70: The Question of Suicide

70

The Question of Suicide

“There is only one really serious philosophical question,

and that is suicide.”

THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS

Albert Camus

It never crossed my mind to write a spiritual musing on suicide until I heard Anna Maria Tremonti’s conversation with the twenty-six year old managing editor of The Walrus magazine on the CBC radio show The Current sometime after three o’clock this morning (I’m an insomniac); but it wasn’t what Graeme Bayliss had to say about his diagnosed clinical depression and thoughts of suicide, but what he didn’t say that inspired me to jump out of bed when the program ended and boot my computer to write today’s spiritual musing.

Suicide’s been in the news lately, not only because of the new right-to-die legislation that the Canadian government has just proposed on physician-assisted suicide, but because of the alarmingly high incidents of teenage suicides in the Northern Ontario First Nations community of Attawapiskat; but not once in all that I heard and read on suicide this past few weeks has anyone dared to bring up the subject of soul and the afterlife, as if there is nothing more to human life than our physical body; that’s what I found off-putting enough listening to Graeme Bayliss talking about his depression and suicide to write today’s musing.

It wasn’t that I didn’t feel for him, nor that I didn’t respect what he had to say about the government’s legislation on physician-assisted suicide not going far enough (he wants it to make provisions for the mentally ill also); but something about his whole attitude on suicide rubbed me the wrong way, and I had to take up his challenge of facing the nullifying void that comes with death because it went against everything that I have devoted my whole life to—finding the inherent meaning and purpose of our existence.

What’s the matter with this modern world, anyway? Are we afraid to bring up the word soul? Are we afraid to speak our thoughts on the afterlife for fear of being laughed at? This emerging dialogue on suicide has been force-framed within the paradigm of our mortal life, not within a framework large enough to include the possibility that we may just be more than our mortal physical body; and at the risk of putting myself out on the proverbial limb that will be sure to roll a few eyes, I have to share my thoughts on suicide that come from outside the spiritually suffocating little box of conventional thought. But where to begin?

The thought of killing yourself is terrifying, but I’ve had the good fortune to not once entertain—no, that’s not true; I did entertain the thought once when I was very low, just to see if it would take hold of me, but it didn’t. I guess I just wasn’t desperate enough to want to kill myself. But some people are, as Graeme Bayliss tells us when his clinically depressed state of mind pulled him down into a corner so dark that he felt there was no way out but suicide, and he seriously tried to kill himself “with an X-Acto knife and too much gin.” But he failed to see it through because he wasn’t serious enough to overcome the pressure of his primordial survival instinct, and he tried again another time as he tells us in his essay “Canada’s Assisted-Suicide Law Fails the Mentally Ill” in The Walrus (April 14, 2016): “Once, on my lunch hour, I walked down to a frigid Lake Ontario, there taking off my coat and shoes with the intention of taking a terminal swim. I backed out in part because, had I failed, I would’ve had to return to work and tell my colleagues why I was sopping wet,” which, no doubt, is why he loves the coy little poem “Resume” by Dorothy Parker (1925) that he discovered when he was 17, the same year that he was diagnosed “with a variety of mental illnesses, including clinical depression”:

Razors pain you;

Rivers are damp;

Acids stain you;

            And drugs cause cramp.

     Guns aren’t lawful;

                                                         Nooses give;

   Gas smells awful;

            You might as well live.

Was it his prevaricating nature that rubbed me the wrong way? Either you’re going to commit suicide or you’re not; you can’t have it both ways. But clinical depression can be nasty, and one cannot help but feel like taking their own life when despair overwhelms them, as it does Graeme Bayliss; that’s why I have to explore my thoughts on suicide in today’s spiritual musing, because there has to be another reason why this precocious young man’s attitude on suicide chafed me—which, ironically, I felt I knew but feared to explore.

When I jumped out of bed this morning bursting with the idea for today’s spiritual musing, I had a fleeting glimmer of what I had to say; and when I stepped into my writing den I reached into the bookshelf by the door and grabbed Jungian analyst Barbara Hannah’s book Striving Towards Wholeness, because I knew that what she wrote in the first paragraph of her book on man’s inherent teleological purpose was my entry point into my musing on this daunting issue of suicide that has gripped the Canadian psyche:

          “In earlier days it was self-evident that every living creature was striving to complete the pattern of its existence as fully as possible. In our rational times, however, with this ever-increasing demand for specialization, this fact seems to be almost forgotten, although in the unconscious the urge towards wholeness appears to have become all the stronger for being repressed and forgotten” (Striving Towards Wholeness, by Barbara Hannah, p. 1).

C. G. Jung, the Swiss psychologist and founder of Analytical Psychology whom Barbara Hannah studied under and wrote about in her intimate biographical memoir Jung: His Life and Work that I read twice while researching the origins of Jung’s psychology of the self and shadow, said something in an interview that expresses Hannah’s theme of man’s inherent teleological purpose with analogical clarity: “As each plant grows from a seed and becomes in the end an oak tree, so man becomes what he is meant to be. He ought to get there, but most get stuck,” and it was Jung’s goal in life to help people get unstuck so they could complete their journey to wholeness; and the question that Graeme Bayliss’s attitude on suicide that howled like Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream became painfully clear to me: why am I stuck?  And this, I hope to answer in today’s spiritual musing…

“Do you fear it?” Tremonti asked Bayliss.

“Yes. It's a terrifying thing. Again, it's getting over that hurdle of that instinct to survive. I mean, I fear pain as much as anyone else does. It's just a question of weighing one kind of pain - the physical - against another kind of pain, which is the emotional, the sort of unlifting pain that depression often leaves you with. Suicide remains a sort of taboo topic. It's still something that we speak about euphemistically. It's still something that the news doesn't like to report on. And it's still something that in many ways in literature and movies and so forth is romanticized, which is not true. It's grisly and horrible. But it is very much something that needs to be talked about…But one of the things that people talk about when they talk about suicide is the idea that it's cowardly. And that bothers me a lot. Because as I've said, suicide is a terrifying thing. To sort of commend yourself to nothingness is one of the most terrifying things I can possibly imagine. So the idea that it's cowardly to do that is, I think, extremely insulting and short-sighted…”

“Commend yourself to nothingness,” said the clinically depressed young man who’s been in therapy and on medication since the age of seventeen, inadvertently revealing his core belief that this life is all there is. No wonder death terrifies him, be it by suicide or whatever means. I’d be scared as hell too if I believed that when I die I’ll be sucked into a nullifying void of eternal nothingness; but that’s just what Bayliss believes. It doesn’t mean it’s true.

Sartre believed in man’s ineluctable nothingness, as did Albert Camus, and they spent their life trying to posit philosophical purpose to man’s “absurd” existence; but as much as I respected them for their intellectual probity when I studied them at university, I could not buy into their nihilistic philosophies, and I spent the most creative years of my life garnering the purpose and meaning of life from the world’s literature and my own life experience, which I’ve written about in books like Healing with Padre Pio, The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway, and The Pearl of Great Price and need not expound upon here..

Of course, proving that we have an immortal soul that does not die when we shuffle off this mortal coil and returns to life again to complete our journey to wholeness is another matter, as is the mystery of why we get stuck in the non-being consciousness of our shadow self that fosters feelings of hopelessness and despair that can drive one to suicide, but that’s for another musing on the redemptive art of dying before dying; all I wanted to do today was offer another perspective on suicide that may help relieve some of this social anxiety.

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69: A Precious Soul Moment

69 

A Precious Soul Moment 

At Food Basics in Midland, his shopping cart bulged with all the right foods, plenty of vegetables (carrots, kale, chard, broccoli, lettuce, and other greens), no meat but half a dozen packages of tofu, milk and other foods giving one the impression that this young man and his family were discerning, healthy eaters, which delighted me; in fact, his whole easy, natural demeanor pleased me. Here’s a man in charge of his life, I thought to myself.

He hadn’t quite placed all of his items onto the moving counter when he excused himself and reached over and grabbed a Coffee Crisp from the quick-sale shelf in front of the cash register. “I have to get my son a chocolate bar. I think this one’s his favorite,” he said, and went on bagging his groceries while the cashier punched through the remaining items.

He continued bagging while the cashier rang up the rest of his order, but his side of the counter was full and she placed the remaining items on the second counter, and then the young man paid the cashier and she began ringing up our order, and I went and waited for them to come through so I could bag them. As I waited, the young man was reaching over to my side to bag his remaining order. “I’m sorry. I’ve got a lot of groceries,” he apologized.

“There’s no hurry. I’m sure your little guy won’t mind waiting for his chocolate bar,” I said, and smiled at his characteristically Canadian courtesy.

“I don’t think he’ll mind,” said the young man. Actually, he wasn’t that young; perhaps middle thirties. But he had the appearance of a newly graduated science student on his first job, probably for the government, perhaps for the forestry or fisheries department. His sandy blond hair was longish, and he wore a white heavy hand-knitted turtle neck sweater, and a pair of high rubber boots. And by the look of his eyes and face, he hadn’t lost his idealism.

 “Are you sure you got your son the right chocolate bar?” I asked.

 “I hope so,” he said, smiling at my friendliness.

“I love Coffee Crisp too, I said. “Is your boy your only child?”

“Yes. Just one,” he said, with a serious smile which I took to mean that they had thought long and hard about how many children they would have; but that didn’t surprise me.

“And what’s his ambition when he grows up?” I asked.

“Oh, we’re giving him the choice to become whatever he wants,” the young man said proudly, just like any free-thinking modern-day parent would say.

I frowned and waited a moment before replying: “It’s great to let your young fellow follow his own bliss, but it’s hard out here without an education. I’d see to it that he gets a degree before letting him do his own thing. If you don’t mind my asking, what do you do?”

“I work for the government. I have a degree in engineering. I know what you mean, but we’d like to give our son the chance to make up his own mind.”

“That’s commendable and very liberal-minded, but without a good education the world can be harder than it need be. I’m a writer, but I had to take up a trade to survive.”

The young man started, as though hearing me for the first time, and our little exchange became something other, a precious moment of soul-to-soul communication, and his demeanor changed instantly. “You’re right. It’s hard enough out here without a degree.”

“Your son can follow his bliss, but make sure he’s ready for life first,” I said, as I began placing our groceries into the re-usable bags that Penny had brought with her.

The young man was ready to leave, but he didn’t know what to say; so I smiled and relieved him of his obligation, “It was nice talking with you.”

“Yeah, you too,” he said, and started to leave; but before leaving he turned and said to me, “I think I’m going to have a little talk with my son when I get home.”

“Before or after you give him his chocolate bar?”

“Before, I think,” he said, and smiled self-consciously. 

***

68:Was I a Man or a Jerk?

68

Was I a Man or a Jerk?

A Dying Writer’s Last Question

I was online researching the Canadian-born American writer Saul Bellow, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976, and I came upon his son Greg Bellow talking about his memoir Saul Bellow’s Heart that he wrote to show his father as he knew him growing up as opposed to the impression of the lionized writer that the public had of his famous father, and Greg related a fascinating anecdote about his father’s dying question that peaked my interest enough to explore the moral implications of that question in today’s spiritual musing.

Even to the very end, Saul Bellow was in moral conflict with himself; why else would he ask his friend for an honest answer to the question “was I a man or a jerk? Although I have only read two of Saul Bellow’s books, his novella The Actual and It All Adds Up, a nonfiction collection of some of his work which includes his Nobel Lecture, and one short story called “The Silver Plate,” I never read any of his major novels like Humbold’s Gift, Herzog, and Mr. Sammler’s Planet (the one I want to read is Ravelstein, which was based on his friend and author of The Closing of the American Mind, Professor Alan Bloom), but after all of my research on Bellow and his novels and listening to Zachary Leader talk about his biography The Life of Saul Bellow I elicited a strong impression of the writer that gave me a context to the final question of his long-lived life: “was I a man or a jerk?”

Why would a man who spent his whole life exploring the human condition in his novels ask such a question if he did not have moral reservations about his life? But let me relate the anecdote first as his son Greg told it in the You Tube video JST Presents: “Saul Bellow’s Spiritual Quest,” and then I can explore his father’s disturbing death-bed question. A man in the audience asked Saul’s son Greg Bellow the question, “I wonder if you know the manner of his dying? Were you with him when he died?”

“I was not,” Greg replied; and then the man asked, “Did you hear about how he handled the occasion?” That’s when Greg related the anecdote of his father’s final question.

Saul Bellow was in his bed at home dying and tended to by his fifth wife Janice, who was forty years his junior, and he was in and out of consciousness and had not awakened in a couple of days when his friend Gene Goodheart came to visit him.

 “Saul, Saul,” said his friend, trying to wake him up, and Saul opened his eyes and saw his friend and said, “Gene, I want to ask you a question if you give me an honest answer.”

“You know I’ll give you an honest answer,” said Gene Goodheart.

 And Saul said, “Gene, was I a man or a jerk?”

We don’t know what Gene Goodheart answered, but Saul’s son Greg interpreted his father’s question to mean that he was still wrestling with his conscience. “In other words, he had moral courage to the end, to be able to assess himself, to be able to criticize himself. That’s what I know, and I don’t think he lasted anther few days,” he replied to the man who asked Greg about his father’s death; but if I were asked to give an answer to Saul Bellow’s dying question, I would have to say: “He was both.”

Saul Bellow was the same as any other person in the world, only more exaggerated because he was a very gifted writer who explored his own conflicted nature through his novels; that’s why he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work.”

Like every writer who taps into the consciousness of their times and becomes a witness to their generation, Saul Bellow reflected the human condition in his fiction as he experienced it in the inescapable dynamic of his Jewish heritage, mostly focused on Chicago where he lived, just as every other writer explores the same human condition in the dynamic of their own heritage, like mine for example which is Italian Canadian; but why would I say that this Quebec-born American Jewish writer who sacrificed everyone for his art was both a man and a jerk? That’s what I hope to explore in today’s spiritual musing…

“One cannot tell writers what to do. The imagination must find its own path,” wrote Saul Bellow in his Nobel Lecture; but the path that the writer takes may take him closer to the truth of the human condition than most people can bear. That’s why Bellow added, “Perhaps humankind cannot bear too much reality, but neither can it bear too much unreality, too much abuse of the truth” (It All Adds Up, “The Nobel Lecture,” p. 95); and that’s the dilemma that every writer must suffer, because the closer they get to the truth of the human condition the harder it is to bear it, which was why Saul Bellow’s conscience forced him on his deathbed to ask his friend Gene Goodheart “was I a man or a jerk?”

Just as an aside, if I may be allowed a moment of personal humor, I find the fact that Saul Bellow should ask a friend named Gene Goodheart for an honest answer to his deathbed question “was I a man or a jerk? to be so laden with irony that it would take a whole book to explain it; but it’s enough to know that the spirit of synchronicity has a playful sense of humor, and why this unpredictable spirit has often been called the Trickster.

Being a writer, I am acutely conscious of the fact that we cannot escape what we are, which has been the inspiration for such great works of literature as The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevens, and The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde; and Saul Bellow could not escape the fact that he was as much of a jerk (perhaps more so, depending upon one’s relationship with him) as he was the man he tried to be.

But that’s the dilemma that art cannot resolve, which was why the gifted young writer Katherine Mansfield told her redoubtable editor A. R. Orage that “art is not enough” and why I wrote in my own memoir The Pearl of Great Price, “Stories bear the truth of the human condition, and the human condition is the story of our becoming; but not until we solve the riddle of our becoming will literature resolve the issue of the human condition.”

Saul Bellow could not resolve the issue of his personal condition with the creative genius of his fiction, which is why he spent years studying the esoteric spiritual teachings of Rudolph Steiner, the founding father of Anthroposophy, and why Katherine Mansfield sought out the enigmatic teacher George Ivanovich Gurdjieff at his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau, France to study his radical teaching of self-transformation just before she died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-four.

But what is the central issue of the human condition that art cannot resolve? That’s the question that writers feel with every fiber of their being but cannot resolve with their art but which they have to explore to give expression to that lump of painful truth pushing at their heart, as another Nobel laureate Alice Munro expressed the writer’s compulsion to write; what is this lump of painful truth that has to find expression in a writer’s work?

The prescient literary critic Professor Harold Bloom, author of Novelists and Novels, among many other brilliant books of literary criticism, caught a glimpse of this lump of painful truth pushing at Saul Bellow’s heart and had this to say about the aesthetic mystery of Bellow’s literary achievement: “His heroes are superb observers, worthy of their Whitmanian heritage. What they lack is Whitman’s Real Me or Me Myself, or else they are blocked from expressing it” (Novelists and Novels, p. 419).

This “Real Me or Me Myself” is that lump of painful truth forever pushing at the writer’s heart and what they seek with their fiction, which became the theme of my literary memoir The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway because like Saul Bellow my literary mentor and high school hero Ernest Hemingway also died unresolved, which he confessed to in his memoir A Moveable Feast, the book that he was working on just before taking his own life.

“When I saw my wife again standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs at the station, I wish I had died before I ever loved anyone but her,” wrote Hemingway at the end of A Moveable Feast, speaking of his first wife Hadley Richardson whom he betrayed with his affair with Pauline Pfeiffer, the woman who seduced and stole him away from Hadley but who was to be replaced by the journalist Martha Gellhorn, and she by his fourth wife Mary Welsh; and Saul Bellow’s son Greg tells us in his memoir Saul Bellow’s Heart that his father confessed to him that he wished he had never divorced Greg’s mother, his first wife; but he did divorce her, and four more wives later he’s in bed dying full of regrets.

And if I may, risking the esoteric flavor of my humor, I honestly feel that Saul Bellow’s friend Gene Goodheart was providentially sent to visit Saul on his deathbed to let him know, in that playfully synchronistic way, that lacking in the virtues of a good heart one will always risk being a jerk in life. It was like the medieval morality play The Summoning Everyman and Mr. Good Heart went to Saul, who was also summoned by God for a reckoning, and found him lacking in the virtues of a good heart, and the delicious irony of Saul Bellow’s life was that he failed to see his answer to his dying question in his good friend Gene Goodheart’s name.

───

67: Honoring Truth: The Jian Ghomeshi Verdict

67

Honoring Truth

The Jian Ghomeshi Verdict

A Freudian slip inspired today’s spiritual musing…

I sent an email to my neighbor, who was in Florida for the remainder of the winter, in response to his objectionable comment on the Jian Ghomeshi trial (the disgraced former CBC Radio host was charged and acquitted on four counts of sexual assault and one count of overcoming resistance by chocking, charges that my neighbor found “ridiculous”), but when I checked my email the following day I noticed that I had made a Freudian slip in my email to my neighbor in the sunny state and promptly sent him another to correct myself:

Sorry, Freudian slip… I wrote that Jian was found guilty but not exonerated when I meant that he was found not guilty but not exonerated.  I guess that shows my unconscious bias. Incidentally, I owe our neighbor up the street a breakfast; we bet on Ghomeshi’s trial, I that he would be found guilty and Dave that he would get off. Dave won the bet and I owe him breakfast. But in all honesty, I honor the judge’s decision and got a good insight into our justice system and am immensely proud of how it works; but what would have happened had the complainants honored their oath to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Funny, how one’s shadow comes out to sabotage our lives like it sabotaged the lives of the three complainants in the Ghomeshi trial…

I was a lifelong fan of the CBC Radio show that Jian Ghomeshi cleverly usurped from Shelagh Rogers, who inherited it from the famous Peter Gzowski who inherited it from the stage actor/broadcaster Don Harron, but over time I began to hate the show because of my growing antipathy for Jian Ghomeshi’s personality, which I wrote about in a spiritual musing (“What’s in a Name? The Jian Ghomeshi Scandal”) that I posted on my blog on December 13, 2014, and as shameless as it may be to admit, I was hoping that he would be found guilty on all counts; which, no doubt, was the reason for my Freudian slip in the email.

A Freudian slip is an unintentional error revealing subconscious feelings, and my feelings about Jian Ghomeshi were that he was guilty as sin on all charges (he openly admitted on social media after he got sacked from the CBC that he was into “rough sex” and that his private life was no one’s business but his own), but he was found not guilty.

I followed the trial closely and listened to all the professional commentary, and when I heard Justice William B. Horkins’s ruling acquitting the disgraced former CBC host of all charges, I was not surprised but disappointed. I did take solace in the judge’s ruling though, because it did not exonerate Ghomeshi of all the charges, only acquitted him.

 “My conclusion that the evidence in this case raises a reasonable doubt is not the same as deciding in a positive way that these events never happened,” wrote Justice Horkins in his 25-page ruling. “At the end of this trial, a reasonable doubt exists because it is impossible to determine, with any acceptable degree of certainty or comfort, what is true and what is false.” And reasonable doubt was raised because the three complainants did not take their oath to tell the truth seriously, which Justice Horkins concluded tainted their testimony.

Curiously enough, as synchronicity would have it whenever I’m called upon to write a spiritual musing, on the evening of the Jian Ghomeshi verdict I was watching a movie on TV called Flipped, directed by Rob Reiner, about an obsessively shy boy who had a strong crush on the girl next door but who lacked the courage to be truthful with her and always ended up in a pickle, and the boy’s grandfather said something to him which was highlighted in that magical way when the silent voice of synchronicity speaks to me: “It’s about honesty, son. Sometimes a little honesty at the beginning can save a lot of grief down the road.”

I can’t begin to imagine the humiliation that the complainants in the Ghomeshi trial must have felt after Justice Horkins publically castigated them for not honoring their oath to tell the whole truth (they failed to disclose that they had contact with Jian Ghomeshi after he allegedly assaulted them sexually and that they had online contact with each other before the trial), which might have turned the tide of the trial had they been forthright; but because they wanted to “sink the prick… ‘cause he’s a f—king piece of s—t’” they tainted their testimony by trying to manipulate and steer the trial in their willful deception by “playing chicken” with the judicial system, as Jian Ghomeshi’s defense lawyer Marie Henein put it, and they got themselves into a pickle; which is what I meant in my email to my neighbor in Florida about one’s shadow coming out to sabotage their life as it did with the complainants who tried to be clever with their testimony; but this needs some explanation, because not everyone is familiar with the concept of the shadow side of our personality…

The shadow is a term created by the Swiss Psychologist C. G. Jung. “By shadow I mean the ‘negative’ side of the personality, the sum of all those unpleasant qualities we like to hide, together with the insufficiently developed functions and contents of the personal unconscious,” wrote Jung in his essay “On the Psychology of the Unconscious,” and in the introduction to their book Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature, co-editors Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams wrote: “The shadow is the awful thing that needs redemption, and the suffering redeemer who can provide it.”

This was the basic theme of my book The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway, in which I attempted to illustrate how my literary mentor Ernest Hemingway’s shadow had a nasty habit (especially when he was drinking) of coming out to sabotage his life while at the same time illustrating how my hero C. G. Jung successful integrated his shadow into his personality thus making him a whole person instead of a divided one like Hemingway, and had the three complainants in the Ghomeshi trial been a little more ethically disciplined and a little less shadow afflicted they might have avoided the grief that they invited by letting the negative shadow side of their personality come out to taint their testimony which created enough reasonable doubt for Justice Horkins to acquit Ghomeshi and reprove the complainants: a great day for justice, a sad commentary on human nature.

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