solitary flight

§35 Suicide is resourcesfulness

Suicide is resourcefulness as determination.

Seneca describes to Lucilius a German gladiator who “excused himself to relieve his bowels — the only function for which the guards would allow him privacy. The gladiator then takes the sponge-tipped stick used as a torchecul and rammed it down his throat and choked his breath till he suffocated.”

Seneca marvels: “That was the way to insult death! Yes indeed, not very clean or nice, but how stupid to be fastidious about dying!”

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Seneca, Essays and Letters.

How then to tell what suicide truly is? Must a story of suicide take the shape and form of the grand story but only in miniature so as to be true? Does the story need to tell what is universal and categorical so as to apply this truth to the individual as one among all that are suicides?

Of course the story can be different in its smallness. A small story (petit récit) different from what is already written for and about, and so a small rewriting and overwriting of a very large story of what human life truly is. A modest story told quick and efficient. A cloud of ink that trails off in disappearance.

And so, No. The story can merely be particularly true, through and through, and absolutely nothing more. The eidos of suicide, always only in this case. A story of knowing by doing and doing so it is done as the embodied and disembodied identity and chasm of knowing and not knowing as being and not being so that full knowledge blossoms by collapsing into itself and extinguishes under its own truth. Endarkness consuming light and the light does not comprehend it.

How then to start a story on the idea (eidos) of suicide? Some stories indulge in overkill. War and Peace, for instance, could have been a pamphlet. There was a lot of war and little peace. The End. But it was over-bent on proving determination amid a cavalcade of characters. The petit récit (le petit récit) will not indulge in overkill or depict an overcrowd of determinating forces. There will be just the right amount of kill by way of the simplest singular commitment. The story starts with the truest most honest thing I know, which is that I live for suicide. And we go from there.