becoming suicided vii

he spends his last few years on a mat in a rooming house until the money runs out and at 91 finds himself homeless. lying in an abandoned parking lot, hungry, dirty, indifferent to the urine, the attention of dogs, he reaches in his hourless degradations a kind of calm. days disappear like suns in suns, the dogs licking his pants are the caresses of lovers.

i am here, he mutters to the filthy sun. i am becoming suicided. what a very long and thankless vocation it’s been. and yet. yet i have done it. we have. it has been done. full of surprises really. in a deeply authentic sense all my objectives have been achieved. can’t complain. was it ritualistic though? absolutely. it’s the new ritual – hidden, fragmented, failed, long, wholly bound with existence. but i should have crawled into the internet, joined the singularity movement, become a bluetooth device – is that the new ritual, have i misinterpreted the future? no … the future’s plural. but is the singularity plural? i’m getting stuck, stuck in things that don’t matter, and i’d have to say, from the center of everything i’ve ever been and not been and might be … even if i’ve misinterpreted everything. my life’s been astounding – i’ve become suicided again and again, each day, once and many times … and now … this final becoming, this becoming finality is hardly final but just another thought in a carousel of thoughts among infinite carousels. becoming suicided is below, around, above, and in all these transient things like seppuku, bluetooth, guns. it is the constant, the dao in the pineapple, the ocean that’s the droplet that’s the ocean. i’m an inventor of new things, i have walked new ways. i have gone around like humanity will go around and has gone around and is around. i probably won’t even be discovered here. suicide is gross, archaic, reductionistic    but becoming suicided is a ritual. the ritual    the ritual called life      the dogs will be happy for a few days    the dogs are watching   i will have contributed originally to the development of the great spirit     great spirits i am becoming     i have become       thank you everyone it’s been a team effort we were all in it together      collaboration       the new                                  all of us          the new dead                       this becoming

becoming suicided vi

after going to some personal growth classes to hone his self-honesty, he realizes like jonah he’s been trying not to fulfill his destiny but escape it. absinthia is too far removed from the advanced reaches of civilization to understand in any meaningful or practical sense what’s necessary in such a situation – that visionaries must be obliterated not pettily tolerated, abused, ignored. he has to bring his plan to the center of the world, not futilely seek it in the anonymity of forgotten circumferences. where is the core action these days, the scrimmages that birth fear in the hearts of the rich and powerful, begetting rhetorics of division and bile? months hurry by as he plunges himself into the maelstroms of media and geopolitics.

in late november as the memory of dead leaves is still fresh and snow waits around the corner like a rabid dog, he’s sitting on the floor arranging coffee beans kabbalistically, listening to breadwoman sing ee chê, naked except for a baseball cap and a yak hair sock on his right foot. it comes to him. how could he have missed something so obvious! the truth is always right here, in front, like a bowl of peaches.

he would antagonize the muslims or the christians or the jews, being so outrageously insolent and joyful that their extremists would have no option but to suicide him.

pokeus initiates muhammadisanidiot.com. he takes drawing classes, posts caricatures of jesus. he writes a story about the knesset copulating with homer simpson and pope trump flailing on manure piles in a chthonic coney island. he dresses as a porno rabbi, parading through times triangle during yom kippur. he tries to volunteer in iran. smuggle himself across forbidden borders. only deportations, fines, painful imprisonments. common humiliations. isis is too busy blowing up western transit hubs and middle class clubs to pay any attention to him. these little infidel blasphemies are nothing to the white house – it wants the world whole, alive, in its throat. jerusalem’s so focused on eradicating palestine borgiz’s weasly project isn’t even on its map.

by now hokeus is unreservedly integratedly depressed. decades of passionately engaged intellectually stimulating shatteringly innovative obsessively devoted unrivaledly creative altruistically expansive fiscally exhausting strategically thorough purposively focused enterprises have ended in nothing. and not even a nothing that resembles the somethings the world’s teachers have called nothing.

he spends his small savings on a therapist who’s less than useless, his agendas tediously about love, relationship, forgiveness, societal renewal, loyalty, cooperation – these bilious pragmatisms. modernity’s just moneyed christianity that fucks, he thinks.

perhaps this is it. i have become suicided without knowing it. or everyone else has and i’m the only one left alive. he laughs to himself in the solitude of his toilet at the clever subversion he has pulled on himself. and yet i’m still alive. or am i?

no. i’ve been over all this before. all i’m doing is going in circles. becoming suicided is a roundabout with no roads. i’ve become it. it’s all repetition. all just a language game. 

becoming suicided v

the solution came to him while he was at a party of architects in a downtown loft. sipping acceptable wine, talking with young beautiful professionals as if he were a precision-engineered product manufactured for such purposes, mingling like tofu in a stir-fry in the crowded sloppily perfect room, video projections of abstract apocalypses dripping down the walls, the air light with weed and the ingressings and egressings of humans educated for ingressings and egressings, everything routine and casual and tragically enlightened, post-internet flesh shining like metallic jujubes in the simulated astral light, the concatenated effect like a neopapal rave in an underworld made for creatures from a blakean prophecy, enitharmons and urizens flung manifest and discrete, a boutique budding architect mentioned – how the topic had arisen horgiz had irritatingly forgotten – that the republic of absinthia had a fire lookout tower program, the last remaining on earth, an anachronistic culture of bitumen, silviculture, mutant pick-up trucks, and bear hunting.

pokeus the following week zealously googled. let’s see. a lookout observer murdered, 127 towers, remote wilderness settings, excessive solitude, significant risk of madness, only helicopter access, the closest medical facilities 100km away and this attended by doctors who loathed being in absinthia consequently misdiagnosing patients for amusement and cheap schadenfreude.

he applied immediately, got a phone interview a few weeks later, and in a few months found himself in a world he thought had been obliterated millennia ago, known only by dinosaurs and giant ferns.

the training program and brief stint in fire camp confirmed what he had suspected. he had not been programmed for survival among these peoples. irony had not been exported here. there was no recycling program. the earth was still flat, the sun its obedient satellite. they had access to the internet but thought it was just for shopping for things not found in the local home depot ... not realizing the internet’s true function is reality and death – not of bears and trees, but of ourselves – and so is the only remaining innovation.

everyone intuitively hated him.

there were 50 ways to die. hantavirus, lightning, missing one’s step on the tower ladder, bears, cougars, falling into the outhouse, hitting your head on a rock and having to wait 10 hours for malevolent medical attention, going fucking crazy, rabid groundhogs, aircraft mishaps, heart attacks. the city was a haven of safety and sanity next to this place, he thinks. it’s inevitable – he would become suicided by an absinthian who loathed his guts, some psychopathic freakazoid who suffers days of mosquitoes the size of pterodactyls, bear attacks, muskeg sinkings, deer flies stronger than the american air force … to appear in his window at three in the morning and blow his brains out.

he waited. each night he got into bed knowing his lifelong plan, decades in the hard making, was nearing completion. borgiz is so far north it never gets dark and he wakes in the white night listening for cracks in the forest, watching for luminous masks in the window. only silence. they’re waiting, he thinks. like me. bound by contrapuntal attraction and vocational magnetism. like sex anticipation’s most of the pleasure … it will be in the final weeks of summer. soon, soon.

but after three seasons of this he’s still alive – just that petty abuse and degradation which after all are everywhere, society’s core achievements, built into everything … and he’s had these before, been far better paid. the absinthians despise him but their despising is perfect, expressed through apathy. horgiz gets depressed by his ineffectuality, by the blasé attitude of humanity toward its end, by the lack of cooperation in anything important. he gives up. returns to his tiny flat in new pork.

becoming suicided iv

horgiz spent a year on the role and difficulty of voice in his vocation.

classically one would say, oh it’s so sad she committed suicide. more proper would be she suicided or she was suicided. or most proper: she became suicided. what was this popularity of the verb to commit? evoking commitment (to a person, idea), being committed (to an institution), and – the only true aspect but one rarely inferred – the notion that suicide is a trust, pledge, or bond on the part of the suicidee and suiciders, between the dead and living – an ecosystem of deep action. we might be able to say, she certainly is one very committed to suicide, and this might suffice if we used it as readily as other forms which fleshed out the nuances without completing them, if we put it in the blender of language and varied the phoneme smoothies. but we don’t.

he wrote plays, poems, novels about these issues of voice and death, which he truly felt were tied intimately somehow with the root challenges confronting humanity in an overpopulated and apocalyptic world, one which separates death and life, productivity and indolence, activity and passivity to a degree that isn’t simply dangerous but … well … individually and collectively suicidal.

he wrote a 5000-word quintological philosophical treatise, self-publishing it. he began blogs, podcasts. he started T-shirt, teddy bear, and lingerie lines. he even went to the expense of opening a storefront in bluewich.

he knew he was getting carried away. the point is not to think about a job or recognition, any form of advancement or glory – all this would do would be to detract – but to focus on the act itself. all these projects – regardless of any intrinsic worth –  were crafty ruses to distract him from his central task. becoming suicided.

becoming.

it was all in that. slippery word. but one which in its emphasis on process, balanced nicely the more punctiliar notion of suicided. so becoming was superior to being, not only for its process point but also because the only thing – yet so critical – that becoming introduces to being is coming … movement, orgasm, flux, doors, visitations.

he had to return to basics. he was losing sight of his original vision, that spark that burned so fiercely once, that had given his life significance. he burnt his manuscripts, closed the blogs, sold the storefront. he had become too intentional, conscious, volitional. mind had stretched too far, snapped. he had to give himself over … had to give himself back to becoming … or rather to this perfect union of action and non-action, West and East even, so precisely, concisely and clearly encapsulated in this phrase that pointed humanity to itself – and beyond …

pokeus knew that an influential interdisciplinary research center in a declining colonial power believes that human extinction is more likely to result from anthropogenic causes than natural ones (if this distinction even had meaning anymore!). he knew that philosophers now believe that some time this century intelligence will escape from the constraints of biology. all this was huge for suicide. all this an argument for the dead. a suisingularity. a singularicide. suicide – and more importantly becoming suicided – could become an energy external to human flesh. history was really just beginning. suicide is who we are.

to help him get started – or more precisely to help him return to getting started – he turned to method. when we lose sight of method, he said to himself – or more truly methodology – we’re lost.

he listed the primary anthropogenic causes of human extinction taxonomized by that colonial research center –

1. artificial intelligence
2. biotechnology
3. global warming
4. ecological disaster
5. experimental technology accident
6. nanotechnology
7. warfare and mass destruction
8. world population and agricultural crisis

most of these of course were too grand for pokeus’ drama. true – humanity’s the species of becoming suicided – but waiting to go out with everyone seemed conventional, excessive, trite, massed. he wanted to show the way. at least a way. and if not show because nobody could see it, at least trace.

trace where?

becoming suicided iii

the same senior executive had told his brief acquaintance that he only hired executives who had been fired – it showed they had shown sufficient gumption. if one had reached that level of management and responsibility and not pissed someone off enough to get sacked – what kind of manager-pansy were you? this struck borgiz as deeply true. of course here the analogy got more troubled:  once you were dead, the question of someone hiring you – even metaphorically – was ludicrous. or was it? with the vast highways of human information, the one still eluding us is the knowledge and condition of the dead. maybe in that most powerful domain his methods – and perhaps more importantly his devoting his life to developing and executing his methods – would put him in good standing with someone senior in the chthonic realms. it certainly isn’t impossible that there’s a parallel world with overlapping values. perhaps even that senior executive had died and would hire him immediately! yes, things were looking good.

but then pokeus hesitated.  if this were the case – these analogies between non-existence and existence – would he not confront precisely the same challenges there as here? would he not then be wandering in the shades determining methods to be suicided in a place of fundamentally different laws … or what would the term be if one were already dead? if one could be born again, surely one could be suicided again. and as we know now, it isn’t like the christians contrived – that we are born physically once into the physical world and born again spiritually once into the kingdom of god – but that we’re born again every year, every day, every moment – backwards and forwards and sideways. so with becoming suicided. ah, this will be the challenge: learning a new language, new routines, orientations. for surely if they speak – and this is in doubt but possible – the vocabulary and syntax of the dead will bear little similarity to those spoken, written, and thought on earth.

all this though was assuming certain base levels of analogy. what if hiring, if recognition were a metaphor not for something that happens in the underworld but for something that happens after death in the living lands? so that by innovating methodologies of becoming suicided horgiz would be elected, so to speak, to a future suicidalist hall of fame on earth, as it becomes progressively enlightened as to the core renewal of these core energetic relationships. he’d become a wayne gretzky of the passive voice, his number retired, his sweater hanging from heaven’s rafters. true – all it was is posthumous recognition. but not quite. for it was acknowledging that achievements in death could and should be celebrated not just in death, but life. that what happens under the soil is as or more influential than what happens on top.

becoming suicided ii

the problem of intent could perhaps help with some of this. would the suiciding one, when lucid and alive, articulate to itself or others that it not only wanted to die but was willing to action this desire through its exclusive volition? if so – and if successful in the follow-through – it could be said to have become suicided. but if there were any doubt or failure, it was just like the rest of us:  waiting to have become suicided.

this did nothing to solve the problem of the locus of volition. even in the most isolated case – some obscure long-term hermit who finally ended it by that reliable cocktail of booze and tylenol – there are far more suiciders involved (parents, siblings, other family members, childhood fiends and bullies, adult horrors, all types) than suicidees (only 1) participating in this one authentic inevitable ritual. and if society had truly suicided van gogh – as it had so many others whose existences were too charged with life for the tyrannical mediocrity that dominated the ponderous bulk of human interaction – this opened an abyss in the nature of suicide that seemed at first glance unsolvable. and not just the nature of suicide. pronouns, voice, grammar … leading straight to language and life. borgiz knew he was onto something as profound as the union of general relativity and quantum mechanics.

yet he began to wonder, with the world as complicated as it is, whether anybody can actually commit suicide anymore and even whether anyone can die. perhaps we had already arrived at the end of the biblical myth, in which heaven had become immanent, there was no more night or death. the prophets and mystics had been right, he thought. death had died, everything was eternal, infinite. he had already committed suicide, but was still alive. 

no.  this was too easy.

or was it? didn’t it actually make suicide the one challenge remaining in an age where everything is possible? if suicide has become technically impossible because everyone has to do it thus it doesn’t exist, pokeus’s ambition was entirely reconstructed. if we are born to suicide and thus the term has no meaning – it’s only the methods that have changed – horgiz concluded happily it’s only possible to simulate the act and the best way to do this would be by having someone else do it for him. ostensibly this could be considered murder but this was only a technicality.

what he must do is place himself in situations which are untenable, where the cultural-psychological mismatch is so great the superior force would have to eliminate him. not something crass and explicitly violent – where being suicided is articulated in the job description – such as the military or mafia and their numerous para-activities (smuggling, robbery, gangs, terrorism, peacekeeping) but seemingly productive and innocuous enterprises (lumber, groceries, scholarship, postal work, banking) in which he would be so naturally a misfit he would – without even trying:  the naturalness a significant aspect of its charm, horgiz thought – necessarily draw his opposite from society:  one who would need to suicide, who would recognize (regardless of whatever complexity or lack of cognition or consciousness might be associated with this recognition – it would be most befitting if it were entirely molecular, almost lacking language or thought) his anti-companion, his anti-colleague, in aesthetic production.  this was true teamwork.

hokeus had met someone in an airport bar once who had told him a story of when he used to work for a large international bank and a senior executive he had had some contact with advised him that one should never quit, one should always situate oneself so as to get fired. this was obviously the case with life also – get others to do the dirty work.  of course, in getting fired, at least in civilized countries, one gets a severance package, however small. but in getting suicided – this was definitely the better, more precise diction to getting murdered – where was the severance, considering one’s subsequent inability to collect? ah – this was it – it would be in the embroilment of society in attempting to track down the culprits and potentially, in some cases, of incarcerating or eliminating them. there was always the risk – not unusual in what is called the justice system – of convicting the wrong person. and didn’t the justice system essentially always convict the wrong person or at least such a small subset of the right people that it became the injustice system … for, after all, we’re all guilty, just by being ineluctably and unwillingly cast into existence and bound to one another in death, greed, corruption, and striving. kafka taught us this. anyway, the point of severance isn’t in the specifics – even as his being suicided is not in any fundamental way about him or anything individual – it’s in balancing, however temporarily, death, on the scales of the unscene … and, more importantly, in the aesthetics of the act. the form actually is more beautiful if severance isn’t exacted through committing suicide – which generates a particular range of preconditioned responses and judgments – but through being suicided– an act (in its very language) closer to existence’s eyes and waves.

becoming suicided

horgiz hokeus borgiz pokeus wished to commit ritualistic suicide but, being part of no culture that included such traditions – just the usual crass autothanatosical transactions like so much of modernity: asphyxiating, poisoning, shooting, jumping off bridges – didn’t know how and deduced he had to invent an act, one so fitting to his life and times that it encapsulated within it the mercantile, pornographic, technological, and virtual frenzies that are the distinctive and already tired sacred pillars of the day.

by definition he had to be seen as having killed himself. but seen by whom … or what? was this analogous to the ancient tree-in-the-forest-making-a-sound problem? if he was the only one seeing himself as having killed himself and he was no longer around to have seen himself kill himself, was it still a suicide? briefly he deeply empathized with the problem of trees. for he could design his death so cunningly someone could be framed with murder, it could unanimously be deemed an accident, doubt and conflict could predominate, or – and this option naturally had appeal – society itself could be made culpable, as with van gogh or, from the right angle, jesus. society was homophonically proximate to suicide – this meant something.

equally weighty was the issue of ritual. when the only rituals left a society were mdma, rush hour, lying and shopping, overdoses, car accidents, enraged lovers and mall terrorism tired concepts, what spaces remained to him? he needed a vision of the zeitgeist, to have his finger so firmly on the pulse of death that new vistas on the grave were opened for humanity.

this wouldn’t be a quick enterprise, he surmised. nor should it be, he told himself. to devote his life to the perfect murder – of himself – when perfection itself had been debunked … what a worthy, complex, and possibly impossible task. infinitely more challenging than the atom bomb, set theory, or ulysses – these were all palpably doable – he realized he was not simply embarking on an adventure as bold and broad as the origins of life but very likely establishing the foundations and principles of a new discipline as revolutionary as psychology and physics had been for theology and metaphysics.

he smiled to himself as he stroked an orange. yes, it was going to be a fine existence.

then there was the problem of duration. suicide was assumed to be sudden but what if it were like enlightenment, more often gradual? there were certainly instances of non-instantaneous suicides – cleopatra, for example, had taken stage time for her necessary dramas before she breathed her last. humans can take hours, days, or even weeks to die. and there are those awkward situations where someone tries multiple times before they finally succeed – lack of experience, technical ineptitude, unconscious ambivalence, or any of those infinite reasons whereby intent and effect are not blissfully married.

finally – and this is the true gradual approach, that chosen by hundreds of millions if not billions across the planet and time – the suicide drawn out over years or decades, facilitated by alcohol, nicotine, work, love, religion, art, apathy, cars, sport, despair, or any of the substances or aspects common to being human. and all this ignoring the van gogh situation which might, if we set aside his obvious talent, be the lot of everyone: fundamentally estranged by our kind by being cast into realities antithetical to nobility and grace – these only dreams – dying slow deaths in secret sorrows. then there’s life itself, always ending … life by definition is suicidal – inevitably, innately shutting itself down.

a day at school

kevin was nervous. he didn’t know why. a student teacher was leading the circle today. befani had suggested everyone go around and switch the first letters of their first and last names. so instead of being befani haduji she’d be hefani baduji. everyone laughed. which kevin guessed was the idea. he didn’t know why he was nervous. he was sitting next to befani but on the other side so he’d be last because she had said let’s go this way – pointing the other way – and befani always got her way. if mixter hoofspa had been here this never would have happened, kevin thought. kevin didn’t really know how to spell. maybe that’s what’s making me nervous, kevin thought. so it went around. befani said her mixed-up name again because she was befani. hefani baduji, she said. and everyone laughed. again. befani was good at making fun of herself without making fun of herself. i guess that’s why she’s popular and gets her way all the time, kevin thought. so it went around. eisili mnkostodotos. blipi flatot. chasooso hikawawa. lren zujy. no one laughed at lren zujy. czapo gie. no one laughed again. a bunch more. sometimes people laughed and sometimes they didn’t and sometimes things were in between. a few more then it was his turn. kevin felt some pee wanting to come out very badly. but before he knew it someone said, kevin it’s you kevin it’s you. everyone looked at him. someone say it for me, he said. no you say it, almost everyone said. no someone say it for me, he said. so befani said, hevin kunt. and the student teacher laughed and then befani laughed and then everyone laughed and they laughed a long time and then kevin’s pee came out and it wasn’t a very good day.