suicidal ideation

“Suicidal ideation.” I think I heard that phrase first from doctors at the Community Hospital in Santa Rosa. I think about suicide. That’s what you’re doing when you ideate — you’re thinking. As one who can be mesmerized by a word I find myself toying with “ideate.” It’s such an unnecessary word, right? Who decided they needed it? The phrase, “suicidal ideation,” becomes detached from its meaning, and I laugh about ideating. Ideate about breakfast, ideate about the weather. I am ideating about thinking.  

My thoughts can get intense. Surprise. Suicidal thoughts among them. Telling people that makes them worry about you. Naturally. You don’t want to make people feel bad. You don’t want them to panic and call in the authorities. So you don’t say anything about it. It’s kind of embarrassing, isn't it? Suicide brings up strong emotions — many people become enraged at suicides, contemptuous even. You wouldn’t want to tell a person like that that you’ve been having suicidal thoughts. They’d get mad at you, sneer at you. 

I was intrigued by Clancy Martin’s memoir/self-help book How Not to Kill Yourself when I flipped it open and found Martin talking frankly about suicidal ideation and how it seems an unbanishable presence, whether he’s depressed or no. I haven’t come across that before. People thinking about suicide — they only do it in extremis. When they’re fucked up in the head. They don’t idly think about suicide while throwing a frisbee for the dog. Do they?

Although Martin suffers from chronic depression, he says suicidal ideation pops up on good days, too. Most of How Not to Kill Yourself is about that crisis point where thoughts shift to action. That makes sense. It’s where intervention is necessary, where the conflicted self needs to do something — hopefully to hold off death rather than jump into its arms. But I’d be curious to read accounts from people who experience suicidal ideation like a hangnail — an affliction that’s seemingly minor, in that a suicide attempt has not resulted, but where such thoughts niggle, tease, madden. 

In this passage Clancy Martin talks about the ambiguities of suicidal urges: 

Is it possible I don’t really want to die? Of course. You can want both things. On many days I did want both things: to die, so I didn’t have to live this life anymore, so that I could stop struggling, stop suffering, stop failing, stop disappointing — in an instant, all my problems, gone; and to live, because to die meant — who knew what it meant?

To die means the cessation of all pleasures as well as all pain. When the pain is overwhelming, joy ideation seems ridiculous, trivial. Joy? Fun? That’s nothing that will ever happen again. Besides, it’s so fleeting. It doesn’t have the grip that pain does. Does it? For someone?  

A friend recently said, “I think we are both mildly depressed.” I wanted to object, but why? Because it’s embarrassing? Because that suggests we need to be fixed? Lifted out of depression, made happy? Am I okay? I don’t know. I am maintaining — feeding myself, doing the dishes and laundry, scheduling get-togethers with friends. I am getting things done — tried on a drawerful of Kent’s tshirts, took a bag of clothes to the homeless shelter. There are a lot of things to do. I can panic over things undone. Not that panic helps anything. I remind myself. I relearn lessons, I pull out consciously composed scripts that have been helpful in the past. One-day-at-a-time atomizes to one-task-at-a-time, one-thing-at-a-time. The dishes, a bill, writing a list, asking myself what right now I could do that would bring pleasure. 

source:

How Not to Kill Yourself: a portrait of the suicidal mind

by Clancy Martin

2023. Pantheon Books, New York

there’s a psychedelic utopian community in the Amazon? why wouldn’t there be!

“Ceu de Mapia … Heaven of Mapia .. a psychedelic utopia … a town of six hundred people  … carved out of the jungle by devotees of Santo Daime, a religion based on ayahuasca, a drink brewed from psychoactive plants that triggers visions and euphoria. Santo Daime, the ‘holy gift,’ combines Catholicism with African and Amazonian nature religions. Its practitioners drink ayahuasca in group rituals that involve chanting and dancing all night long, everyone locked in a hallucinatory mind meld. …

Santo Daime was founded in Amazonia in the 1930s by a poor rubber tapper … Under [the] influence [of ayahuasca, given to him by native shamans] he looked up at the moon and saw the Virgin Mary, whom he called the Queen of the Forest. … Like the followers of many utopian movements before them, [the former rubber tapper’s followers] developed an ethos of self-sufficiency, living off the land in simple harmony with their environment. …”

Entirely self-sufficient the community never became. One recent way they’d found to bring money in was to harvest wild cacao and sell it to a German chocolate company. Luisa Abram was introduced to Heaven of Mapia because she had learned of wild cacao and was hoping to market it within Brazil itself. The German company had pulled out of the project so Luisa Abram putt-putted up in a little boat at an opportune time. Abram lugged back bags of unsold cacao beans and busied herself making chocolate out of them. The bars she made tasted terrible. 

After two years of struggling to figure out what she was doing wrong, Abram found a man who promised to help. “Luisa sent [Mark Christian] a couple of her [bad-tasting chocolate] bars … [Christian detected] ammonia, manure, ‘a lot of other detritus with it … cardboard, chalk, maybe even the blackboard itself.’” But Christian was familiar with these noxious flavors. They were the result not of bad beans but of bad processing. Cacao beans require a lot of careful processing to be edible. God knows what the German company thought of the beans they were buying, but the Mapia community had no idea what they were doing. 

Cut to the happy ending:

The Mapia community has been taught how to do all that processing in just the right way. Luisa Abram is making chocolate bars which rank among the best in the world. On a visit to the village Abram for the first time asks to partake of the ayahuasca ceremony. 

The preparation given her “was thick and bitter, like a mud smoothie. … Guitars and drums and maracas and flutes filled the air. … Luisa began to feel lighter as if she were floating in place. The dancing became effortless, the songs flowing through her. She closed her eyes and heard the trilling of the tree frogs … their rhythmic whoo-whoo merging with the singers … There was a second shot of Daime, and then a third. Waves of color poured through Luisa’s body, swirled around the church, flowed out into the night. … She lost track of where her body stopped and the next one started. … They were all in it together, all part of the forest.”

source:

Wild Chocolate: across the Americas in search of cacao’s soul

by Rowan Jacobsen

2024. Bloomsbury Publishing, New York

word of the day: raglan

word of the day: raglan

 context:

“[During an] 1895 interview, [Peter] Doyle brought out a raglan of [Walt] Whitman’s and explained, ‘I now and then put it on, lay down, think I am in the old times. Then he is with me again. … When I get it on and stretched out on the old sofa I am very well contented. It is like Aladdin’s lamp. I do not ever for a minute lose the old man. He is always near by.’” [ellipsis in the original]

definition (Merriam-Webster): a loose overcoat with raglan sleeves; raglan sleeves are sleeves that extend to the neckline with slanted seams from the underarm to the neck

Peter Doyle was one of Walt Whitman’s lovers. Whitman only had a few with whom he was together long enough that one could see the two as a couple. Whitman loved getting his portrait taken but he was typically solo. There’s a well-known photograph of Peter and Walt facing each other, clearly gazing into each other’s eyes. 

They parted ways, but not acrimoniously. Peter Doyle came to Walt Whitman’s graveside service. It seems he “almost was not admitted.” There were, however, at least two close friends of Whitman who remembered Doyle and made sure he could stay. One of them, Horace Traubel, conducted the 1895 interview three years after Whitman’s death. 

source:

Calamus Lovers: Walt Whitman’s working class camerados

edited by Charley Snively

1987. Gay Sunshine Press, San Francisco, CA

acknowledgments

A book of poetry almost always includes an acknowledgments page, where the poet thanks magazines for publishing poems that are now being collected. I read two recent books by good poets, and looking over the lists of their prior publications I see few magazines appear on both— wait, I see no overlap at all. Huh. That’s interesting in its own way.  

Poet #1: 

The Adroit Journal

BODY Poetry

Beloit Poetry Journal

Colorado Review

Diode

Frontier Poetry

Gulf Stream Magazine

Harpur Palate

H.O.W. Journal

Indiana Review

LAMBDA Literary’s Poetry Spotlight

The Los Angeles Review

The Missouri Review

Narrative Magazine

Nashville Review

New South 

Nimrod International Journal 

Ninth Letter

North American Review

Passages North

Thrush Poetry Journal

Tinderbox Poetry Journal 

Tupelo Quarterly

Waxwing

West Trade Review

Poet #1’s book is out from BOA Editions.

Poet #2:

Wise Owl

Old Red Kimono

Avant Appalachia

Tenth Muse

Clamor

Pulsar

San Antonio Review

Schuykill Valley Review

Steam Ticket

Lullwater Review

Uppagas

Amulet

Whistling Shade

NOD Magazine

US1 Worksheets

Umbrella Factory

Door Is A Jar

California Quarterly

Pinyon Review

Isotrope

Kennings

Bethlehem Writer’s Roundtable

Havik

Illya’s Honey

Off Course

Firelight

EKL Review

Abbey

South Florida Poetry Journal

Floyd County Moonshine

Shot Glass Journal

Suisin Valley Review

Poetry Superhighway

Chronopolis

Lost Pilots

Adelaide Literary Magazine

Fourth and Sycamore 

Triggerfish

Trajectory

Blueline

Doubly Mad

Cool Beans Lit

In Between Hangovers

Perceptions

La Presa

Poet #2’s book is out from Cyberwit.

The magazines publishing Poet #1 are mostly known to me. I published in one of them. Many of the others have declined my poems. These are relatively high prestige venues. Poet #1 hasn’t hit the heights of Poetry Magazine or Paris Review, but the magazines he lists are very competitive. If you look at the names in a current issue you will recognize some — that is, if you recognize the names of contemporary poets. 

Many of the magazines publishing Poet #2 are unfamiliar. I have published in four of them and been rejected by a few others. I will look up more of them, curious to see what they’re like. Some have such fun names! Old Red Kimono, Whistling Shade, Umbrella Factory. Wouldn’t telling people I have a poem in Umbrella Factory get their attention more than telling them I had a poem in Indiana Review? Indiana Review is a handsome, perfect-bound, digest-sized literary magazine, the kind of product that, as a baby poet, I remember awe-fully flipping through at the newsstand or library. Whereas Umbrella Factory (I just looked it up) is web-only. Umbrella Factory’s latest issue has six writers in it, so they must be pretty picky, even if I don’t know them as “prestige.” But then, I don’t recognize the names of any of the six.  

Based on these lists, which poet would you rather be, Poet #1 or Poet #2.

The careerist in me (yes, he’s still alive, the fucker) says Poet #1. The populist in me says Poet #2. The realist in me would be thrilled to be either. 

word of the day: autochthonous

word: autochthonous 

context: 

“as long as the States continue to absorb and be dominated by the poetry of the Old World, and remain unsupplied with autochthonous song, to express, vitalize and give color to and define their material and political success, and minister to them distinctively, so long will they stop short of first-class Nationality and remain defective.”

definition (Merriam-Webster):

 

1: INDIGENOUS, NATIVE

an autochthonous people

autochthonous plants

2: formed or originating in the place where found

autochthonous rock

an autochthonous infection

*

You really need to know the meaning of today’s word in order to understand Walt Whitman’s assertion. The context is enough to figure it out, but it is helpful to have a dictionary pin it down. Merriam-Webster gives the etymology too:

auto-, meaning "self," and chthōn, meaning "earth."

That’s from the Greek. The first use of autochthonous appears here: “English literary critic William Taylor [wrote] in 1805: ‘The English have this great predilection for autochthonous bread and butter’ (rather than French bread, one might safely presume).”

There's more autochthonous song in America than in Whitman's time. But are Americans less "defective"? It's nice to think so. 

source:

The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of Walt Whitman

edited by James E. Miller Jr

1959. Riverside Editions / Houghton Mifflin, Boston

“the air was full of the sounds of other boys”

Three of the founding members of the British rock band Genesis — Peter Gabriel, Paul Rutherford, and Tony Banks — went to boarding school together. 

“Gabriel later recalled his first night in a new dormitory: ‘The air was full of the sounds of other boys either crying or masturbating or both.’”

You’re not supposed to let that get out, are you? There’s some talk in a Mojo Magazine article about how “public school,” as they term it in Britain, with its cliques and bullies and aggressive teachers, yet also with its escapes of literature and drama, was the origin of the Genesis project, which mixed R&B and opera, Motown and psychedelia — and crying and masturbating? What could be more formative?

source: 

“Alpha and Omega”

by Mark Blake

Mojo Magazine

n. 377, April 2025