To Be and Not To Be

In Marsha Norman’s Pulitzer-prize winning play from 1981, ‘Night Mother, a youngish woman spends an evening preparing her mother for the daughter’s suicide later that night. The two live together, washed up after years of failed relationships, secrets, debilitating illness, and profound depression on the part of the daughter. She’s not sad so much as tired. The relentless wheel of monotony and effort has exhausted her, and the only twinge of satisfaction that she has experienced in ages comes from knowing that tonight she will end it all.

But first, she calmly organizes the house once more for her mother, details the chores her mother will now have to do, and blandly assures her mother that it’s nothing personal — she just needs to draw the curtain on tedium and suffering.

It’s a brilliant play which disconcerts the audience by luring them to sympathize with daughter Jesse’s desire for autonomy and her right to take stock of the meaning of her own life, even if the verdict leads to a devastating consequence.

Yet, it turns out that the play has mostly got suicide all wrong.

Interviews with survivors of suicide attempts have revealed something astonishing: a significant number of those people did not seriously consider ending their lives until moments before they tried to kill themselves. In fact, more than 90% of suicide attempts happen within five minutes of first really entertaining the idea.

Clearly, something far more mysterious is happening within the final approach to taking one’s life than the broadly-painted story of severe depression and despair. (This would also explain why many of those who do commit suicide did not obviously suffer from depression, nor exhibit an established set of warning-sign behaviors.)

The late macabre illustrator Edward Gorey penned a biting epigram that reads: The Suicide, as she is falling / illuminated by the moon / regrets her act and finds appalling / the thought that she will die so soon. Strangely enough, this seems closer to the mark of the seemingly capricious way in which people take their lives — though we don’t have an accurate read on how many actually did momentarily regret their decision (especially not amongst those who succeed at dying).

More to the point, there is a mysterious experience that people often meet on the brink of foreseen danger — say, standing on the edge of a cliff, looking over the edge. The phenomenon is known as the Appel du Vide, the “Call of the Void,” a siren-like urge summoning the one who feels it to abandon safety and do something self-destructive. Some even hear it as a voice of command, telling them to lean out or to jump, or to cut, or even simply to disappear.

Here’s a proposition: if we seek to understand and contextualize the Appel du Vide, we will circle round to a far deeper insight into depression and despair as well.

Long ago, in the year 967, King Edgar of England decreed that those who commit suicide will forfeit lands and titles to their overlords. Since this was the same punishment for committing a common law felony, it is possible that this was the origin of suicide as a felony crime. What’s interesting about this is the historical question it raises: was this merely an administrative development made explicit in law? Or, was there a spate of suicides disrupting the very regimented medieval society — a death fervor that needed to be discouraged in the strongest possible terms: by sacrifice of all inheritable claim to wealth and privilege?

It wasn’t until several hundred years later that the religious philosopher Thomas Aquinas put in writing an argument that suicide was a crime against God: to kill oneself is an act of self-hatred and therefore amounts to despising His Creation and image. So, what could have motivated criminalizing the act? What, hypothetically speaking, could account for a rise in the number of people ending their own lives in the late 10th century?

One piece of historical evidence that has been recently reasserted is the societal impact of millenarianism — the dread expectation of apocalyptic upheaval every thousand years or so. We know that many cultures have built in to their calendars anticipated events of ruination and renewal. The evidence is strong that social disruption in the approach to the year 1000 A.D. was particularly severe. The large portion of society frozen in the lower ranks of servitude read a lot into a prophesy that Jesus Christ would return at the end of the millennium to launch a new era of peace and reversal of personal fortunes; the wealthy and powerful were apparently quite aware that they might be toppled at any time by an organized revolution.

Could it be the case that a millenarian anxiety was leading middle-rank nobility — especially knights, who had the often unpleasant job of enforcing a local warlord’s territorial power — to suicide? Perhaps. Alternatively, what we’re failing to perceive from the vantage of 1000 years forward is the mystical aspect to the social tensions around life and death. Liege lords may have petitioned the king to stamp out a worrisome behavior within the ranks of their knights: a beserk zeal to be devoured by violence, leading to self-harm.

One attitude which is tremendously difficult now to really fathom with any real degree of empathy is the medieval truth that people did not belong to themselves. This wasn’t merely an economic doctrine on labor; this was also held to be true in a very personal, existential way. God made you (mysteriously), and the theocracy positioned you in your proper identity and functional relation to your creation. You were a cypher — a bead on the abacus of God’s calculated design. Your personal disposition and preferences largely didn’t enter into the equation. Even the relatively powerful were held in thrall of fatalism that shaped attitudes, choices, behavior.

In this context, what is suicide? At first glance, it appears to be a way out. Yet, it may have functioned as a way in deeper. On the outside, we often expect people in highly compulsory situations to seek to escape, the first chance they get. (Why didn’t you leave the abusive relationship? Why did you stay in the cult?) Often, though, the opposite is true, and participants in circumstances that resemble imprisonment to outside observers actually try to get more intimate with the source of the dynamic.

What is behind this phenomenon — Stockholm Syndrome? Empathy with one’s captors? A desire to break the cognitive dissonance and become congruent with social pressure? Or, is there a metaphysical dynamic at work as well?

One of the strange aspects of the Appel du Vide is its impersonal quality. Those who have experienced it know that there’s a third-person aura to it, an overhead, dispassionate view — what would it be like if this person who is me just ended herself right now? What would happen if this person I inhabit cut himself? Will she cry out? Will he stop himself? Will the “me” that is watching feel anything?

There is also an aura of inevitability that creeps up suddenly on the experience, so that the polarity can switch in an instant from seeming like the momentum of inertia lies with the act not happening to it lying with the act happening. In one second, it can seem that an extra burst of resolve and energy would be required to do the fateful act, and in the next second, it can seem that extra resolve and energy would be required to prevent the act from happening. (This effect is so powerful that simply standing on a cliff can induce vertigo, as we sensorially hypnotize ourselves with the fantasy of falling.)

We are all primed, prepared, for this lure of the unknown. What dreams may come does not give us pause for thought — instead, we impulsively lean into it. When social conditions veer toward diminishing individuals and enlarging fatalist attitudes, this phenomenon — the Appel du Vide — is amplified. When a person is led by the leash rope in every aspect of their life, all the ways that life could end also pull on the other side of the rope in a tug-of-war; the person is merely the knot in the middle.

It’s no doubt obvious to you that (in spite of now being 20 years into the new millennium) the future is terribly uncertain, a millenarian “day of reckoning” cloud of anticipation hangs over our shoulders as we pathetically imitate yesterday’s lifestyles, and we angle for insipid and poisonous nostalgia as the antidote to our collective anxiety. As young people, you feel the performance pressure to participate in the Game of Life, even though many of the objectives and rules of play no longer make any sense.

You also live in an increasingly petulant society, tattle-tales and drama queens and cancelers rubbing elbows with the quietly dangerous who are truly intolerant. And there’s a new paradox: you might belong to yourself in a way that no medieval person could even imagine…but, if you can’t make a good showing of it, cultivate your competitive potential or sell yourself to society for the price of your desirability in one way or another, society will let you fall by the wayside in a manner that was also mostly unheard of in the Middle Ages.

Point being, pressure is a familiar experience for teenagers, as you’re being drafted to play the role of an adult and “functioning member of society” even while that society, its foundation, is crumbling around you.

No wonder so many of you hear the call and feel the pull of the void.

At this point, you might expect me to pivot toward a message of hope, the intrinsic worth of life, the possibilities of personal freedom within a secular humanist society. Yet, I think the real truth, and the real way to deal with the temptation to suicide, is something more wild.

There are a plethora of ways to express your individual persona now: you can dress as you want, play the music you like, join the clubs that interest you, find virtual friends across the world, study and learn anything that intrigues you. The leading advice of queer activists to those who find themselves in repressive circumstances is get out. Move geographically. It gets better.

Of course, there are circumstances that are harder to escape. Poverty. Mental illness. Grief. Feeling lost in a broken world.

And, still, the mystery of the Appel du Vide speaks to a more intimate phenomenon than the creation of your persona. It begs the question of whether free will exists at all, or whether our apparent choices are determined by passions and confrontations occurring within the subconscious domain, and from participating in larger dynamics that we can’t control rationally or willfully. It does seem the case that the impulse to self-destruction is unavoidable, that the third-person-perspective lure of curiosity toward the transfigurement of our lives (up to and including death) will always be there, and can wash over us suddenly like a sneaker wave.

Yet, it turns out there are many ways to die. In many cultures, it is traditionally considered necessary to die to your former self many times within this one biological lifetime, in order to clear house and maintain the well-being of this transient and evolving creature you are. Undergoing deaths within this life is at the heart of the alchemy of fusing life and death into one creative process. Identities are contingent on context and meaning, they come and go. It is for this reason that sadhus in India abandon their former lives for a time to live on the bare fringe of existence and prayer, and it is the wisdom behind the Twitter advice to just get out. Change it up.

However, the deaths that satisfy the Appel du Vide are closer to the bone than changing your hair color, moving to a new city, switching your gender. Dying is a way in to something deeper. What’s required is death of ambitions, death of ideas of self that you hold very dearly. Old desires must go, too. Sometimes, well-built stability in life must likewise be sacrificed — moderation in all things, including moderation.

Confronting and transforming fear is key to the experience of death, and it’s here that the sudden reversal in attraction-repulsion polarity, the new temptation to fling yourself off the metaphorical cliff, is very helpful.

Life thrives on novelty, disruption, unpredictability. It must always shed its shrunken skin. It is not a crime to feel this imperative. The metaphors and analogies that bind you to your sense of self, that populate the hypnotic dream you weave to entrance yourself with certainty about reality: these are more firmly glued together than the cells of your body. That certainty, the tiresomeness of the voice in your head telling you exactly how things are (and how they are not) — that is the medium on which despair grows like a scum.

So, spiritually speaking, death, on any scale, is an antidote to despair, in a way that is far more profound — and life-affirming — than simple escapism.

All articles about suicide end with advice. Here it is, then.

Some of you will still take your lives, corporeal as well as metaphysical. For some of you, the Appel du Vide is very, very powerful. The reason is rooted in where we find ourselves on a dynamic continuum of appearance and disappearance (which we will discuss in another essay).

For those of you toeing the cliff edge, ask yourself: is the Call of the Void leading me to my physical death? Or, am I invited to an alchemical transformation of being that is yet more mysterious?

Sometimes, like a person who can’t stop humming a tune or an artist who churns out painting after painting of the same subject, you must simply do something — and it may seem you have only one way to do it. But, suicide is like painting with black paint: once added, there is no way to subtract it. So, let us pause, step back from the artwork of your life (which is a form of death itself) and see what other colors will reveal for us first.