Sculpture depicting a suicide, by Maurizio Cattelan, Milan, Italy, 2022 (Getty)
It was horrible for a young woman to weigh the pockets of her dress with stones and take them into the river to die by drowning. I’m talking about Virginia Woolf’s suicide, of course, and there are those who praised this as heroic. It was also horrible suicide Ernest Hemingway, who put the nozzle of the dried catch in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Perhaps it is the only chapter I did not like about Hemingway’s biography.
Even worse, it was the suicide of the American poet Sylvia Plath The one who put her head in the gas oven and opened the tap, or the Lebanese poet Khalil Hawi The one who shot him in the head… I apologize to those and others, I have no doubts. There were very painful circumstances that prompted them to do so.
I always come across articles and opinions praising suicide and suicides. There are also books that repeat this same admiration. I thought that the topic has a certain popularity… One of them is that the reader might like that the person who committed suicide was someone else.
I said: I respond to these people by writing about suicide with pleasure, as an opposite of desperate suicide.
I write about suicide with pleasure, as the opposite of desperate suicide
Yes, there is a fun suicide, this is what I saw today in the street… The man in his eighties was trying to make a tobacco roll with one hand trembling a little, his second hand holding the phone on which he was talking cheerfully, he rested the tobacco bag on a low wall by the sidewalk and it stood Clearly, like a street sign, the phrase was written in large font on the inside of the tobacco packet: fumer tue (Smoking kills)…
I said: This also adds to what I considered an enjoyable suicide…and there is suicide by alcohol, which I never liked. There is a huge difference between the pleasure of the glass and the light intoxication, the creative fun, and the alcoholism that is always miserable.
There is the spectacle-lyrical suicide that has never left my memory: Three men descend into a sea that has become poisonous – they know it – on a planet so far from our solar system, and there is no way for them to leave this collapsing planet, whose sun will swallow it up within hours, and there is no way for them to return. to ground.
The three men were advancing in the shallow waters of the shore together in harmony, before them the sun, and the calm sea gradually engulfing them as they sang the harp of a sweet love song without a trace of despair… The song did not stop until they moved away and disappeared completely beneath the surface.. It happened in a fantasy movie I do not remember him now except this last scene.
I don’t know who was the first to say: “Death for love”… Too many types of human behavior we might describe as this: Pleasant suicide… Life itself may be one of them.
A Syrian poet residing in Paris