My Friend's Suicide

In Edwin Arlington Robinson’s much-anthologized poem “Richard Cory,” the title character, a man blessed with wealth, a man admired and respected, “ schooled in every grace,” and “always human when he talked,” goes home “one calm summer night” and puts “a bullet in his head.” That poem, and the mystery it contains, became staggeringly real to me when last week, one calm autumn evening, a colleague and a friend, a man blessed with the wealth of imagination and an intellect that pierced to the heart of things, a man graced with a gift for writing poetry, a man respected and admired and, while never on social terms with mediocrity, always human when he talked, walked into the woods and, emulating Richard Cory, took his own life .

Upon hearing of his suicide, I asked the question that I think most people ask on similar occasions: why? A moment’s reflection, however, convinced me that such a question, because it gestures toward the irrationality of the act, is impertinent. The decision to end one’s life, so momentous in its conception, so final in its outcome, must be more than an impulse-imbued act lacking in deliberative judgment, must have a compelling reason, a reason perfectly clear, perfectly sensible, a reason that it is not our business to know. Trish Crap, in “Moon Poem,” writes that “life leans/ and fattens, one part joy/ two parts loss, and our job/ is to make it come out even.” For whatever reason, my friend had decided that he could not strike a balance. For whatever reason, he decided that while life may have a rhythm, it had no melody; that it had a grammar, but no catalyzing words. For whatever reason, he decided to stop inhaling time, for its back-of-the-throat taste had grown acrid and unsavory. For whatever reason, he decided that life had become too small because it had become too large, its possibilities somehow thwarted, his love for it somehow unrequited. For whatever reason he decided it no longer deserved tribute and the silvered notes of heraldic trumpets—and respect demands that we leave off being cognitive voyeurs, looking for the sense of it all to quell our own curiosity, our own fear, and acknowledge that reason, even if it is not given us to know it.

But more than impertinent, the question why is futile, unanswerable. Neuroscientists tell us that we are born with a “Theory of Mind” and with a capacity for empathy. We are innately capable of ascertaining the thoughts, feelings, and intentions of others, of predicting their actions and reactions, of imaginatively locating ourselves in their place. But we do this only on analogy with our own minds; we impute and predict and empathize only from our perspective. What can we ever know, C. S. Lewis asks, “of other people’s souls—of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles?” We simply cannot penetrate, directly and immediately, the minds of others. We cannot access their subjectivity, their felt experience of being, cannot inhabit their anger or fear or joy, cannot feel the assault of their despair or anxiety, cannot feel their islanded remoteness. At best we can know only fragments. It cannot be otherwise unless we know all the places, and events, and people that were and are meaningful to, did and do contribute to, the person we say we know.

How little we know of others. Literature has continually taught us the essential unknowability of others: the masquerade in Fielding’s Tom Jones; the inscrutability of Melville’s Bartleby or the impossibility of trust in his The Confidence Man; the theme of concealment, of hidden pasts and hidden motives in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility; Shakespeare’s Iago, Poe’s “The Cask of Amantillado,” “Ligeia,” and “A Man of the Crowd;” Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert; Conrad’s Verloc in The Secret Agent, Prufrock’s anguished “That’s not it at all, that’s not what I meant at all;” DeLillo’s Richard Elster in Point Omega, the held-at-arm’s reticence of Sethe at unveiling her past in Morrison’s Beloved. All these, and many, many more, teach us that human behavior is more complex, more opaque, more cabined, that we are perhaps prepared to admit. The affective experience and the behavior of each individual is multisourced, overwritten, a palimpsest of traces and annotations. It is at once micro and macro history.

So, where does that leave us? Where does my friend’s suicide leave me? Perhaps it leaves us, me, questioning whether we know even ourselves as intimately as we believe we do. Perhaps it confronts us with our own darkness. As Marlowe, in Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, observes “it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence . . . its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream—alone.” Perhaps it tells us that the imposture that all is normal, all is well, can no longer hold. Perhaps it leads us to realize that the Exodus has yet to be completed, that we still wander, still seek the pillar of fire that will light our way to a barely-glimpsed, ever-receding Canaan. Perhaps we will heed the call of the trained mynah birds in Aldous Huxley’s Island to pay attention to the “Here and now!” Perhaps it will make us see, with Matthew, that our treasure lies where our heart is, and we will hoard those we love. Perhaps it will make us take stock, take inventory, liquidate last year’s, last week’s, yesterday’s models of thinking and being. Perhaps it will convince us to lift our heavy eyelids and scan the horizon for some gleam, some bright innuendo, that will draw us away, even if momentarily, from the dark, dark prose of the world. Perhaps. Maybe.

Two weeks before he took his life, my friend sent me an email to tell me he was reading the essays in my blog, that he liked them, and was considering creating a blog himself. He included, “for what it’s worth,” he said, a new poem. It was a searing and satirical indictment of the peculiar dynamics of American pretense, of our propensity to proclaim our virtue, our “Unimpeachable Goodness,” to counter “the weight of our emptiness.” It noted that lately “the real is straining against belief,” and that straining “real” urges us to peer “into the thicket of the human heart.” Since his death, I have combed every word of that email and poem for some hint, some clue, some trace of what lay two weeks ahead. And while the proposed blog appears affirmative, I am haunted by the deprecatory “for what it’s worth” that introduced a poem that now, suddenly, seems troubling, ominous. Did this gifted poet somehow feel his talent ebbing? Was the poem’s satire self-directed? I don’t know, can’t know, can’t even surmise or suppose. We are all, finally, the imperfect curators of a museum we call the self, and its exhibits, while open to the public, tell only a partial story, for much, most, of the inventory remains secured in hidden rooms and basement vaults, stored away in inner recesses, inaccessible and unknowable.



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Stop and Smell the Roses

In a recent conversation with a colleague, I was given a piece of advice in the form of a cliché. Now, as a writing teacher I don’t just warn students to avoid clichés; I scorn them most unmercifully. I execrate them, I inveigh against them: unlovely lumps of language, lexical ossification, verbal riffraff, impoverished expression, jejune junk rusting on the philological landscape, vacuous verbiage, lazy locution, handy pegs upon which to hang shiftless thinking. Confronting a cliché, I have the tolerance of a pillaging Anglo Saxon and the subtlety of barbed wire. And yet, for reasons I cannot account for, my colleague’s cliché mugged my self-righteous scorn and left me silent, my linguistic pockets empty and turned inside out. It resonated, and I have been thinking about it ever since. He told me, “Jerry, you’ve got to stop and smell the roses.”

Previously, I had considered “smell” the pivot upon which this cliché turned. Smell being one of the sense, I took the cliché to be a warning against being too cerebral, against living in the shallows of abstraction, an implicit appeal to the flesh, to breath and pulse, to direct and immediate intimacy with the sensuous surround. After all, who could deny that the beauty of a rose deserves more homage than a passing glance, that it in fact deserves a glance inflamed to a gaze? Who could deny that it deserves being experienced with a fully embodied sensory appreciation that savors its obviousness and its nuance, the delicate fold of each of the 50 cupped petals, their velveted tactility, their gradual unfurling as they whorl outward from a densely packed center, the reddish conical thorn tapering to a white tip, the intense olfactory assault of fragrance. Who could not apply to roses what Wallace Stevens imputed to the whistling blackbird: the beauty of their inflections and the beauty of their innuendos? Who would not agree with Ralph Waldo Emerson that roses “are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.” Who would not understand Robert Burns comparing his love to “a red, red rose” or Robert Herrick’s advice to “gather ye rosebuds” while we can? For me, then, my colleague’s cliché had in the past emphasized the filagreed grace of nature’s aesthetic expression, the importance of its felt texture to our all too often distracted lives, an experience experienced as an experience.

But hearing it this time, now, it struck me that the resonant word was “stop.” Measured by most psychosocial metrics, we are afflicted with busyness, little different from the way Thoreau 160 years ago characterized us as “in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises.” The leaden foot on the accelerator of making a living inches downward, and we neglect living. We see that living has a length and forget, as Diane Ackerman observes, “the width of it as well.” We somehow fail to see that busyness is densely caloric but without nutritional value, that every article that appears touting some scheme for time management to organize our busyness leaves unchallenged and, thus, naturalizes the assumption that we should be engaged in frantic activity. It is telling, I think, that we so often define our self-worth by how busy we are, by how often we confuse being productive with being busy, how often we equate not being busy with a lack of self-management, with how often we consider not being overscheduled, not multitasking, not being stressed and pressed a sign of indolence. We read, or hire, lifestyle consultants to organize our days and little regard the style of our lives. The kiss of the rose is given only to those who stop long enough to receive it.

To stop is to reflect, and perhaps that is why we don’t. It can be, often is, disheartening to be the audience of our own performance. Reflection necessarily involves not instrumental knowledge but what Hans Kung calls “orientating knowledge,” a knowledge that cleanses mental space of debris, a knowledge of the congruence between the persons we are and the persons we most want to be, of the values we accept with unthinking dogmatism and those we most want to commit ourselves to. Tangled in the traces, we canonize our autonomy without understanding that the granite substrate upon which it rests is our capacity for self-reflection, our capacity to disentangle, to step out, to conjure ourselves standing beside ourselves, and regarding, really regarding, the who and what and why and where and how we are and ought to be. It is hard work, harder and busier than any work we do to get a living. It interrogates the fine-structure constant of our individual universe, corrals our scattered thoughts and returns them to the mindful present. But it is the busyness that we should more often make it our business to mind.

I recall coming home late one Saturday afternoon to find my dad sitting on the family room couch, feet up and hands behind his head, staring, it seemed, at the point where the wall met the ceiling. I had seen him in this posture before and it always struck me as strange. This time, however, I inquired:
“Dad, what are you up to? Is something wrong?”
Oh, no; I’m just thinking.”
“About what?”
“Oh, stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“Well, you know; things.”
My dad. The systems analyst. He wasn’t mowing the lawn or fixing the toaster or reorganizing the garage, wasn’t writing a report or outlining a presentation, wasn’t pouring over the specs of the latest line of IBM office computers or calculating whether or not they would improve efficiency at the Cincinnati office. No. He was far too busy for all that.