Suicide is to be fed upon.

In Biathanatos, John Donne cites as example of self-sacrifice the female pelican who feeds her young with her own blood. Donne draws attention to the parallel with Jesus Christ. The blood evidence of the pelican turns out to be the red color of her breast mistaken for blood.

Vampire bats practice blood feeding. It points to an ethic of reciprocity. Brosnon and de Waal write: “To survive, [vampire bats] cannot go longer than three days without a blood meal, and adults miss a meal about once every 10 days. These females exchange blood meals with conspecifics who have failed to feed for one or more nights in a row.”

The practice entails a high risk, edging toward one’s own death in order to preserve another. The practice centers on mother and offspring, and expands from there.

Drink this, my blood of the covenant, says Jesus Christ. Jesus is not a pelican. Jesus is a vampire bat.

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Donne, Biathantos, 17.
Brosnan and De Waal, “A Proximate Perspective on Reciprocal Altruism,” Human Nature 13, no. 1 (2002): 134-5.

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Are there not limits simply to witnessing excellence so as to do yourself? What is the solution? The answer is dying over and over again until you get it right.

In Edge of Tomorrow (2014), also starring Mr. Tom Cruise and based on a Japanese novel titled All You Need is Kill, Major William Cage, played by Mr. Cruise, enters a time loop wherein he trains to defeat an alien invasion, dies, and returns to the previous day to start again. He becomes aware of this loop and uses it to learn and improve, each time realizing incremental success even if he is defeated and dies each time up until the final encounter of the film.

A similar but less well-known depiction of the death loop is in Boss Level (2020), starring Frank Grillo. Frank, who plays a former special forces soldier named Roy Pulver, awakens at the same moment on the same day hundreds of times to be immersed immediately in violent urban warfare only to be brutally killed in the fighting at some point during the day. As he realizes the loop he accumulates knowledge on how the world will unfold to advance level by level toward a refined choreography of evading and killing until he reaches the big boss to complete the job. He even expedites a next iteration by brutally killing himself when all hope in a particular attempt is lost.