solitary flight

§11 Suicide is punishable by death

Suicide is punishable by death.

In The Savage God, Alvarez reproduces a reports on the following London event:

A man was hanged who had cut his throat, but who had been brought back to life. They hanged him for suicide. The doctor had warned them that it was impossible to hang him as the throat would burst open and he would breath through the aperture. They did not listen to his advice and hanged their man. The wound in the neck immediately opened and the man came back to life again although he was hanged. It took time to convoke the aldermen to decide the question of what was to be done. At length the aldermen assembled and bound up the neck below the wound until he died.

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Alvarez, Savage God: A Study of Suicide (New York: Random House, 1972), 45.

While most stories merely tell one version of the story of the human condition, some stories aspire to become Holy Scripture as words to be read and enacted as the true and final authority on the subject of the problem of human hunger and as the solution to it. With true Holy Scripture, which is of course redundant, nothing is left to be answered or even asked about human hunger in and over time and across place since what in truth needed to be written down is already said wholly and completely in writing. Holy Scripture writes clearly and with anticipation of its audience so as not to breed confusion about its meaning, since would it not be disconcerting and unseemly for true Holy Scripture to sow faction about meaning meaning falsity amid whatever truth in reading the very same words, or to need what is not in Holy Scripture to clarify and interpret and apologize for Holy Scripture itself? It would be. And so you have scripts aspiring to be Holy Scripture but always falling far short, except for when certain stories are adopted as being absolutely true so people can then fight over their meanings and prove how very wrong others are about a story that is so right on what truly matters. These are called holy scriptures.

Often stories will grow out of and group together around a holy scripture to form a particular constellation of stories meant to tell the whole story in what is called religion or ideology or field or school. For instance, the holy scripture of one religion is nothing if not itself a constellation of stories all about human hunger. And then because this holy scripture does not truly satisfy the thirst for a true and complete understanding of the words of holy scripture and what the words of holy scripture truly mean in the world of individuals and society, society and species as the rectifying of the human condition, then a universe of fanfiction assumes orbit to work diligently to fill in plot holes or tie up loose ends or explain or expand upon or apologize for holy scripture such that millions upon millions of stories are spun by as many storytellers rushing to complete and to clarify and adequately to map a pocketful of words casted over the vastness of human hunger as the human condition.

And because not all fans agree on what this holy scripture truly means and what other fans write about it, then factions of fans and their fictions form their own constellations within and against constellations of the constellation of a single religious story which is itself a constellation of stories. And so it goes with other religions and all ideologies and each field and every school that aspire to write Holy Scripture on the human condition and that will inevitably fall far short.