by Gary Lachman
One last possible agent of suicide. At the time of writing, BBC 4 presented a remarkable documentary about the ‘anthropologist’ and drug-guru Carlos Castaneda. Much of it was familiar to me; having written about Castaneda in my Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius, I was aware that most likely Castaneda had pretty much invented the whole of his adventures with the Yaqui brujo Don Juan, depicted in a series of bestselling books. What I didn’t know was that in the last years of his life, Castaneda had gathered a group of female followers with whom he apparently shared an esoteric teaching concerning a kind of cosmic resurrection after death, something along the lines of the Heaven’s Gate cult.38 Castaneda himself died of liver cancer in 1998, a shock to many of his followers who had accepted his own teaching that he would not die, but ‘ascend’ to some higher sphere. His death was kept secret for some time and was, as they say, shrouded in mystery. His body was cremated, and, according to Amy Wallace, author of a memoir of her time as one of Castaneda’s disciples, lovers and wives (he had several simultaneously), burning was a means of releasing the spirit into a higher form.39 Shortly after Castaneda’s death, at least three of the women in his intimate group, known as ‘the Witches’, disappeared. Florinda Donner-Grau, author of bestselling books based on Castaneda’s work, Taisha Abelar, and Patricia Partin, seemed to have simply vanished, and were never heard from again. In 2003, the wreck of a car was found in Death Valley, California, and had evidently been involved in a fire. DNA testing on human remains found in the wreck showed them to be those of Patricia Partin. Partin had a particular relation to Castaneda, as she was both his adopted daughter and his lover. To date the other women have yet to surface, and the assumption among some is that they may have taken the teachings of Don Carlos to a perhaps fatal extreme.
Against Suicide?
These, then, are some of the many types of literary suicide that deserve mention, but that fall outside of the main categories with which the rest of this book will be concerned. Needless to say, however, not all writers and poets are attracted to suicide. As several of the selections in the Suicidal Miscellany show, there were those who argued against it, those who made light of it, and those who, at first finding it attractive, were later purged of the idea. There is the question too of how sincere were the many writers who, writing darkly of the desirability of ending one’s life, did not, in actual practice, end their own. In his novel Manalive, G.K. Chesterton, whose “Ballade of Suicide” starts off the Miscellany, offers a sure-fire (no pun intended) test to determine one’s seriousness about the value of life. The only way to prove if someone who claims life isn’t worth living is serious, Chesterton argues, is to point a loaded pistol at his head and propose to pull the trigger. If he remains unmoved, then his nihilism is sincere, and you would probably be doing him a favour if you carried on. If he flinches, then it’s just a pose. Although poseurs are not hard to come by – and most of us have been one in our time – most of this book is concerned with those for whom, more or less, the question of suicide was deadly serious.
To end this introduction, let me add a personal note. In writing about suicide, more often than not, most writers devote some time to their own attitude toward it and describe, if such is the case, their own encounters with it. Like many people – writers or not – I have passed through difficult times, patches and even long stretches of my life when I was subject to much hardship and psychological and emotional suffering. But I have never attempted suicide, nor did I ever seriously consider it as an option, although the idea of ceasing the harangue of thoughts and anxieties that accompanies bad times at a single blow can be tempting. Why this is so probably depends on several factors, not the least of which is a recognition that, however bad my situation was, killing myself was certainly a shabby way of dealing with it. A sense of fastidiousness then, an awareness of the mess and complications and difficulties I would leave behind, ruled suicide out. I was also too aware of that piercing yet sadly useless consciousness, shared by Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary and others, that killing themselves was, in the end, a really bad idea and that in the face of that finality, life, as difficult as it is, is infinitely preferable. In more recent years, which have not been without their troubles, the fact that I am a father and that two young boys would, I think its safe to say, be severely upset at my absence, make it a definite non-issue. To avoid a long, slow, painful death through an incurable illness, to say farewell when it is still possible, before old age incapacitates one’s lucidity and grasp on life: I can appreciate these circumstances and understand ending one’s life in these cases, although how I will feel and react if I find myself in these situations remains to be seen. Everything else, however, strikes me as selfish and, realizing fully that most people bent on suicide will not be stayed by this, irresponsible, even egotistical. It is, I think, in some ways a kind of supreme egotism: the notion that my death will matter to the universe.
I will add one more thing. Reading these accounts of tragic and lost lives, it strikes me that it is never the major philosophical or religious arguments that convince people not to kill themselves – although in some cases, metaphysics does seem to have succeeded in prompting the opposite. What changes people’s minds are the little things: Goethe’s Easter bells, Chesterton’s “little cloud all pink and grey,” the glass of wine that Hesse’s suicidal Steppenwolf drinks, avoiding the razor back at home. Like Graham Greene’s experience of Russian Roulette, these things somehow trigger a sense of life’s “infinite possibilities,” the awareness of which makes suicide seem an absurd blunder. Why these everyday items, which we normally take for granted, can at times release a mystical sense of the absolute value of life, remains a mystery. Perhaps when we solve it, most reasons for suicide may become a thing of the past.
Notes
1 Unfortunately, space does not allow me to discuss the tragic deaths of all of these individuals. For more on the life and work of the occult historian James Webb, see my article “The Damned” at www.forteantimes.com/articles/150_webb.shtml
2 Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched by Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (Free Press Paperbacks: New York, 1993) p. 46.
3 Ibid. p. 5.
4 Robert Lowell, quoted by Robert Giroux, Ibid. p. 250.
5 Bernard Shaw John Bull’s Other Island in The Complete Plays of Bernard Shaw (Odhams Press Ltd: London, 1934) p. 441.
6 Quoted in Jacques Barzun A Stroll with William James (Harper&-Row: New York, 1983) p. 15.
7 A. Alvarez The Savage God (Bloomsbury: London, 2002) p. 34.
8 Ibid. p. 12.
9 Christopher Woodward In Ruins (Vintage: London, 2002) p. 152.
10 For more on Jan Potocki and Gérard de Nerval, see my Dedalus Book of the Occult: A Dark Muse (Dedalus: Sawtry, 2003).
11 For more of Gustav Meyrink and Guy de Maupassant, see my Dedalus Book of the Occult: A Dark Muse.
12 O.V. de L. Milosz The Noble Traveller: The Life and Writings of O.V. de L. Milosz ed. Christopher Bamford (Lindisfarne: West Stockport, MA, 1985) p. 438. See also The Dedalus Book of the Occult: A Dark Muse.
13 Ibid. p. 439.
14 For more on Baudelaire see The Dedalus Book of the Occult: A Dark Muse.
15 Graham Greene The Lost Childhood and Other Essays (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1962) p. 202.
16 Richard Holmes Coleridge: Early Visions (Penguin: London, 1989) pp. 49–52.
17 Graham Greene The Lost Childhood and Other Essays p. 204.
18 Kay Redfield Jamison Touched With Fire p. 43.
19 Graham Greene The Lost Childhood and Other Essays p. 205. Greene’s attempts to shock himself out of a spiritual lethargy are an example of “living dangerously,” an ideal which Colin Wilson associates with many of his Outsiders. Wilson argues that there is a kind of “indifference threshold” in human consciousness. “There is, “he writes, “a certain margin of boredom or indifference when the human mind ceases to be stimulated by pleasure, but can st
ill be stimulated by pain or discomfort.” (Encyclopedia of Murder with Pat Pitman [Arthur Baker: London, 1961] p.22) Greene (and Coleridge), who could see but not feel beauty, had reached this threshold, and the prospect of blowing his brains out, and then discovering he hadn’t, for a brief time galvanised his consciousness. In her account of Greene’s experience, however, Kay Redfield Jamison fails to mention that his motive in playing Russian Roulette was to achieve a feeling of greater life, not to end his own.
This is one of the problems with Jamison’s book, which, as a study of manic-depression among writers and artists, is excellent, as far as it goes. But being a clinical psychologist, Jamison tends to see everything in terms of either mania or depression. One example she gives of ‘manic’ behaviour is Poe’s short story “The Man of the Crowd.” She quotes Poe’s narrator remarking how, convalescing after months of illness, he finds himself in a London coffee house “in one of those happy moods which are so precisely the converse of ennui – moods of keenest appetency, when the film from the mental vision departs … and the intellect, electrified, surpasses … its everyday condition.” For Jamison this is an expression or confession of Poe’s manic states, but it is clear that Poe is simply speaking of the poetic condition itself, the kind of clarity and acute sensual and psychic appreciation which reveals to the poet the poetic object. Psychologically speaking, Poe’s narrator is having what the psychologist Abraham Maslow called a ‘peak experience’. This isn’t ‘manic’ at all, and is something, Maslow argued, experienced by most healthy people. This kind of ‘peak’ is shared by many of the depressives Jamison writes about, people like Coleridge, William James and others. But she fails to recognize it as such, and erroneously speaks of it as an indication of a pathology.
20 Charles Nicholl “The Wind Comes Up Out of Nowhere,” London Review of Books vol. 28 no. 59 March 2006.
21 Andrew Hussey The Game of War: The Life and Death of Guy Debord (Pimlico: London, 2002) p. 2.
22 Again, for more on Lowry, see The Dedalus Book of the Occult: A Dark Muse.
23 Quoted in Alex Kershaw Jack London: A Life (Flamingo: London, 1997) pp. 5–6.
24 Ibid. p. 153.
25 Ibid. p. 25.
26 Martin Booth Cannabis (Bantam Books: London, 2004) p. 155.
27 Another possible category is the strictly literary suicide. One candidate for this is the horror fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft, who two years before his death by cancer, had effectively given up writing. It is possible that Lovecraft’s reluctance to ‘sell’ himself – he would rarely submit his work to another editor once it had been rejected – and general passivity to life, created the psychological conditions for his illness to establish itself.
28 Fernando Pessoa The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa ed. Richard Zenith (Grove Press: New York, 2001) p. 301.
29 Ibid. p. 304.
30 Ibid. p. 310.
31 Ibid. p. 287.
32 For more on Aleister Crowley, see The Dedalus Book of the Occult: A Dark Muse.
33 For more on Pessoa see The Dedalus Book of the Occult: A Dark Muse.
34 Colin Wilson The Quest for Wilhelm Reich (Doubleday: New York, 1981) p. 65
35 Ibid. p. 72.
36 For more on Silberer and hypnagogia, see my article “Waking Sleep” www.forteantimes.com/articles/163_hypnagogia.shtml
37 For more on Briusov and Bely and the Russian occult revival, see The Dedalus Book of the Occult: A Dark Muse and also my afterword, “Valery Briusov: Paradoxical Decadent,” in The Fiery Angel (Dedalus: Sawtry, 2005).
38 In spring 1997 the comet Hale-Bopp became visible in our sky. Convinced a UFO accompanying the comet had come to take them away, thirty-nine members of the Heaven’s Gate cult in Oregon committed suicide. In 1994, after their leader murdered a couple and their three-month-old baby (whom he believed to be the Antichrist), fifty-three members of the Order of the Solar Temple incinerated themselves in Quebec and Switzerland. And of course the Jonestown massacre in Guyana, 1978, in which almost 1000 people drank cyanide at the command of their leader Jim Jones remains one of the most gruesome group suicides on record.
39 Amy Wallace The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: My Life with Carlos Castaneda (North Atlantic Books: 2004)
The Existential Suicide
Philosophers have thought about suicide – its implications and meaning, if not about engaging in the act itself – practically since philosophy began. Legend says that Empedocles, one of the earliest Greek philosophers, killed himself by secretly jumping into Mt. Etna in Sicily; his idea was that the volcano would destroy his corpse and people would think he had been transformed into an immortal god and had been raised to the heavens. This ruse was uncovered, however, when Etna, not agreeing with Empedocles’ plans, threw up his golden sandal. Most historians discount the legend – there’s good reason to think Empedocles died somewhere in Greece – but if it’s true, then along with the less renowned Proteus Peregrinus, mentioned in the introduction, Empedocles belongs to the group of fame suicides, who used the act of taking their life as a means of promoting their celebrity. How successful Empedocles was at this can be judged by Matthew Arnold’s account of his death, found in the Suicidal Miscellany.
Zeno, founder of the Stoics, who counselled suicide in some cases, is said to have hung himself at 98 when he stubbed his toe on a turtle. The Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius, author of On The Nature of Things, is said to have committed suicide after being driven mad by a love potion, but few historians give much credence to this idea today. Another ancient philosopher associated with suicide – although his death, I think, really doesn’t count as one – is the one philosopher most people have heard of: Socrates. Rather than cease from pestering the Athenians with his incessant questioning, or go into self-exile, Socrates preferred to drink hemlock. Given that he could have avoided death by leaving Athens, which his followers suggested he do, and that Socrates would more than likely not have poisoned himself unless compelled to, I can’t count his death as a true suicide. In this, Socrates is in some esteemed company. The other famous death upon which Western culture is based, that of Jesus, is, like Socrates, one that was consciously chosen; but although many would disagree, it was a death that could have been avoided. Judas Iscariot, the apostle who betrayed Christ and so was instrumental in his arrest and crucifixion, famously hung himself when he realized what he had done; yet there is some doubt about this as well, and in some apocryphal accounts, Judas doesn’t kill himself, but is stoned to death by the other apostles.
Another example of self-killing from the classical period that, for me, falls outside of suicide is the writer and debauchee Petronius, whose Satyricon gives us the word satirist. During Nero’s reign, Petronius, known for his profligate life, fell foul of Nero’s minister and favourite Tigellinus, and was compelled to commit suicide. He did so by slitting his wrists and letting them bleed, then binding them, then opening them again, and so on. During this slow process of bleeding to death, he dined luxuriously and talked among his friends. Petronius enjoyed some poetic posthumous revenge when, under the reign of the emperor Otho, who found him despicable, Tigellinus was forced to cut his throat.
The Romans seem a people for whom suicide was something of a matter of course, and some of the greatest names in Roman letters, like Seneca, Cato, Lucan and Tacitus, either wrote of it or, in the case of Seneca and Cato, did actually kill themselves. Seneca, like Petronius, also got on Nero’s bad side, and was ordered to take his life. He slit his wrists, but his arteries were clogged, and the blood came slowly and with much pain. He then procured some poison, but this didn’t work either. Eventually, he took a hot bath, hoping the heat would thin his blood; in his Annals of Imperial Rome, Tacitus records that Seneca died of suffocation from the steam. Following the defeat of Metellus Scipio, with whom he sided against Caesar in the civil wars, Cato, refusing to live under the dictator, chose to kill himself with his sword. Plutarch recounts that because of an injured hand, Cato’s attempt was unsuccessful.
His servants found him, and called for a physician, who bandaged his wound. Cato waited until they left, tore open the bandage and apparently ripped out his intestines to finish the job.
Most early philosophical discussion of suicide centred around ideas of when it was justified; an example of this, from Epictetus, can be found in the Suicidal Miscellany. Later thought questioned the prevailing Christian idea that it was a sin; David Hume, for example, who can also be found in the Miscellany, argued against this. Some philosophers, like Arthur Schopenhauer (also in the Miscellany) argued, at different times, for and against suicide, and some, like the mathematician Alan Turing – considered the father of computer science – and the physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, best known for his work on the statistical interpretation of the second law of thermodynamics, did kill themselves. Depressed over his arrest and subsequent persecution for his homosexuality, in 1954, Turing is thought to have eaten an apple laced with cyanide. Boltzmann suffered from severe bouts of manic-depression, and, in low spirits over criticism of his theory of atomic structure, he hung himself while on holiday with his family in the Bay of Duino, near Trieste. Although the second law of thermodynamics may seem a rather specialized concern, Boltzmann’s insights into the ‘increase of entropy’ (disorder) in a closed system, is linked to ideas about the eventual ‘heat-death’ of the universe that troubled Victorian thinkers like Arnold, Tennyson and Carlyle.