A Suicide's Love

There was a suicide note posted on the Internet a couple times last week, written by Daniel Somers, a U.S.A. soldier in Iraq, which brought back to my mind the many times we used to talk about the subject of suicide when I was teaching sociology. We would discuss Emile Durkheim's Le Suicide, one of the classic works in the establishment of sociology, which attempted to show that society “influences” us even in such seemingly individual things as suicide.

Most of my students, who were in the 18-25 year-old range, had seriously contemplated suicide by that time, and a surprising number had actually attempted it. It's the third leading cause of death in people of that age range according to the statistics, but the statistics surely under-report the actual incidence.

The passage in Daniel's letter that struck me most strongly was this:

Angeline and Daniel Somers

You must not blame yourself. The simple truth is this: During my first deployment, I was made to participate in things, the enormity of which is hard to describe. War crimes, crimes against humanity. Though I did not participate willingly, and made what I thought was my best effort to stop these events, there are some things that a person simply can not come back from. I take some pride in that, actually, as to move on in life after being part of such a thing would be the mark of a sociopath in my mind. These things go far beyond what most are even aware of.

There is something about suicide notes that touches the essence of everything – love. You see love in Daniel's letter from beginning to end.

The question then arises for me: “How is a young person to be able to come to grips with the fact that his own people around him whom he innocently loved and trusted, with very few exceptions, are willing for him to be their proxy in crimes against humanity?”

The Milgram Obedience Experiments undeniably showed, against fierce resistance, that this is the reality young people face.

There are many “crimes against humanity” besides war crimes, clearly. I consider what goes on in most schools to be crimes against humanity. I remember writing in my resignation note to the superintendent of the high school where I taught for several months - “I just can't do to these kids what their parents want me to do to them.”

That sounds very much like a suicide note that a high school student wrote to his father in the toney town of Concord, Massachusetts, where I lived at the time: “I love you, Dad, but I just can't stand all those bastards.”

The reality is that a young person comes into the world and sees this, sees that it's upside down, backwards, the opposite of love, except for very rare instances which he is extremely unlikely to encounter. Don't say it isn't so – I have met many people who have never encountered a single act of kindness in their lives and do not know how to handle one when they see it. They deny it, won't believe it. They have to deny it because then they would have to realize the depth of their wound, the depth of their woundedness.

You can say to them, “Hang on for a while, it gets better over time,” but what really is being said there is that you may be able with time to assimilate the truth, to come through to a perspective that there is ultimately a God of Love who has not abandoned us. Coming through to that perspective does take a whole lot of thought and experience, going through a Dark Night of the Soul, but it is a fact that there are people who have done it, and who have written about it and talked about it. There are also people who have gone through it and come out the other side but who just say nothing about it.

I have tried many times to say it, but it's difficult to know where to say it. Sometimes I feel that I would not have lived in vain if I were able to say to just one single young person, "Yes, you are right, you are not crazy, the world really is as upside down and backward as you are seeing it, but if you can persevere through the loneliness, calumny, enmity, absurdity, you can come out the other side like the guy in the 22nd Psalm, the 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' psalm."

Tears.

Turgenev's Maturity

It bothers me that I was seventy-one years old before

Turgenev

I came to read Ivan Turgenev. I wish I had known him at eighteen. How helpful it would have been to my life, just to have sensed his generosity, kindness and maturity.

Henry James reports Ernest Renan saying at the time of Turgenev's death:

His conscience was not that of an individual to whom nature had been more or less generous: it was in some sort the conscience of a people. Before he was born he had lived for thousands of years; infinite successions of reveries had amassed themselves in the depths of his heart. No man has been as much as he the incarnation of a whole race: generations of ancestors, lost in the sleep of centuries, speechless, came through him to life and utterance.

James goes on to say, “I quote these lines for the pleasure of quoting them...”

That concept at the end, about giving life and utterance to generations of ancestors, could not have held in any case as much meaning for me when I was young as it does now. One of the things that becomes more certain and clear to me as I reach the end of my life is how far back our minds go, how deep is our ancestry.

Wilder Penfield, Albert Camus, and Me

The first time I came across the question of a great motivation was in a talk that Wilder Penfield gave to a group of us McGill University students who were interested in his work. Penfield was a great man in medicine in those days, notably for his work on epilepsy and in neurosurgery. 

Wilder Penfield

One of the things he said in his talk was that if he had ever done anything in his life that was worthwhile, “It was because there is a little boy inside me.”

 

There were two other things he said that I well remember: that when he interviewed students who were applying to medical school, he placed a great importance on what they had done during their summers; and also that when he was just starting his study of epilepsy he set himself a goal of knowing all there was to know about epilepsy. He considered this last statement to be a measure of how little he knew about the subject at the time.

That thought about there being a little boy inside him that makes the difference strikes me as exactly right.

Albert Camus came close to that when he wrote that he knew with certainty that our work is a long path to re-find though the detours of art the two or three

Albert Camus

simple and great images on which the heart, a first time, opened itself.

The section in the preface of his “l'Enver et L'Endroit” where he writes this, is worth quoting at a little more length:

Rien ne m’empêche en tout cas de rêver que j’y réussirai, d’imaginer que je mettrai encore au centre de cette œuvre l’admirable silence d’une mère et l’effort d’un homme pour retrouver une justice ou un amour qui équilibre ce silence. Dans le songe de la vie, voici l’homme qui trouve ses vérités et qui les perd, sur la terre de la mort, pour revenir à travers les guerres, les cris, la folie de justice et d’amour, la douleur enfin, vers cette patrie tranquille où la mort même est un silence heureux. Voici encore... Oui, rien n’empêche de rêver, à l’heure même de l’exil, puisque du moins je sais cela, de science certaine, qu’une œuvre d’homme n’est rien d’autre que ce long cheminement pour retrouver par les détours de l’art les deux ou trois images simples et grandes sur lesquelles le cœur, une première fois, s’est ouvert.

I think that the reason such motivation strikes me so strongly is that it is right there, available for every last one of us, whenever we see the face of a child we love.

Intelligent Opponents

There was a comment on a recent political blog - I can't remember just which one - by a US ex-pat living in Hong Kong which has often come to mind since I read it. The subject was the “decline” of the USA and the commenter was saying that he found many of his Chinese acquaintances to be skeptical of current talk about this supposed “decline.” Their attitude was that nothing has truly changed so what's actually behind all this talk?

You can read Zinn's book, “A People's History of the United States: 1492 to the Present,” or even de Tocqueville, and easily see the intelligence of these Chinese skeptics.

My response to this was to feel grateful for intelligent opponents.

I'll Will Never Leave You, Ever, Even through the End of the World

Ivan Turgenev

The protagonist in Turgenev's Smoke loves this woman who is married into vapid, corrupt, respectable, rich society, but who says that she in reality loves the protagonist. The crisis is at hand when she has either to leave with him or stay in her phony situation, and he says the following words to her:

Hear my last word: if you don't feel capable to-morrow, to-day even, of leaving all and following me – you see how boldly I speak, how little I spare myself,- if you are frightened at the uncertainty of the future, and estrangement and solitude and the censure of men, if you cannot rely on yourself, in fact, tell me so openly and without delay, and I will go away; I shall go with a broken heart, but I shall bless you for your truthfulness.

The teaching of that passage strikes me as applicable to every reality, every situation, we face. I immediately thought of words attributed to Christ that we have to give up everything and follow love: “But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful: for he had great possessions” and then “Lo, I will be with you always, even to the end of the world.”

It's not necessary to get into what language Christ used or even whether Christ existed or not – the thought in one form or another can be found even in the fairy tales, such as the Grimms' Fundevogel.

One scene that I will always remember even to the end of the world is in Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago where a prison official makes a young girl stand outside in the cold for a long period, needlessly, maliciously. Solzhenitsyn wrote of her: “I will never forget you.”

Another event that I will remember even to the end of the world is Martin Luther King Jr's “A Knock at Midnight” speech, embedded below, in which he hears the words. The speech is sometimes known as his sermon on “Why Jesus Called a Wise Man a Fool” and was, I believe, his last speech before he was assassinated. I feel that the whole of my life, the essence of everything I am and see, are in these words of King, and Solzhenitsyn. 

The War Geniuses

The thing that most struck me during Memorial Day/Decoration Day yesterday was a quote that Amy Goodman used in her Memorial Day article:

Thomas Paine wrote in the March 21, 1778, edition of his pamphlet The Crisis, 'If there is a sin superior to every other, it is that of willful and offensive war...he who is the author of a war, lets loose the whole contagion of hell, and opens a vein that bleeds the nation to death.'

I suppose that it struck me so strongly because I have been reading a new book by Fred Kaplan entitled The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War.

Petraeus and his people recognized that the there was a necessity to deal with insurgency in Iraq and thus became a sort of “insurgency” themselves withing the US military establishment.

These military people are all highly intelligent and experienced. They have unlimited financial backing; they take time off to get Ph.D.'s; write books; fly off to high-level conferences; get visas and permits easily; have access to every source of information there is. I have known some of them. I am aware that they have far more information and sheer brain power than I do.

However, I see again and again as I read Kaplan's book that all that talent and experience and money was worse than wasted – it was detrimental. The Iraq war was, as one of these highly-powered people himself said, “a colossal blunder.” It was the opening of a vein that bleeds the US to death. The Viet-Nam war was the same thing. I think that one of the ancient traps for the highly intelligent and subtle and powerful is that they make an initial assumption that is wrong and get started down a wrong road, and all their intelligence and subtlety is used to continue down that road past all kinds of great obstacles until they reach the dead end. There is then no hope but going back to the beginning, to the naked human being, the Child of God, the mutual humanity of us all.

The Greatest Thing Muhammad Ali Ever Did

 Muhammad Ali, “The Greatest of All Time,” has probably been loved by more people than almost anyone who ever lived and the good he has done around the world is incalculable. I know that there are still people who very passionately hate him but my hope and faith are strengthened whenever I go back and listen to his speeches.

He gave a speech at Harvard once in which he shared one of his poems, which he called the world's shortest poem:  

Me? Whee!

He said in a Life magazine interview that the greatest thing he ever did was to refuse to go to the war in Viet-Nam.

I remember very well the time when he refused, because I did the same thing at that time. It's difficult to imagine the murderous hatred the act elicited unless you lived through those years. The USA sentenced him to five years in prison, fined him $10,000, took away his passport and boxing title, banned him from boxing in the USA, took away his livelihood, as well as vilifying him. He took his case to the US Supreme Court where the conviction was reversed and he went on to further greatness after that. He says in an interview which I embed below that the damage done to him was actually less than the damage done to people like me, who didn't have his resources, but the damage all around done by the USA's Viet-Nam war was so immense that it will continue for untold generations.

It looks on the surface as if it is all forgotten very

quickly. The USA wanted to go to war in Iraq and all the old familiar hatred and justifications immediately came up again, just as if nothing had happened: “Whose side are you on?!” and vehement anger at anyone who raises questions or seeks the truth, and the exact same words, the same phrases, as ridiculed by Mark Twain in his War Prayer.

There are many videos around of interviews with him but this is one of the best, in my opinion: