Suicide Is No Longer a Taboo
Even among the middle and upper classes suicide is now regarded on par with a mere facelift. In recent months it escaped its ancient banishment to become a mundane "cosmetic time tightening procedure"
The middle-class embrace of mundane suicide
In the past few weeks, I have registered a genuine, exciting change in the way people perceive and talk about life expectations and death, particularly suicide. At a recent art event where most guests were parents (responsible, presumably, no? I’m a parent too, yet I wouldn’t go on parade with that label) The subject under discussion – as the offspring of adults darted around the room and occasionally scaled legs to claim a parent’s lap – were the pros and cons of suicide as a realistic, acceptable next step on life’s journey – we exchanged views on this with not the slightest hint of irony or sarcasm. To me, this was a new manner of existential inquiry. But the lap-climbing lad and I seemed to feel some uneasiness as the strange debate unfolded around us.
I have lately had several of these odd conversations (with no layers of irony or sarcasm) with others.
Take for example a recent gathering of a diverse group of middle-aged, seemingly sensible adults, straddling several foreign cultures again in an art context. I am compelled to describe the little group: We were the accomplished painter Lynne from Woodland Hills whose partner is the super-sweet, Harold, with a dark mop of hair that invites ruffling. Harold is always close by and ready to offer his undivided attention to stray thoughts or poorly conceived ideas. Bafflingly he seems completely free from passive-aggression, which this male position normally elicits – at least in my experience.). Lynne and Harold are parents to a precocious 15-year-old, Claude.
Then there was the defensive/skeptical Carol who claimed to live in Sedona. (She didn’t appear to trust me, so she gave me very little to work with). I was of course curious about the Sedona thing. Based on my art radar I assumed she wasn’t an artist. She later mentioned going into finance. Despite finance, she revealed a side that was very critical of Big Tech and told us a story about how she had met one of the biggest at a private party and considered murdering him then and there. While there was no doubt that his eventual death would be a contribution to the Greater Public Good to such an extent that her crime and the crime visited on the person in question would be negligible in comparison to the public benefits – if the moral logic applied here serves the maximising of the Greater Public Good and allows for off-setting the evil of the individual crime against the massive gains on the part of the Greater Public – we’re all good and square and I did finally “meet” her qua this radical ethics – ethics which I subscribe to.
To stubbornly follow the insane logic of self-contradictory suicidal discourse like a bloodhound
Also present was my oldest schoolmate, Tim, from way back in the Glasgow days. Despite a cultural gap, Tim surprised me as he too pulled no punches in the ensuing suicide discussion and he kept to the scent of insane logic of the conversation wherever it led like a bloodhound in a show of total fearlessness right up to the frustrating gnarly and knotty, contradictory, and flat-out impossible end. Tim made me aware that this upsurge in suicide a pedestrian acts is just a thing you can do if you feel like it. Thus suicide with Tim as well appears completely absolved from any stigma and seems to apply broadly across the contemporary — as in NOW. (I will in subsequent writing attempt to suggest what the consequences are for the analysis of power and lay out the imperative for us to engage in collective “raw accumulation” – (the Marxian ‘Steal all you can lay your hand on — or maybe this is less Marx and more Stirner - but it’s always good to add some spice.). Including – as I will come to in one of the next texts – the mobilisation and arming of a security wing of our efforts.
I cannot emphasise how important this historical moment is for us and I’m exceedingly frustrated by the fact that the text is still not ready. But let me say that the development around the perception and act of suicide is intimately linked with the collapse of the old order and the necessity to partake in the conceptualisations of the new. Clearly, the strong radicalisation represented by these examples of friends and peers should help clarify and assist readers in identifying their own instances of the shift in the concept of suicide, its subsequent far-reaching reconfiguration of human life and potentiality.
But I have strayed in my ill-tempered impatience, let’s return to our story and its exemplary presentation of the forces that are erupting everywhere in this moment.
Meanwhile: We are back in the room with Lynne, Harold, Claude, Carol and Tim:
There was a slightly demonic, no-holds-barred atmosphere or excessive feel to our exchanges and I think we were all surprised by the concurrent collective surging energy that co-created while feeding the radicality of the demanding questioning and analysis. I registered some persistent melancholy in Lynne’s face. It was that of the parent torn between a young child and the drive to make art and to keep intact her self-image: the spicy cocktail of independent, pure beauty and abstract painting (before Harold I assume). I recognised the melancholy mask. I wore it for some years when I too raised young kids.
Lynne didn’t speak but I read her unspoken question from her expression: Where is this leading to? The unusual feature of the social situation was the absence of a heel-dragger, a fearful person, whose passive-aggressive imperative demand for protection from boundaries transgressed would usually win out regardless of numbers in the room and whatever important findings such a full-throttle group exploration would come up with.
Among the sets I have moved in for decades, suicide and everything associated with what used to be called a “cowardly” or “despicable” act was deemed utterly out-of-bounds – and so precluded as a topic for light conversation, precluded also as a real-world move, and precluding pretty much everything beyond or in between.
Still, there were normal, sober-seeming people. All parents! Down-to-earth, “ordinary,” middle-aged people with respectable university degrees, and decent careers carrying a more or less standard/average trauma package from childhood. It was a new experience I didn’t understand this radical questioning of fundamentals under the white office cubicle light tubes. Still, it was very funny. At one point we hilariously discussed how many years had to pass to render suicide acceptable in terms of the “safe” age for our children to experience their parent’s removal of self from the world.
Lynne’s dry comedy intervened thankfully to plunge me from fancy ethical hights as I estimated an ok age for a parent’s suicide to lie somewhere around a child’s end 30s or start-40s (my children are 23 and 26 respectively) as Lynne cut through the high-mindedness with a mere grace period of 3 short years before “self-removal” was acceptable – 3 years should be more than sufficient. I laughed heartedly – it was the perfect mix of despair and comedy. Enhanced by the spectacle of Claude seated in her lap as she made her time/suicide/acceptability equations.
Suicide as a safe topic for idle chatter and bantering
From this first experience with suicide as a safe banter topic, I now see it in the computations in the contemporary brooding minds all around me. And when am I allowed to let go? (51 – is that an ok age?) Do I need to check with the kids? Probably best not. Or wait 3-4 years maybe until I’m like 54-55 – then people will be able to send me off with positives like “at least he had a good run,” or: “The chap did well all things considered, what?” The echoing last words about my time among the humans, now picked up by a stranger who happened to walk into the wrong memorial service with the photo of me, from my undead phase, blown up to American standards in a way that makes me look like a Holiday Inn manager. The appalling billboard-sized indignity fronting my memorial service in the non-distinct ‘Primrose Chapel.’ And it does nothing in terms of keeping him away from my service.
Still echoing off his tongue, the stranger whose name is Stuart, has preserved his cheery sentence about the deceased’s honourable engagement with the planet and life’s blessed gifts. And stranger-than–Stuart declares loudly in front of the cake stand: “He certainly gave life a decent run for his money.” To soothe a suspicious-looking waitress (with strict orders to hold back on the cake and make short shrift of the notorious cake-muncher ghosts who have infested the 8-story funeral home since its inception.) He smiles expectantly and a simulation of close friendship with the deceased tipped the red velvet scales in his direction. A good run indeed.
Stuart is seated balancing the cake on his knees and only now do I see that we share more than a passing resemblance. Stuart has the exact same look as I had when I entered my forties. Short hair, clean-shaven, straight nose, a hidden snarl of a left lip drawn slightly upwards to emphasise a basic attitude of wry disbelief when he is confronted by the facts of the world. And of course, it had a liking for red velvet cake too. They’ve already sent my replacement. And I haven’t even been cremated yet and the kids might get upset and confused if they spot him on the thick wall-to-wall dark-brown carpet. A carpet to store the tears of the bereaved and spilled wine from Jacob’s Creek – the Australian hangar-sized winery outside Adelaide whose credo is if the machines can’t make it, it’s no good, a popular staple wine with the majority of the Funeral Parlour’s clientele. The high markup price is also popular with the undertakers as few have a clue that the machine juice is shipped by the tankload to be bottled locally. This makes a considerable saving to add substance to the the bottom line of both businesses involved in creating a unique and authentic experience as for their clients while old Skrimmentaler of course takes care of all other aspects including the spreading of my ashes in the water at the slim strip of sand in front of the breakwater’s boulders that lies past the outermost breakwater in San Pedro, across from the lights of the Long Beach Port Authority.
With the new relaxed attitude to suicide, you’re allowed to judge your own life sufficiently accomplished, an honourable effort, at which point you’re free to do away with yourself with no eyebrows raised. Gone are the times of wailing and lament due to a perceived premature snapping of tightly spun lifelines.
It gives a whole new meaning to the saying ‘It's never too late or too early to be whoever you want to be.” It is perfectly empowering as you’re exalted to the level of the sovereign, as you notice and judge that you have repeated some old joke one to many times and so you deem it is time to go. With the new flexible attitudes and expectations to a lifespan, the convention is dismissed summarily and you’re bestowed with the sovereign authority to announce: Yesterday was too early. Tomorrow is too late (a shudder ripples through your sovereign frame as the danger of repeating that joke tomorrow is considered).
And you trim the lifeline through your new exalted sovereign authority. It is ceremoniously stated for the sake of form: Today is the day I want to be dead. And you set about arranging a dignified and fitting death by your hand. Your father’s unsheathed surgeon’s scalpel is at the ready on a supporting wall. It gleams with the intensity of a blade rejoicing in its sudden liberation from the confines of the tidy, neat scabbard. It is to be used according to its purpose: to cut ever so proportional to the task at hand, to cut ever so swiftly. The incision in time is fleeting and fatal.
The old joke:
Marx, Engels, and Lenin were each asked what they preferred, a wife or a mistress. Marx, whose attitude in intimate matters is well known to have been rather conservative, answered “A wife”; Engels, who knew how to enjoy life, answered, of course, “A mistress”; the surprise comes with Lenin, who answered “Both, wife and mistress!” Is he dedicated to a hidden pursuit of excessive sexual pleasures? No, since he quickly explains: “This way, you can tell your mistress that you’re with your wife, and your wife that you are about to visit your mistress …” “And what do you actually do?” “I go to a solitary place and learn, learn, and learn!”
Basic Q&A About Pastor Projects:
Pastor Projects gallery website at pastor.mx
Who are you? Answer: Bio here: https://pastor.mx/patrick-scott-napier/
Why Tecate? Answer: You are free to do whatever you want and we are only 3 and a 1/2 hours drive from LA.
Where Are You located? Answer: In a three-room bungalow with an open-plan kitchen in the friendly neighbourhood Benito Juárez. There’s a large porch with facilities brilliant for outdoors work.
Is Tecate secure?: Answer: Yes.
Is the border crossing “friendly”? Answer: Yes.
Do you have a gallery space?: Answer: Yes
Do you have access to additional spaces?: Answer: We can rent an additional house at the back of the bungalow (shared driveway), should some of you wish to join the camp during 2024. We also have a standing offer from Yohanna Jaramillo, who is thse director of IMACTE, La Casa de Cultura, to make use of their museum facilities.
What artists have you shown? Answer: We have a decent roster of past exhibiting artists — check it out here: https://pastor.mx/artists-shown-by-pastor-projects/
Is the gallery established in the region? Answer: We have existed in various incarnations for 10 years. We have shown nationally in Mexico as well as internationally. The gallery’s history is outlined here: https://pastor.mx/447-2/ The last two years in the bungalow in Benito Juárez.