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.