combatting normality

combat
normality

"...cast a cold eye on life, on death..."

Anthony Weir
SUICIDE FOR
NON-BEGINNERS
poems for a later age
in order of composition

part four

' "Alone": the Emperor of words...' Alma Mahler

 

THE GRATEFUL DEAD

Time is kind
to very few
until the end
when time is
infinitely generous.

 

NINETY-EIGHT PERCENT

98% of our genes are shared with chimpanzees.
We have polluted 98% of the world.
Dogs are bored 98% of the time.
Nearly 98% of life is mechanical.
More than 98% of us are lost in the plot.
And parrots think,
and parrots mope.

O praise
the 98% of thinking animals with the integrity
not to pray or hope.

 

 

WARSHIPS AND WORSHIP

The mind
is both tool and tool-user.

Hope is both crime
and the mother of crime.

The infantile God is utterly discredited
by his First Commandment*.

300,000 oak-tree years
sank with one ship-of-the-line.

* After writing this poem I read Marina Warner's comment on the First Commandment:
«Now that I have returned to the Decalogue for the first time since childhood,
the voice of the deity strikes my ear as that of a petulant and charmless tyrant
who is covering up his own ineffectual promises with bluster,
the kind of humourless boss who is given to loud renditions of My Way
at the annual office party.»

 

 

WAKE

Philosophy's a corpse
continually washed and combed
wordblind, megalithic
I prise open its eyelids

to receive the light
of the dark dog-star.

That which is written is hollow:

i llegibility
of knowing,
everything repeated
an hundredfold -

w e climb in
but never climb out.

 

 

THE SECRET SOCIETY OF SUICIDES

Let us dress up
in hairy brown blankets
disguised as god's testicles,
bump into people, crush them

and crash into many-towered skyscrapers
of vanity

for

A POEM THAT IS NOT A VIPER
IS A BATTERY-TURKEY

for

b eneath the mountains of bone
among the skeletons of trees
upon the sickly seas
of not understanding understanding
Progress is death's pseudonym

and

This Liberty you vaunt
is sold with terrible compulsions

This Peace that you manipulate
drips out of dreadful mutilations

This Civilisation that you serve
is wanton devastation
All your Heavens and Utopias of luxury
bleak and full of angry comfort

We are raped and raping
Hope is the crime and mother of crime

We are always on the way, and never arrive
Some infinites are very small
Happiness is an imaginary number
and a by-product
(with what evolutionary worth, I wonder ?)

LET US DRESS UP

in hairy black blankets
masquerading as god's testicles
and bump into people and crush them

and crash into many-towered skyscrapers
of vanity

for

destruction
was the birth of civilisation
and in destruction of destruction
it slowly dies, ever more demanding

The only true achievement
is renunciation

and not understanding
is also understanding

 

 

FOR LULJETA LLESHANAKU

The only true reward's Oblivion -
'Spirituality' is just sexual mysticism
for the poor in spontaneity and spirit,
the cruelly-effete
who suck out each other's tiny, naked truth
and dress it in deceit.

 

 

WHILE THE DOG'S CLAWS SCRATCH UPON THE HERMIT'S DOOR
11-11-2003

All power is abuse of what is not itself
and all power is abused.

At the cenotaphs
the holders and the representatives of power,
the generals, the admirals, the air-vice-marshals
pretend to mourn
the powerless that their predecessors murdered
by proxy as dictators also do
through words like Glory and Defence
and Fatherland and Honour
and Democracy
and Western Way-of-life - which we've now reduced to lifestyle .

Masters of claptrap, they call
mass-murder sacrifice

but horses are the inevitably-unsung heroes
the unremembered victims
before replacement by the tank

and the Holy Grail is in the basement of a bank.

 

 

MAYBE THE MAGGOTS

Heads full of dreams
too many heads
only one dream

in t he world now poised between
Hell and Hollywood
genocide and overpopulation

words and politics and war
there is no memory
only expectation

for what begins with power ends in mysticism.

We are the devil of our creation
and only the maggots
can grant us salvation.

 

 

REFLECTION ON A POEM BY MIROSLAV HOLUB

Should I open the door ?
Maybe it's Miroslav's dog scratching
Or perhaps Cerberus
bounding from the Underworld
with sounds and bleak insights
that transcend
the Information Threshold

Or just a disembodied eye
or just the darkening
shallow sky
or a cluttered
mindmad mind
or the starving
hollow wind

Might there be a face outside,
or a ghostly projected image ?
Or my frightening farmer-neighbour
who so dearly wants
to get rid of me ?

Or absolutely anything

Shall I open the door
and let in
anything ?

 

 

ELEGY FOR THE LAST WHITE RHINOCEROS
which, having thrived for 15 million years was wiped out in two generations

 

 

Das Bewusstsein unserer Sterblichkeit macht unser Dasein erst menschlich.

- Max Frisch

Primo Levi, survivor and chronicler of Auschwitz,
poet, novelist and suicide.
See http://www.giotto.org/piccolomini/levi.html

 

One definition of a Fascist might be: a person who claims that it takes more guts to keep on living than to commit suicide.

 

SUICIDE WHILE THE BALANCE OF HIS MIND WAS TEMPORARILY RESTORED Another motive for suicide is a variant of that guilt which haunted the survivors of the Nazi death-camps: guilt at simply having shelter and incredible availability of food - through no merit of one's own - while so many do not. The very unscientific study reported above entirely begs - of course - the question of the motive or reason for suicide. Suicide, like cannibalism and infanticide, is a great taboo in the present near-totalitarian World-Order, so these two highly rational (or explicable) behaviours frighten the highly-bred and nervous horses of reason. Suicide also comes in different qualities: messy, dramatic, neat, quiet, ambiguous (Camus ? Tchaikovsky ?), invisible, pathetic - and world-shaking: Jan Palach, the Czech student who set himself on fire in 1968; the World Trade Center kamikaze pilots. To group "suicides" together in a lumpen-category is rather like putting "gays" together in a tight, invented ghetto of unknowing. One can commit suicide out of shame (for one's family), guilt, grief, despair, the feeling that one has had enough, the knowledge that one should never have been born, or the awareness of the wrongness of being. Terminally-ill and suffering people may pull the plug out of their expensive life-support machines or ask others to do so. For the rest of us, it is a simple matter of a few sleeping-pills and a strong, air-tight plastic sack. 'Aboriginal' people often will themselves to die when they are herded into 'civilisation' where they appear (and are made to appear) useless. They will also drink themselves to death in a long, slow cultural suicide. 'Depression' is the 'black magic' or 'bad medicine' that the totalitarianism of 'normality' puts on the despairing for threatening the 'normals' by seeing the world as it is. The more angry might combine various ideological and personal motives and become hunger-strikers - as not so long ago in Turkey.) Suicide-bombers seek eternal bliss through martyrdom, out of sheer lifelong frustration, and humiliation by the whole world - including their Arab 'brothers'. The suicides of (for example) Primo Levi and John Berryman are hardly comparable. Nor are those of Sylvia Plath and Vladimir Mayakovski. And what is suicide, anyway ? Why did Dmitri Shostakovich never kill himself ? If ever there was good reason, his, like Mayakovski's would have been among the best. The deepest sadness is the knowledge that happiness is just the embracing of shallowness. Suicide is the only conclusion of utter grief, not 'merely' of suffering. Utter grief is the honest result of honest seeing. Those who talk of objectivity are careful to apply it only to a very narrow sector of their awareness - otherwise they might be forced to act with compassion - which involves, amongst other cans of worms, a serious consideration of the justifiability of suicide and the rightness of 'depersonalisation' or 'derealisation' - 'conditions' that many take drugs both to counteract and induce. In some societies suicide has been more acceptable than others. In Japan especially the practice is considered most honourable and is known as Jiketsu , which translates as 'taking control'. 'taking responsibility or 'self-determination'. Chinese women commit suicide in order to revenge-haunt, as malign ghosts, their oppressors. China is the only county where the suicide rate is higher for women than for men. In Ancient Greece and even 19th century Europe, suicide to redeem one's honour was not only acceptable in the ruling class, but de rigueur - as, famously, in the case of Tchaikovsky. Berserks and battle-suicides were an important element of the Nordic world-view (like suicide-bombers today), which also accommodated, as do many non-universalist religions, ritual murder. Universalist religions also practise ritual murder, but under the category of Punishment for Heresy. In Ancient Greece infanticide (not just of females) by exposure on hillsides was also widely practised - as was, we should remember, another modern bugbear: pædophilia. In the insanely-inanely-optimistic West we should realise that our horror and condemnation of suicide is the product of the three monotheisms which hate nature. This irrational optimism is the lynch-pin of Humanism - itself a quasi-secularised form of Christianity, as Professor John Gray of the University of London has pointed out. Humanism is Christianity without the silly stories, the nice pictures or the dancing in the aisles - it is an ultra-Puritanism, an unexamined Fundamentalism whose chief myth is the Myth of Progress. Armed with this, as the earlier empires were armed with The Book, we are squelching or have already squelched all other societies (not to mention all other species) with our hypocritical sentimentality, our unquestioning subservience to the Technological Imperative, our terrible machines and our insane, planet-destroying optimism. No wonder al-Qaeda has risen up in opposition like so many Dragon's Teeth! Among the 'lower' animals suicide is not unknown. There is the tragic case of the octopus trained to perform tricks for food. When his circus disbanded, he simply put into a tank and ignored. Unnoticed, his tricks produced no reward. Unstimulated, his colour slowly ebbed away (a sign of mood-deteriorations in octopi as well as humans), and, after performing his tricks to no effect a final time, he stabbed himself to death with his beak. Jonathan Dollimore suggests that the will to live and the wish to die "share the same obscure origins", quoting Byron: "...life's strange principle will often lie Deepest in those who long the most to die." This certainly seems to fit my case - or is it just that I haven't the guts to make the right decision and take the appropriate action ? Suicide can also be ritual self-murder. For some it is the ending of utter and unending fatigue. For others it is the closing of the door on immanent and overwhelming evil. The most interesting suicide is suicide of Self - for it can be studied while it proceeds. The death of the body occurs soon enough and appropriately afterwards.

"...horseman - pass by !"

 

top of page