I could see was this balcony. Everything around it just blacked out. It was just like a circle. That was all I could see, just the balcony . . . and I went over it.”

  A. Alvarez described this stifling condition as a foreign land with its own laws and “its own irresistible logic.” The logic, he wrote, is not the kind employed by philosophers.

  The logic of suicide is different. It is like the unanswerable logic of a nightmare, or like the science-fiction fantasy of being projected suddenly into another dimension: everything makes sense and follows its own strict rules; yet, at the same time, everything is also different, perverted, upside down. Once a man decides to take his own life he enters a shutoff, impregnable but wholly convincing world where every detail fits and each incident reinforces his decision. An argument with a stranger in a bar, an unexpected letter which doesn’t arrive, the wrong voice on the telephone, the wrong knock at the door, even a change in the weather—all seem charged with special meaning; they all contribute.

  Alvarez wrote from personal experience. In an epilogue to The Savage God he described his own suicide attempt at age thirty-one. He recalled the suicidal threats his parents had made when he was a child, which embedded the idea in his unconscious. Then one day, many years later, following “some standard domestic squabble,” he realized that he wished he were dead. “After that,” he wrote, “there was only one way out, although it took a long time—many months, in fact—to get there.” Once he knew, it seemed an inevitability—“the last slide down the ice slope had begun and there was no way of stopping it.” He described that slide: the marital fights, the drinking, the isolation. Inside, he experienced that “presuicidal syndrome.” “My life felt so cluttered and obstructed that I could hardly breathe,” he wrote. “I inhabited a closed, concentrated world, airless and without exits. I doubt if any of this was noticeable socially: I was simply more tense, more nervous than usual, and I drank more. But underneath I was going a bit mad.”

  Two months after deciding on suicide, following a Christmas spent drinking and quarreling with his wife, who finally walked out on him, Alvarez swallowed forty-five sleeping pills hoarded for the occasion. He went into a coma for three days but recovered.

  The constricted world described by Alvarez and the simultaneous urge for transformation described by Lifton and Hillman are dramatically evident in the unpublished journals of Lisa Courtney, a talented twenty-three-year-old silversmith from Newburyport, Massachusetts. For Lisa, depression was a “fog” that settled over her each fall. One autumn a series of events made that fog even more dense: the end of a relationship, the breakdown of her car, anxiety over getting along with new roommates, concern with her work. In the journal she kept during this time she wrote on one hand about her art, family, and friends, and the possibility of new love, and on the other about her doubts, anxiety, and loss of confidence. In her journal entries one can trace her growing depression, her feeling of numbness—“as if I were encased in foam rubber packing,” she wrote—and, at the same time, her need to change her life, “to be a different person.”

  October 2: . . . September just flew by. I want to slow things down; give me a break! This light fogginess around me prevails, I wish I could control it better. Even in trying to remember the week—there is a dimness about it. . . . God, I hope this mind fog will lift.

  October 6: . . . Somehow I find a strength that makes it possible for me to smile for a little while. Then suddenly I feel paralyzed. I can’t function. I can’t do any of the little chores I want to get done. I started a letter [to an old friend], but too many letters to write and nothing to say (well, I couldn’t gather my thoughts) made me stop. I just couldn’t think at all to be able to start a sentence. . . . I have so many things to do—list after list, day after day, and they don’t get shorter. . . . One thing at a time, I must get these things done. I can’t work! I can’t think! I have so much designing to do. I can’t even begin because I am thinking of everything at once. I can’t clear my mind to focus on one thing. . . . I have no physical desire. I feel empty. My body is shut off. I don’t WANT. I want to cry. It hurts. . . . Everything just seems so pointless. Nothing is going anywhere. Nothing is getting done. Help me, Lisa. Don’t lose your strength. Rest now, it’s night.

  October 16: . . . I fantasize about running away. Why does this fantasy always come to me? What am I running away from? What am I running towards? To change myself, be a different person. Why don’t I like myself? I want to know so much more, experience so much more than I do now, force myself into situations that are very difficult that I will find my way out of, become a bit hardened and not so naive. I am so afraid, so cautious. I am in a larger box than I was before, but I still feel walls around me, the walls of fear and self-imposed confinement that I must break down. I keep thinking about external changes: dress differently, change my hair, but I know it is what is inside that I want to change. . . . I am afraid I am sick. My body feels weak sometimes. There’s something wrong with my voice and my breathing. Sometimes I have to push out words. I am afraid and angry with myself. Almost embarrassed. Cigarettes oh shit. My vagina itches. I get sore from brief intercourse. I don’t know what’s wrong. I try not to think about this, but I’m afraid. Sometimes I think if I found out I were going to die then I might be able to break through the walls that limit me. Can’t I do it now anyway?

  November 13: . . . How can you tell people that you can’t feel anything? They will hate you. You are no longer alive or worth knowing if you can’t feel. HELP ME LISA help me.

  Over six weeks, Lisa’s handwriting gradually changed from small and neat to large and scribbled. On November 15 she wrote a chronology of her slide:

  Fog is getting very deep.

  Work is getting difficult. I don’t want to design.

  Having trouble concentrating on production. The new girl is learning so fast.

  I am quiet at work. Have nothing to say.

  Orders to do

  car trouble again

  don’t want to work on ne
w home—barely set up stuff—throw rest in cellar.

  withdrawing from people. Can’t think or communicate anything but confusion, panic, lost.

  exhausted from work—just trying to keep from running out of the place and screaming help me God! I’m afraid.

  I can’t remember what day it is.

  No relief except sleep.

  morning: panic, can’t get out of bed

  work to do

  car to fix

  change addresses

  make wedding presents

  can’t remember how to do things at work.

  I feel nowhere

  I have lost my place in time.

  can’t make decisions

  I can’t design. I have two designs to work on but my hands aren’t working right. I can’t see how to make the heart symmetrical. I don’t want to work. I have to get out of there. Everyone knows I am mixed up. I make bad vibrations. I am hoping they remember I am not always like this. I leave work.

  Eat lunch slowly. Try to rest my mind.

  I don’t know where to go. I hate you Lisa. Come back to earth. I hurt. I hurt you Lisa.

  That afternoon Lisa stabbed herself superficially in the stomach. She was able to drive herself to the hospital, where she was stitched up and released. “I wasn’t trying to die; I just wanted to cut through the fog,” she told her parents. One month later the fog hadn’t lifted. Lisa cut her wrists and throat with broken glass, then rolled off the roof of a five-story building to her death.

  III

  THE MANNER OF DYING

  IN JAMES M. CAIN’S classic whodunit Double Indemnity, whose plot hinges on a murder disguised as a suicide, a savvy insurance agent shows an associate a book of statistical tables on suicide. “Take a look at them,” he says. “Here’s suicide by race, by color, by occupation, by sex, by locality, by seasons of the year, by time of day when committed. Here’s suicide by method of accomplishment. Here’s method of accomplishment subdivided by poisons, by firearms, by gas, by drowning, by leaps. Here’s suicide by poisons subdivided by sex, by race, by age, by time of day. Here’s suicide by poisons subdivided by cyanide, by mercury, by strychnine, by thirty-eight other poisons, sixteen of them no longer procurable at prescription pharmacies. And here—here, Mr. Norton—are leaps subdivided by leaps from high places, under wheels of moving trains, under wheels of trucks, under the feet of horses, from steamboats. But there’s not one case here out of all these millions of cases of a leap from the rear end of a moving train. That’s just one way they don’t do it.”