In How Not to Kill Yourself Clancy Martin talks about the dearth urge. Do we harbor a hunger for death? It seems counter-evolutionary. You can’t procreate when you’re dead. But if you think about it, lifeforms are programmed to die. Opossums and octopuses living their best lives rarely get past a second birthday. We barely notice that plants chose parts of their bodies to kill off, perhaps to conserve resources, perhaps out of pique.
We all die. It seems wrong to think anyone could strive to. But just because something seems wrong doesn’t mean it isn’t real. Maybe suicidal thoughts are connected to the bedrock, the death urge bubbling up like hot lava into the thin air of consciousness.
Here is Clancy Martin on suicidal ideation as normal:
[W]e all desire [death], in much the same way we desire sex or food or love or fame. Some of us desire it unconsciously; some of us semiconsciously; and some of us, like me, can’t get the desire out of our heads. On this account, the suicidal person, and also the person who is often contending with suicidal ideation but not making a suicide attempt, is in her way giving death its due. She is not suppressing a part of her thinking that other people manage or subjugate more expertly.
Suicidal ideation is not a topic of your average conversation. If it is as standard in our heads as Martin suggests, wouldn’t it be more commonly talked about? Not that there aren’t universal experiences we somehow fail to process with our friends. Just about everybody masturbates, yet you’re unlikely to overhear the best brand of vibrator being discussed in a cafe. Sex is embarrassing. Death is, too.
source:
How Not to Kill Yourself: a portrait of the suicidal mind
by Clancy Martin
2023. Pantheon Books, New York
