suicidal ideation, part II

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 choose 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

top or bottom?

“A white child born into the upper-income quintile was five times more likely to stay there than fall to the bottom. A black child born into the upper-income quintile was as likely to fall to the bottom as to remain rich.”

The federal government collects a lot of information, what Michael Lewis calls, “big pools of raw facts.” In his book on the career civil service, Lewis profiles people who rarely get any publicity, who aren’t paid a whole lot, but who regularly tackle incredibly difficult problems, people who sometimes get amazing things done. During the Obama administration DJ Patil was tasked with making that “big pool of raw facts” available to the public, especially “people who could make new sense of it.” 

As one example Lewis talks about what was learned concerning the distribution of wealth in this country. “A team of researchers at Stanford … used newly accessible data from the Internal Revenue Service … to study Americans across generations and the census data [let them] compare [Americans] by race, gender, or whichever trait [the researchers] wished to isolate.” The data showed that younger generations aren’t improving their lives the way older generations did. “Every year, the economic future of an American child was a bit less bright. And the big reason was not lower rates of economic growth but the increasingly unequal distribution of money.” The rich were getting richer — and that trend only seems to be getting faster. 

Sounds familiar, mostly. The lines about race that I quote at the top of this post surprised me, however. Yes, I knew advantages are disproportionately distributed — that is, white people get more of them. But a rich family has advantages, whatever the family’s skin color. Money gives you opportunities, connections, education, a cushion in emergencies. Whether or not that’s the same across all races, it can’t be so very different, right? Money is money. That any rich kid could be as likely to become poor (“fall to the bottom”) as to remain rich strikes me as hard to believe. There are quintiles in between rich and poor, after all. Wouldn’t a rich kid — even a rich black kid — be more likely to drop a quintile or two or three rather than drop all the way to the bottom fifth? I mean, dropping from the top to the bottom — that’s a long way to fall. Still, the data sounds alarming — such a dramatic difference in lived experience for blacks versus whites, even among the wealthiest.  

source:

The Fifth Risk

by Michael Lewis

2018. W. W. Norton & Co., New York

fires

“How do we comprehend the stars? In our system, you know, our galaxy — and the next galaxy? But all over there are things happening, not just here on our little planet. I think it’s really useful to think about it, because then if a fire wipes out these paintings, it’s not such a huge, big deal; it’s not so big.”

That’s Jan Wurm, a painter, in conversation with Richard Whittaker. 

A fire is wiping out swathes of Los Angeles as I write. According to a Forbes breaking news update, “At least 2,000 homes, businesses and other buildings have been destroyed … so far.”

A friend, a painter, tells me that he burned one hundred paintings. He says his friends were horrified. “Give them to us,” they told him. He shakes his head. “You know, the paintings weren’t really good. I looked at them. I decided they weren’t good. Once I’d burned them I felt relieved. I think it was the right thing.”

It was the covid shutdown that prompted him to do this, he says. He had time to look over his archive and burning presented a way to clear things out. 

I confess I was a bit stunned. I am not a burner. I have friends who have burned diaries — one tells me she regrets that now. I have a friend who burns the drafts of her poems. Read biographies and you come across people who’ve burned their correspondence. The burning of diaries and correspondence is motivated at least partly by shame or the fear that secrets will be made public, burning a permanent hiding. 

Was there anything of that in my painter friend’s choice to burn his works? He paints frequently so he has many paintings. He did not burn everything. Does he still have hundreds of unburnt paintings? 

Much is being lost in Los Angeles. All that loss is involuntary. I look at my shelves of diaries and working notebooks, magazines in which my poems appear, and I know it’s possible that a fire could tear through Berkeley and turn them all to ash. I think about building a fire proof vault. I think about scanning everything, save it digitally — in the cloud? It’s a big job. It’s the sort of mindless job somebody could be hired to do. But then they’d be privy to all my secrets! 

When I go through Kent’s things I put aside his writings. Little of it is art. It’s primarily employment law educational materials, newsletters, memos. Some of it is clever, even witty, with Kent trying to make the subject matter fun enough to keep people awake. 

What to do with this stuff? 

The purging of fire can relieve one of the responsibility of dealing with it all. If it’s all gone, there’s nothing more to worry about. Fire or no, one could just walk away, let fate take it. Usually that means some stranger carting it all to the dump. In a galaxy in which stars explode and planets are shredded by black holes, what’s a few paintings, a few poems? 

Jan Wurm says, “One of the reasons I love drawing so much is that it is inherently impermanent. It’s on a piece of paper that’s going to fall apart, and that’s the end of it. It’s very liberating because, in a sense, what you’re doing doesn’t really matter. So you can do anything.”

source:

“The Social Contract — a conversation with Jan Wurm”

Works & Conversations, n.43

(a magazine)

Richard Whittaker, editor 

“This is a life different from anything I had imagined.”

Excerpts from “None, I think,” a poem by Lise Menn:

“This is a life different from anything I had imagined. 

You are not here, you will never be here again.

There is no point in waiting for you.

You are, of course, everywhere, 

In this house full of our lives together.

But all thoughts of you are recollections.

There is nothing more to anticipate.

Everything about you is back, back, in some past, dreamed or remembered.

I live in a strange, quiet place.”

These are fewer than half the lines of Lise Menn’s poem about life after her husband died. I recognize in them my own experience. I did not know how to imagine a life without my husband. I did not try. Despite the oncologist’s dire prognosis, Kent seemed to be doing okay. He was alive. I wanted to live with him while he was alive. Even now, I don’t know what I could have done to prepare for his death. 

When Kent was first diagnosed with cancer 14 years ago, he found an estate attorney to make him a living trust. In the early weeks of this year Kent asked a lawyer friend for current recommendations so that I would have someone to help me administer the trust. Because of the trust no court had to get involved. That was Kent looking out for me. 

Kent and I were together for 30 years. Kent was my only long term relationship. We met when I was 28. Back in my teens and twenties I was mostly alone. I didn’t have a series of boyfriends. I wanted one. I wanted a lover very much, and I felt terribly lonesome. I did make friends here and there, and I didn’t live a sexless life. But I didn’t get the intimacy I yearned for. Not until Kent. 

I’d been going to a board games night at the LGBT community center in Berkeley. The people there were nice enough, but I wasn’t spending time with them beyond the games. (I was surprised when I’d hear others laughing about going sailing together or some other outing.) When Kent showed up he was taken with me right away. Six years older, he was close to my age. He displayed a sharp wit and I liked looking at him. Kent had had boyfriends before me. I don’t know how long he was with any of them, but I got the feeling he was the marrying kind. Relationships break up. I think my longest was three months, but if you add up all the time he and I were actually together it was more like two weeks. 

Kent liked to tell a story about how we met. We were playing Trivia Pursuit. We may even have been on the same team, and this question came up: “In the 1980 election who was the dream team?” Kent was bowled over when I knew the answer. Some politicos thought it would be amazing to have presidential candidate Ronald Reagan choose ex-Pres Gerald Ford as his running mate. That would be a dream team! I was fourteen at the time, but I was paying enough attention to politics that I picked up this tidbit. It didn’t seem to me a president would want as his VP a former president. You want the vice president (and everybody else) to be clear on who’s in charge. Ronald Reagan had the same thought, I guess. 

30 years of memories is something, isn’t it? I feel lucky I had all that time with him. He is everywhere in this house full of our lives together. But Kent is not here. And I have to figure out a new life without him. You may hear me saying the same thing next month or a year from now. I really don’t know. I am the one in the present, the one who has to look to a future. I want a lover. I want company. It seems so strange that any person coming into my life will be wholly different, not Kent at all. 

source: 

The Widows’ Handbook: poetic reflections on grief and survival

edited by Jacqueline Lapidus and Lise Menn

2014. Kent State University Press, Kent OH

I swear I won't call no copper, if I'm beat up by my papa. Tain’t nobody's business

In his recent memoir Siya Khumalo includes feminist critiques of men and homophobia. 

I once heard some of my friends discuss violence against women. Without exception, they, male and female, agreed it was unacceptable for a man to hit a woman who is not his own girlfriend. Consider, also, a conversation I overheard at a bus stop. ‘I don’t date a man who doesn’t beat me,’ one woman was saying. Her friends thought this was excessive; it was enough for him to warn and threaten to beat her, wasn’t it?

But the first woman’s argument was, how would she know that he really cared to have her (and have her to himself) unless his jealousy and possessiveness boiled over now and then? … By offering her body to patriarchy’s son, this lady at the bus stop was serving her role in the tribe perfectly.”

The woman who needed to be beaten, Khumalo says, was helping to reinforce the culture of wife-beating. She had become an advocate for her own victimization, seeing violence against women as a necessary proof that men were … I don’t know … too stupid to resolve disputes without fists? so incontinent with their feelings that they easily lost control? only strong enough to pick a fight with a weaker opponent? 

Hatred of gay people is of a piece with wifebeating, Khumalo says. 

Homophobia isn’t a stand-alone prejudice. It’s normalised so all other violence and bigotry may be tolerated when it comes.

Tolerable prejudices are the gateway drug to harder stuff, the solvent in which the next scapegoating prejudice can dissolve.

No one who hates his brother, whom he has seen, can claim to love God, whom he has not seen.

source:

You Have to Be Gay to Know God

Siya Khumalo

2018. Kwela Books, Cape Town, South Africa

a mine in Madagascar

Katherine Standefer has a rare genetic condition that makes her heart go into fibrillation with seemingly little provocation. When a heart is fibrillating, it’s basically just quivering, which means it’s not pumping blood, and one cannot live long without blood on the move. A defibrillator is a machine that shocks the heart back into its regular rhythm. Only in the last couple of decades have doctors figured out a way that a defibrillator can be inserted into the body so that the quivering heart can be shocked back into useful activity immediately, no EMT necessary; you can be hiking in the wilderness and your internal defibrillator will be ready to rescue you, no helicopters, no doctor on the trail. It sounds great. And Katherine Standefer thought it meant her life had been saved. 

It certainly meant her life had been changed.

Katherine Standefer’s medical memoir gets its title, Lightning Flowers, from the aftermath of a lightning strike. It seems that a person struck by lightning may end up with a sort of tattoo as the electricity surges through the body, the patterns of capillaries just under the skin visibly seared close enough to the surface that they look, well, not flowerlike so much as “arborescent,” as the Free Dictionary puts it. Something to show off if you survive, I guess.

Standefer never refers to any lightning flowers of her own, but she does undergo painful electric shocks, which may or may not save her life. 

She becomes curious about where the device came from. Who made it? Standefer even travels to mines in Madagascar to see firsthand where metals essential to the Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator (ICD) are dug up. There is no unalloyed good in what Standefer learns. Mining, for one thing, is hard on the land, and on the people who depend upon what grows upon the land, the water that flows over and through it, and, of course, mining is extraordinarily hard on the plants and animals whose habitat is ground up.

Nevertheless not all of the change is bad for the people of Madagascar. Some of the people experience the power of the government-like multinational corporation that comes in to run the mining operation and see what a competent government might do for its citizens. Madagascar doesn’t have the kinds of roads, bridges, schools, or power plants that, suddenly, people see can exist, as the mining company seemingly drops such things from the sky. 

Katherine Standefer describes contrasts between those who have been helped, those who have been harmed, and those whose lives have seemingly remained the same. They all have opinions. “Perhaps the source of the heartbreak was this: however much a Western presence in these towns created strife, it also came with a brief bright hope — that someone, at long last, would accountable for improving their lives.”

source:

Lightning Flowers: my journey to uncover the cost of saving a life

by Katherine E. Standefer

2020. Little, Brown Spark, New York

Jesus, failed writer

I wasn’t sure what to make of Stephen Marche’s On Writing and Failure. Much of the essay is stories of writers down on their luck, the implication being that’s the standard situation. He stretches that to include famous and bestselling writers by suggesting they, too, often feel undervalued and ill-done-by. Marche digs back into history for the misfortunes of Herman Melville and Jane Austen, then much farther back to ancient China when Tu Fu and Li Po (or Du Fu and Li Bai, as Marche’s choice of transliteration spells them) wandered the nation trying to put together a living, or even back to Confucius who, it seems, couldn’t find a new patron and, one gets the sense, starved to death. The essay culminates with a paragraph on the Son of God:

Jesus Christ may be the most failed writer. He preached love as clearly and as evocatively as possible. In return, his friends betrayed him, his people turned against him, the authorities crucified him. After his death, his disciples gathered a bunch of his speeches into a handful of potted biographies that contradict one another and their world took to massacring his own people on the basis of what they thought he meant. Two thousand years later, Jesus has over a billion devoted fans. They get together, sometimes once a week or more, to read his stuff out loud* to each other. A career could not have gone much worse or better.

Well, that takes your thesis to the apex, Mr Marche. After reading the above I was even less sure what I was to take away. I don’t aspire to Jesus-level consequences for my work. I don’t even dream of paying the bills with my writing. I do suffer. Yeah. There’s that.

source:

On Writing and Failure

or, On the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer

by Stephen Marche

2023. Biblioasis, Windsor ONT Canada

*update 10/10/23: David in a comment notes that I posted this as "out lout" -- perhaps Jesus fans were trying to out lout each other? It was merely I typo so I am correcting it. Funny tho.

Bad Weather

In an essay exploring possible turning points in the life of philosopher William James, Louis Menand defines Depression the way I do:

Commentators prefer to assume that [William] James was despondent in the years after his graduation from medical school because of some problem — a family problem, a sexual problem, a career problem, an identity problem, a philosophical problem. But depression is not a problem; it’s a weather pattern. Under its cloud, everything else is a problem. When the weather changes, these problems disappear or become ‘opportunities’ or ‘challenges’ — until dark skies return.

Depression can certainly be triggered by events in one’s life. You may be able to pinpoint the thing that “made” you sad. But if you can’t, that doesn’t mean you’ve failed. There might not be a concrete causal factor. Even if you find something you think must have brought it on, addressing it directly often does not blow the Depression away. Sometimes all you can do is endure until the bad weather passes. 

source:

American Studies

by Louis Menand

2002. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York

Compare the Central Americans to the Irish?

I try to pay attention to what’s going on in Latin America, my major at Cal was Latin American Studies, after all. But Latin America doesn’t lead the news in the US, unless events there impinge on us, and even then the slant is often unsympathetic. The rage on the American right wing against immigrants from the south seems mostly racism — and, yeah, deeply antagonistic, way beyond unsympathetic. Sadly, even in news sources that aren’t pushing an anti-immigrant agenda, the lede is how US authorities are dealing with the immigrants rather than the root causes that force them to leave their homes. I could have delved deeper into what has caused such trauma recently --  in Central America in particular -- but I confess I really haven’t. I remember the civil wars of the 80s and 90s, but I hear that deaths and crime has spiked in the 2010s and 2020s beyond even those horrible times. Yet there are no rebel armies to negotiate with. 

So I’m reading a book on coffee, where it originated, how it spread throughout the world, and what its current situation is, and I come across this passage:

In 2013, coffee rust affected 74 percent of El Salvador’s crop, 70 percent of Guatemala’s, and 25 percent of Honduras’s, causing losses of nearly two hundred thousand jobs in the trio of countries. … Coffee was the livelihood for more than two million Central Americans. For many of those households, it was their sole source of income, money they used to cultivate staple foods. Jobless farmworkers poured into the cities looking for employment. Gang membership increased. Violence surged. El Salvador became the word’s murder capital, only to be overtaken by Honduras in 2016. Parents sent their children north, often unaccompanied and entrusted with coyote smugglers, passing through a series of way stations as they tried to reach extended family in the United States. … ‘To discuss the current Central American immigration crisis without talking about the coffee rust,’ one newspaper wrote, ‘is like talking about the 1845 Irish immigration without mentioning the “potato blight.”’

As my source was published in 2017, I looked at current news for an update. Says a December 2021 Reuters story: “[T]his year has been particularly ruinous, according to interviews with about a dozen farmers across the region, the heads of one regional and three national coffee institutes plus an executive at a U.S.-based international coffee association.” Damn. 

source: 

Where the Wild Coffee Grows: the untold story of coffee from the cloud forests of Ethiopia to your cup

by Jeff Koehler

2017. Bloomsbury, New York

The road that didn’t get here

I’ve been dealing with bouts of envy. This is not new, exactly, but I am old now (55) so it just seems more critical. I want my writings collected in books, which are available in bookstores and libraries. I want to go on a book tour. I don’t want to have to do it all myself. My ambitions seem pretty modest. I don’t expect to write bestsellers, or have Terry Gross suck my Fresh Air or sit on a panel at the Big Book Fair (none which I would scorn, however).

When I came across Jesse Browner’s How Did I Get Here?: making peace with the road not taken, I thought, maybe he’ll offer some consolation, this successful writer offering up an essay about how unsuccessful he is — like me, minus the successful part. 

And some of it just made me roll my eyes. Really? He’s complaining about a life that sounds similar to one I dreamed of as a kid. Polyglot, in his 20s Browner got a well-paid and intellectually stimulating job at the United Nations, married and had two daughters and is still married, and is regularly publishing books. Browner thinks he’s a failure because his books don’t pay his bills, he never sees anybody reading his books on the subway, and he’s not a bohemian living only for his art. Browner’s romantic views of poverty are not mine. I always hated being poor, whereas I used to dream of being an interpreter at the UN. That job seemed so important, if unsung. I have studied other languages, not to no avail but well shy of fluency. I don’t know that I ever had particular dreams about kids of my own, but I like kids, and in one of those alternate universe versions of my life (the kind of musing Browner does quite a bit in the book) I imagine myself as a father. 

But I did end up liking How Did I Get Here? Like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, “On the one hand … but on the other hand …”, Browner tries out different ways of thinking about his situation. The essay is framed by a discussion of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” and Browner does a good thorough reading of that poem. It’s a far more ambiguous poem than its reputation suggests. “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.” I like the way Browne even allows that the outcome of that fateful decision might have been terrible. The poet doesn’t really say. The mood of the poem seems wistful and satisfied rather than anguished and regretful, but no concrete result is described. Wealth? Love? Good drugs? The monastery?

So let’s say you are an artist, and underappreciated. What advice does Jesse Browner have for you? Fortunately, it’s less advice and more example. Here’s what I wrestled with in my head, kids. Maybe it will mean something to you?

My favorite line in the book is this one (by “work” he means his writing, not his day job):

My work was there to keep me alive, and it was doing exactly what it was supposed to do, but I was asking it to make me happy, and that was not its job.

With all big dreams of capturing the world’s attention unfulfilled, how then does the work serve? With commitment to one’s art not bringing satisfaction and contentment as one had expected, is there any point in doing it? To live. Really? To live?

Rereading the quote out of the context of Jesse Browner’s argument I see that “work” he’s referring to could also be the day job … so long as it keeps you alive. (Browner does explore this idea when he discusses Franz Kafka’s oft-voiced distaste for his day job, one at which, Browner says, Kafka actually excelled, moving up in the company and garnering much praise from his supervisors.)

And here we come upon one of my rare insights into the notion of the Blues. Why indulge sadness when you could strive to be happy? Well, there’s sadness in everything because nothing lasts forever. Happiness is great. I much prefer it. And I have a nagging tic of suicidal ideation. But for me the writing of a poem is the visiting of a place, and in that place that feels like a nexus many a disparate thread comes together into a cloth, or a poem. Browner also wonders what “meaning” is in the search for meaning. And I think we agree that the meaning is in the meaning, that is, meaning is an action, meaning is in the making of meaning (or maybe the searching). 

Live while you’re alive. 

source:

How Did I Get Here?: making peace with the road not taken

by Jesse Browner

2015. Harper Wave / HarperCollins, New York NY

Wizard of Oz as allegory

In her book on Modern Monetary Theory Stephanie Kelton touches on the most obvious, inarguable allegory of The Wizard of Oz:

The United States is the wealthiest country in the history of the world. But even when Americans were at their poorest during the Great Depression, we managed to establish Social Security and the minimum wage, electrify rural communities, provide federal housing loans, and fund a massive jobs program. Like Dorothy and her companions in The Wizard of Oz, we need to see through the myths and remember once again that we’ve had the power all along.

The Cowardly Lion was already brave, the Tin Woodman already compassionate (not what you’d expect for someone without a heart), and the Scarecrow (despite having a head stuffed with straw) took care to think things through. In other words, the Oz friends had to learn that what held them back were “myths,” as Kelton puts it. 

The myth Kelton addresses in her book is the myth that the U.S. is deeply in debt and we must continually cut spending in order to keep from going under. I’ve found this truism of Washington politics most curious in the case of our endless wars and so-called defense spending. There never seems to be an issue about paying for that stuff. And yet the economy doesn’t crash based on profligate military budgets. 

Don’t our taxes pay for everything the government does? No, says Stephanie Kelton. Taxes don’t actually pay for the federal government. The federal government self-funds — by printing money. Also, the federal government is never in debt. Those treasury bills bearing interest, that we can read as the federal debt? They’re not really a debt. They’re a way to get people to use the money the USA creates. 

There’s a lot more to Kelton’s argument, and I’m not sure I get it all. But before I read the book I knew there was plenty of money — there is plenty of money to do everything we need to do, everything that’s really a good idea, and a lot of silly, just-for-fun things. Stephanie Kelton backs me up on that. 

The last time I wrote about Wizard as allegory was back in 2012. 

source:

The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the birth of the people’s economy

by Stephanie Kelton

2020. Public Affairs / Perseus Books / Hachette Book Group, New York