“Jumpers” is an article written by Tad Friend and published in The New Yorker on October 6, 2003. The essay presents what might be called the phenomenon of suicide off the Golden Gate Bridge. To suicide is to jump and to jump is to suicide. Thus, jumpers.
First and foremost, “Jumpers” shares individual stories of suicide ranging from a large and balding Iraqi-American man to a petite fourteen-year-old who was already planning her career in psychiatry. Friend tells us that the individuals also stand for over 1,200 suicides off the Golden Gate Bridge since 1937, a number that has since grown to an estimated 2,000.
Friend records these suicides as a meditation on the shared and undeniable draw of the bridge that enthralled each one as part of their individual story. Completed in 1937 the Golden Gate Bridge spans 4,200 feet over deep and turbulent water with a drop of 500 feet that generates speeds up to 75 mph during the fall. The velocity upon impact crushes and pulverizes and demolishes. A strong current pulls down and drags out to sea. Sea life descends upon. Death is virtually, though not always, guaranteed.
To the east, the Golden Gate Bridge overlooks the splendor of San Francisco Bay. To the west, the bridge is the final outpost before 5,000 miles of ocean. The Golden Gate Bridge overshadows any mortal that ventures onto it, just as the bridge is subsumed by the grandeur of what it purports to oversee.
The bridge “speaks to people,” says one bridge employee. What does the bridge say?, we might wonder.
I am here for you in all that I am,
for the magnitude of what you have come to do.
Together, we do so it is done.
Or something like that …
In all, the Golden Gate Bridge is a fitting place for suicide.
At the end of the article Friend describes a note left by a man in his thirties. The man remains nameless. All we learn is that he lived alone in a bare apartment. The note was found by the medical examiner. It was placed on the dresser before he went out. The note reads as follows:
I’m going to walk to the bridge.
If one person smiles at me on the way, I will not jump.
Knowing nothing more about the man who wrote the note, I would like to read those twenty words in two ways that are mutually generative and reflective.
I would like to the read the note sympathetically.
What does this mean?
It means the note is relatable. The note is a personal and intimate expression of what might be called loneliness or unfulfilled dreams or a thirst for simple kindness. The note can also be read as a profile, and even an indictment, on the breakdown of society as family and friends and community. I read the note in both ways, which I think are meaningful and true. The words resonate. I can relate. I sympathize.
Yet both readings easily flow into a particular reading known as prevention. Specifically, suicide prevention. In fact, “Jumpers” is written from the standpoint of prevention, or the lack thereof. The story of “Jumpers” is the story of suicide off the Golden Gate Bridge as failure upon failure to prevent.
Suicide is failure as individual error in that “suicidal behavior is crisis-oriented.” The error that needs preventing is often called “the permanent solution to a temporary problem.” Address the temporariness of the crisis, goes the logic, and avoid the permanency of suicide.
Suicide is also the failure of the San Francisco community. Friend explains that the Golden Gate Bridge has remained for decades a virtually unguarded gateway to suicide despite pleas and campaigns for policies and resources and personnel and systems and structures to address individual crises on the bridge in the very last moments and so before the very last moment.
Friend mourns the glaring divide between the engineering achievement of the bridge, which was admired and celebrated at the the time of construction, and abysmal failure as inaction and indifference to engineer prevention into the bridge ever since. For decades the community was happy to keep count of suicides while doing little to keep the number from climbing year upon year into the hundreds to reach the grand milestone of 1,000 in 1995, then onward unabated.
These failures within “Jumpers” can even be expanded to become the story of failure in the surrounding communities to be on guard so people never even wish to make their ways to the Golden Gate Bridge. Or rather, the real story is one of suicide as the broad and growing failure of everywhere that wends its way into this very specific and fascinating story of suicide off the Golden Gate Bridge, while remaining everywhere else as a reality of everyday life all the while.
Only recently, prevention measures have in fact been implemented on the bridge and the number of suicides per year has dropped dramatically even as the number of suicides around the country and in the world continue to rise. This is called winning the prevention battle while losing the war since you do not need a monument high above a sparkling city set on the very edge of vast waters to suicide. “A rope or a river, and either will do,” declared Seneca, who chose a sharp blade and warm bubble bath in the privacy of his country estate, though you do not need a country estate to suicide either.
Friend concludes his article with the observation that the Golden Gate Bridge demonstrates our “control over nature” while revealing our failure “to control the wilderness within.”
I do not read the note from the standpoint of prevention. Instead, I read the note cosmically.
What does this mean?
Let’s read the note again.
I’m going to walk to the bridge.
If one person smiles at me on the way, I will not jump.
The note calls the question.
The earliest debates on the cosmos, and human life and meaning in it, centered on whether the cosmos is unity, harmony, and order or chaos and violence that tears people apart before dragging them down for good. As the cosmos goes, so goes human existence, was the thinking. The question was timeless and the answer, for those who dared to ask it, was urgent. Is cosmic design one of peace, justice and happiness or cruelty, suffering and indifference?
Philosophies and religions of all stripes were devised to assure the former, metaphysically, in part to engineer what they promised the world truly was at heart, precisely because of all evidence to contrary: that cruelty and suffering and indifference abound in human life and what does that say about the cosmos?
Socrates desperately searched for the forms of the good built into the cosmos to bring them to light in Athens, where they clearly had such little brightness or manifestation without him — and even with him — despite supposedly being built into the very fabric of the cosmos.
Certain religions describe an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving divine that has a plan to defeat cruelty and suffering, but not just yet and for good reasons.
Einstein famously weighed in on behalf of science to declare that God does not play dice with the universe, though it is not clear who told him this or how he knew for certain.
These few examples must stand for 1,000 or more versions of the answer that are not always satisfactory when the answer declares unity and wholeness in the heart of the cosmos while human life and experience say otherwise.
The note says that’s not good enough. The note, on its own behalf, calls the question.
To whom it may concern, Which is it?
The notes does not ask for much. There are no demands for world peace, an end to genocide, solutions to poverty or homelessness or starvation. In fact, the note asks for very little. Just a smile from a stranger is all it will take and I will not kill myself. Why? Because you will have shown yourself to be listening and that you are caring and in control. Or, you will show otherwise. So which will it be?
Some will wholly disagree with this reading of the note.
The note is clearly a cry for help to get through a temporary crisis of mental health. It has no relevance to questions of the cosmos, whatever that means.
The smile from a stranger is just the much needed spark to kindle faith in humanity to be, simply put, humane. Again, no cosmic reading is necessary.
Some will say that you cannot even test the cosmos in this way, although practically every religion administers the very same exam and in the next breath declare that “Good News! The cosmos has passed with flying colors. It’s all good deep down inside!” Pick almost any religion to see much of the same, where the true name of the cosmos is thus and such. This is, after all, is the main point of religion.
Others will say that relying on cosmic characters to deal with worldly matters is outdated. Put your faith in the powers of humanity to build a better world in a better tomorrow. Suicide prevention resides comfortably within this way of thinking. Human cruelty and suffering are just temporary problems waiting for a solution. We are in control. We have the technology.
Either way, the sentiment is that human life is grounded in what is orderly and good, despite all the badness everywhere you look, but don’t let that fool you. It may seem bad now, the sentiment assures, but things will get better. They always do.
The note is not so sure. The note has serious doubts. The note speaks not to a temporary crisis but to the basic condition. Is human life itself not the permanent problem made so by the cosmos, in whatever that means? The note is not alone. The question is asked in good company.
Socrates raced around town searching for the keys to a better tomorrow only to admit in the end that human life is punishment. Human life is prison and inescapable as such. Human life is affliction where death is the true release and the only real cure. Socrates suicided accordingly. One might call this the permanent solution to a permanent problem. Other might say this is the courage not to be.
The note is not the mark of a temporary crisis. The note is writing the final exam. The note questions whether the cosmos really cares and is in control. Are you even listening? The note suspects cruelty and suffering and indifference at its very heart and not just around the edges. The note allows that it might be the former, made manifest by a simple smile. The note expects the latter and elects the way of Socrates if this turns out to be the case.
So the note calls the question. It administers the test. Show me a smile. Or show me otherwise. Either way, I will know and I will act accordingly.
According to “Jumpers,” the cosmos did in fact fail the test.
“Needless,” declared the medical examiner who found the note.
But is this the right characterization of the note and the man who wrote it according to the question? Is the declaration not importing its own cosmic view into the question to answer in a way the cosmos obviously did not? Does the cosmos need a medical examiner to speak for it after the fact, after the suicide, when it could not or would not produce a simple smile from a stranger beforehand? Is this the way the cosmos works? Does that not also answer the question asked by the note in the first place?
This brings us to the actual failing of the test, which is the walk.
I’m going to walk to the bridge.
If one person smiles at me on the way, I will not jump.
“Jumpers” focuses on the bridge itself, of course, but everybody who jumps has to get there somehow. In olden times this might be called the pilgrimage portion of the journey. The man who wrote the note made it literal and etymological by way of his walking, his peregrination.
There are only two things that are all but certain about the walk. First, he did in fact walk. Second, no one smiled at him along the way. When he started and where he started from and how far he had to travel is all unknown by way of the article, though this might somehow be discoverable. From there you could map possible routes and parts of the city passed through and streets traveled down. From there you could picture the kinds of people he would have passed who could have smiled at him, for there are people everywhere at all times and they do tend to sort by neighborhood and time of day or night.
You could also wonder about how exactly he walked. Did he look people straight in the face to give the cosmos a fighting chance? Did he keep his head down to make the cosmos work hard for it? Did he walk slowly or briskly? Was the pace out of dread or hurry or resignation or expectation? It is worth noting that if his route traveled up from San Francisco, which seems likely, the city is pretty to look at but not famous for its warmth or kindness at any hour. Perhaps this was factored into the test design.
Of course none of it is known here and none of it really matters. Presumably, if the cosmos is caring and in control it can pass just about any version of the test. What matters is the walk itself, which is not the jump. The walk is the leap.
What does it mean to leap?
To leap is to depart solid ground in the very moment of walking. To leap is to ask the question by walking and to walk is to enter the dangerous maybe of what the answer might be.
The walk shows daring in asking the question, honesty in learning the answer, and determination to act accordingly. By walking the man leapt where most fear to tread. Some call this the stake that grounds, where the stake is life or death and either will do.
To jump, then … which is to say, to become a jumper … is now merely the final step of the walk that is read, in these notes on the note, both cosmically and sympathetically.
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