Dark Contagion

Sweet Bleaders,

I like this discussion about suicide that has been going on around here.  You guys are wonderful and I'm proud to be working with you.  So I'll say something else too.   I think when people kill themselves it is like they open the back door on the plane and they accidently take some people with them.  In a poem I've posted here I say if you shoot yourself you crack the bio-dome.  (Here is The No Hemlock Rock on my blog in stanzas, I posted it here as a paragraph), I am prepared to insist that suicide should be morally forbidden is because it causes massive harm to the people who know you, and know of you, and know your work.  Most of the great atheists in history have asserted our right to take our own life, but I don't side that way.  They were emphasizing that we owe nothing to the universe, I am emphasizing that we owe this to each other.  

One thing that predicts suicide a little is having suicide in the family already.  If our community is in any way a family than what David said in his post has pretty much got to be true: Suicide is contagious. But it isn't respiratory, talking about it makes it less likely to fester and kill.

If you are dying and you want to hurry the thing up that's one thing, but if you just despise yourself and curse the air, tough tits, you have to stay.  

Make art, make a mess, climb on the furniture.  Scream and cry.  But don't kill yourself, for the sake of everyone else.  Please accept my thanks.  Thank you for not killing yourself.  I know how hard it is and I am grateful.  Thank you for staying.  Let's just owe that to each other.  

You don't have to understand everything all the time, just note that we are all connected and that if you write and publish and post you exponentially increase the number of people who get their hearts all scarred up just because you didn't know how much harm it would do.  So just don't.  If you would like a written thank you note, I suppose something could be arranged.   

Do you swoon for miss stevie smith (1902-1971)?  of course you do.  I think we could use a morsel of her or two.

First of all you should know this great poet story, so I'll remind: Coleridge always said that he wrote his great Kubla Khan after dreaming it in an opium-induced sleep, and that after he got a few stanzas down from this vivid dream a business man from the town of Porlock knocked on Coleridge's door and after their conversation ended, Coleridge went back to his desk, the dream had vanished.  That is why the full title of the poem is "Kubla Khan; or A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment." 

Okay, so here is the first part of smith's poem:

Person from Porlock 

Coleridge received the Person from Porlock 

And ever after called him a curse 

Then why did he hurry to let him in? 

He might have hid in the house.

It was not right of Coleridge 

in fact it was wrong (But often we all do wrong) 

As the truth is I think, he was already stuck 

With Kubla Khan. 

He was weeping and crying, I am finished, finished 

I shall never write another word of it, 

When along comes the Person from Porlock 

And takes the blame for it. 

It was not right it was wrong, 

But often we all do wrong.

Smith then goes on the tumble around in her nursery rhymes for a few stanzas, and then:

I long for the Person from Porlock

To bring my thoughts to an end

I am becoming impatient to see him

I think of him as a friend

 

Often I look out of the window

Often I run to the gate

I think, He will come this evening

I think it is rather late.

 

I am hungry to be interrupted

For ever and ever amen

O Person from Porlock come quickly

And bring my thoughts to an end.

 

*

 

I felicitate the people who have a Person from Porlock

To break up everything and throw it away

Because then there will be nothing to keep them

And they need not stay.

 

*

 

Oh this Person from Porlock is a great interrupter

He interrupts us for ever

People say he is a dreadful fellow

But really he is desirable.

 

Why should they grumble so much?

He comes like benison

They should be glad he has not forgotten them

They might have had to go on.

 

*

 

These thoughts are depressing, I know. They are depressing.

I wish I was more cheerful it is more pleasant

Also it is a duty, we should smile as well as submitting

To the purpose of One Above who is experimenting

 

With various mixtures of human character which goes best

All is interesting for him it is exciting, but not for us.

There I go again. Smile smile and get some work to do

Then you will be practically unconscious without positively having to go.

--stevie smith

Great isn't it? 

I think smith is advocating the idea that we must not kill ourselves because we have work to do -- when she's congratulates the people who are always being interrupted because they are not able to get any work done and because of that are able to: a) get up and leave their work and b) kill themselves, since in both cases, who cares since your not getting any work done anyway.  She envies them this freedom.

But then when she says why do people grumble, we sense she means why do people mind the coming of death? (which means that the person from Porlock is only figuratively the "interrupter" who stands for death, he is now actually death.  Many people can't get themselves to do the art they wished they did. Such people do not know, says smith, that being able to stay at it is not salvation.

And then there's that marvelous final stanza where you can almost feel her breath talking.  She doesn't resolve much here, and she isn't certain anything is worth anything, and her big final advice is sad and weird.  Yet what can I tell you.  All is actually interesting and some of it is exciting, though I suppose I wouldn't mind a bit more of the good exciting and less of the ones that make you feel like you are a dead lion and a hive has built a honeycomb in your chest.  It is interesting though. I think when she says it is only interesting to the eye that gazes at it without having to live it, and that is true in ways, at times, but still.   Leave the justifications up to me, you just stay.  From stevie to me to you, Smile, smile (or don't) and get some work to do, or do whatever you want to do to be unconscious without positively having to go.  But don't drink and drive.  

love,

Jennifer

Comments

[Laura Orem]

Jennifer, this is wonderful. And your image of the suicide opening the back of the plane and taking others with him is right on.

Thanks for sharing Stevie with us today, and thanks for your thoughtful explication of her poem.