Illustration Credit: Aaron Cooper
Note from the informational ether: “Nosedive” is a collection of essays and narrative prose written by Ben Lee over the course of a year prior to his death. Per his will, I am posting these on his behalf with no changes made to his original text. He’s not that Ben Lee. He’s also fictional.
Part 1: Is Suicide Punk?
Chapter 2
Suicide comes in a few varieties, so to make an overreaching statement about all of them, one must examine the punkness of each as distinct types apart from the whole. Emile Durkheim describes four different types of suicide (egotistic, altruistic, anomic, and fatalistic). For the most part, these categories are bullshit, so I’ve made my own to differentiate from his shitty theories.
In my opinion, there are five types of suicide:
Self-Immolation: Suicide as an act of protest.
Revenge Suicide: Suicide used as a weapon against people one wants to hurt.
Mercy Suicide: Suicide to relieve one from the extreme pain of prolonged periods of dying or a malady/disease that will never heal.
Disillusionment Suicide: Suicide to relieve one from the extreme pain of being disillusioned with one’s life or society as a whole. This is the most commonly thought of type of suicide with a wide range of causes for the disillusionment that characterizes it – whether it be mental disorders, societal issues or personal stress/sorrow.
Accidental Suicide: Suicide that was not meant to result in actual suicide. This does not account for genuine, unforeseen accidents, but risky behavior where the potential of death is obvious but one does not particularly care about the risk. (More on this in a later chapter.)
Of course, life is complicated, and any given suicide could be a mix of two or more of these categories. A person could kill oneself due to disillusionment with society but with the added benefit of it being a protest. Pain could be a reason for suicide with the upshot of being a form of revenge.
It’s not hard to imagine the ways these five categories may combine so that a disillusioned man who was injured during his military service then had his healthcare taken away by the US Government might set himself on fire outside a hotel the president owns. In this example, the man is killing himself across four types of suicide. Disillusionment might be the main catalyst, but it’s also revenge against the president, a protest against the way soldiers are treated once they are no longer in active service and merciful in the wake of his injury that he is no longer able to treat.
In this example, I would call his type of suicide Disillusionment-Mercy-Revenge-Self-Immolation Suicide, listing the types in order of relevance to the particular situation, but what parts of that mutt suicide are punk? And what does that mean for this case as a whole? These are questions that should be asked in every case.
Self-evident is that Self-Immolation is the most punk type of suicide. Punk itself is protest – so much so that punk is a square if protest is a rectangle. Punk is a circle and protest is an ellipse.
Thích Quảng Đức set himself on fire in South Vietnam to protest the treatment of Buddhist Monks by the government. Malcolm Browne’s photograph of this act remains one of the most famous images of protest, and the act itself inspired four additional monks and nuns to repeat the act. The government declared martial law and Buddhists protested even more.
When it comes to self-immolation, Buddhists are something of savants at the practice, whether in Vietnam or China or wherever, and are thus the most punk of religious groups if only because their acts of self-immolation are pure, free of the complexities of the other types. These Buddhists were protesting persecution, war and government, three of the least punk things in the entire world.
Punk is often violent but that violence should never physically harm another person. Setting oneself on fire to protest some very unpunk things is suicide’s version of pure energy noise in someone’s basement, sweaty kids throwing themselves gleefully at every surface, surrounded in screaming like fire engulfing their bodies. Nothing could be more beautiful or true.
More often, however, the protest aspect of any suicide is secondary.
The first time I tried to kill myself, I laminated a suicide note and hung it on a lanyard around my neck. Downtown, some assholes were holding a gun expo in the convention center, so I bought a gun and some ammo. The note patted me on the chest, subtly reassuring. And in a parking lot outside, I shot myself in the head but missed all the fatal sections when the gun kicked. A chunk of something unrecognizable twirled like a wayward firecracker that shot into the air only to fizzle brightly to the ground well before reaching maximum height.
I had a nosebleed, dribbling from my face through the cracks between my fingers, and a moment of clarity overtook me in what should have been the worst moment of my life. The suicide had failed. That was the worst of it, but in a close second was the nosebleed. I’m not sure if I can rightly call it that because the shredded pulp of nose skin wallowed at my feet. So while the blood was certainly coming from the place where my nose should have been, the nose part was missing. It was a gaping hole bleed.
Potential gun owners gathered around me, gasping in horror.
“Fuck guns,” I murmured.
Later that night, newscasts aired astonishing footage of some bloody fuckhead collapsing in a parking lot, his already disfigured face smacking wetly against the pavement.
Had I been successful, this would constitute a Disillusionment-Self-Immolation Suicide, but I can’t call this a selfless act of protest. Certainly, I cared about guns and still do. That’s not enough. A pure case of self-immolation requires a life consuming obsession with the thing one is protesting, so much so that the person and the protest become as inseparable as protest and punk, all three becoming the same thing. I didn’t care about guns enough for my protest to be that pure.
If I’m being honest, I did this to myself because it was cloudy for a few weeks straight. No blue tinted the sky. Overcast can be like a hammer slamming down on me. It can be overwhelming. I tried to kill myself because of that.
Disillusionment Suicide isn’t punk. On the surface, it doesn’t pass the punk test just because punk is about doing shit. If one doesn’t like something about oneself, change it or shut the fuck up. If one doesn’t like something about society, work to change it or shut the fuck up. Nowhere does punk provide an option for the selfishness that is taking oneself out of the equation.
Punk also requires adhering to the greatest good, and suicide doesn’t do that in this case. It only hurts. Hurting people isn’t punk, and hurting people in a way that helps nobody certainly isn’t punk.
And although my act of protest called attention to the issue of guns in America, my primary motivation wasn’t altruistic on any level (not to be confused with Durkheim’s altruistic suicide type). My motivation was selfish and hurtful.
Earlier, I said that this failed suicide attempt should have been the worst moment of my life, which implies it wasn’t. Despite the bleakness and the pathetic emo-ness of this act, silver flowers grew from my bullshit. If I hadn’t shot my nose off and nearly died, I wouldn’t have met my future wife (and current ex-wife) Allison.
I wouldn’t have had a chance to attempt Mercy Suicide, Revenge Suicide or Accidental Suicide either. I’ll speak more on those in the next many chapters, but I’ll leave things with this thought for now:
As unpunk as it is to kill oneself in a way that hurts the people one has left behind, it is just as unpunk to expect a person to stay alive when that person has no will to do so. Does that make it punk to enact Disillusionment Suicide? No. Two unpunks don’t make a punk. But would-be punks everywhere should c’est la vie and fuck off. Okay?
[kofi]