Richard
Suicide Note
�For us they are suicides none the less; for they see death and not life as the releaser. They are ready to cast themselves away in surrender, to be extinguished and to go back to the beginning.� Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse
(A Code)
(Arachnid soup for the soul)
I
The scorpion does not know that he is ugly.
He does not know he repulses others. He does not know that the sting he uses in his defence causes people to freeze with fear. He does not understand them backing against a wall. He does not understand why they stamp on him. Nobody bothered to tell him that he was disgusting.
He scuttles along in search of the rain that will drown him. He does not realise that he is terrifying.
II
We envy the wisdom of our elders. They are closer to death. They can focus on it more clearly.
III
Emasculate me. Cripple me. Spit on me. I need your condescension. Without your chastisement I am nothing. I crawl along hanging onto your ankles begging for another condemnation. Please offer me one more sanction.
Run your fingers through my hair and tell me that you hate me.
IV
Dutch butter costs less than Kenyan butter in the shops of Nairobi.
V
"Dear Mr. God,
We regret to inform you that due to a downsizing of our operations, from the 1st of June 2001, your services will no longer be required. We regret that in an increasingly competitive economic climate, we have been forced to modernise in order to increase levels of productivity, which has unfortunately necessitated a reduction in the number of personnel within your department. We thank you for your long and valuable service, and wish you success in the future.
Yours sincerely,
The IMF."
VI
You are not Abraham; you have no excuse for raising your knife to sacrifice your children.
You are not Moses; you will not lead us into the promised land.
You are not Isaiah; your economic forecasts are not prophecies.
You are not the Angel Gabriel; you do not bring glad tidings of comfort and joy.
You are not the Messiah; you preach no gospel except that which casts the first stone.
You have turned this den of thieves into a temple.
VII
Your coins are tokens of slavery, your banknotes are death threats, and the swiping of credit cards is the slashing of wrists.
VIII
Tonight I shall eat arachnid soup.
(A response to a piece of art by David Mach entitled "Thinking of England", as taken from notes of a visit to Tate Liverpool on 28th March 2001.)
Bottles on the floor. Sauce bottles. The bottles are arranged in an oblong shape. (I think that's how I'm meant to start, anyway.) Allow the reader to envisualise the work and things. Upon closer inspection (you have to say that if you're writing art criticism, see), the viewer can see that the bottles contain coloured water. The colours are familiar; Red, White and Blue. They are arranged in the shape of the Union Flag. And yet, there is clearly in the diagonal red cross, the image of a man. He is lying back thinking of England. He looks as though he is on a rack. He is spreadeagled, drawn, tortured, crucified, sacrificed. And then bottled. The red bottles are filled with his blood. But the blood does not stain the flag. The blood creates the flag. The blood is the flag. The flag is not just planted in the blood, it is made from the blood.
A nation built on blood. A nation built from blood.
(His Life's Work)
Comb strands of hair over my receding hair line
A layer of deceit which grows thinner and thinner
See how it retreats from my youth
Until I'm left as bare as the day I was born.
My car is a box.
My home is a box.
My life is a box.
Pragmatism is my only friend,
Wooing me with gentle promises of compromise;
I lust after conservatism.
We worship a pantheon of shareholders and do their bidding
Mindlessly mumbling a mantra of conformity
Sharing gladly in phatic communion
Eating and drinking a parody of life.
We are the shambling undead, crawling into a towering necropolis where the deceased have no names.
Our suburb is a graveyard, and I live in a red brick tomb.
(Two Sequences)
(Meditation on Dies Irae)
The prophet wails and the poet sings:
Day of wrath.
I find no earth beneath my feet.
I look upward and see no sky.
The terror engulfs me, the crowds press around me, the gale lashes its whip at me, the waves crash against me. I listen for the birdsong and hear only the deathly silence of the disaffected automaton. I look for the colour of the rose and see only grey suits. I look to the sky for the night to cover me, but see only the clouds exploding and sending down shards of broken glass to tear me.
Your fanfare cannot be the fanfare of car horns from endless matrices of gridlock. Make it stop.
My voice is hoarse. I cannot scream.
Do not make me sit in front of a court in session. Do not run your finger along my soiled book of torn out pages and half started sentences. Do not phrase my own damnation from my own words. Do not drown me in the blood I have drawn, or the tears I have coaxed. Do not look at me with my own hateful eyes.
Do not glare at me.
I am shaking.
Calm me.
Do not judge me.
I am crumbling.
Pity me.
Do not smash me.
I am broken.
Piece me together.
Do not let me blow away in the gale or the breeze or the stillness
Do not burn me with fury or freeze me with contempt.
Do not sneer at me
Do not pluck me
Do not tread on me.
I am crying.
Comfort me.
(Meditation on Victimae Paschali)
We praise him. We offer sacrifices to the sacrificed. We praise a victim. We praise our victim. We are washed in the blood of a victim of our own knives and shouts and jeers and nails and thorns. We are baptised in the blood which trickled down from his forehead, which ran over his cheeks, which mingled with the tears of a screaming freezing agony and the beads of sweat which met a burning midday sun.
A passover lamb smeared on the doorpost. A betrayed lamb saving the sheep who crushed his body and watched and bleated as the blood stained his fleece red.
A death from which there was only birth. A death mocking death.
Tell us, Mary, what did you see?
A stone rolled away.
An opening.
A tomb, empty. A shroud lying abandoned. Grave clothes folded.
No corpse. No death.
A light sharper than the nails, more piercing than the spear, stronger than the midday heat, brighter than the sun which beat down on the crucified.
A darkness now absent, a place of the dead becoming a place of birth.
A birth.
A brightness.
A victory.
A glory.
A mercy.
(Treatise on the Fog)
It lurks. Like a paranoia, without making itself apparent, it crawls along. It's there. Nobody belives me when I say it's there, they blame it on wisps of hair straying into my field of vision, but I know it's there. I can't touch it, and saying that I sense it is too cliched; I smell it. Like a thickening invisible fog, the smell is putrid. It is the stench of stagnation. It is the stench of disease. The macho attitude of not caring about anything is an infectious degenerative disease (not to be confused with adulthood, which has similar symptoms) which would lurk like a parasite and suck you dry of any feeling, if only the death would silence the screaming.
But my objectivity is in vain. I am contaminated. I am the hypocrite I spat upon, I lie to myself in seeking to belong, in wanting to blend into the background, to become invisible in the loud, obnoxious way which is the membership badge I cherish.
A membership badge which states this:
Our society is a disapproving apathy. Our society is a lack of enthusiasm. Our society is a gathering place for the diseased.
But we are sick because we have trampled upon ourselves. We have no hope because we offer ourselves none.
(Rhapsody and 12)
I
Pianists are just glorified typists, artists are just glorified painters and decorators. We talk of talent, people who are gifted, as if it were some mystical quality. People are born as chains of cells, built up from genetic codes, it is a matter of mathematics and chance. We speak of expressing our feelings, trying to make ourselves believe that they are all more than chemical reactions, secretions of hormones. Your hopes will rot, and your dreams will fade in the morning sun.
II
I painted myself a pretty little picture, and I spilled my drink all over it.
III
To look at the spark of innocence, of pure perfection, of uncorrupted consciousness in the eyes of a baby must be like seeing Lucifer- LIGHT- in his original glory, the most beautiful of all the angels of heaven. Imagine it! Pure as the sunshine through a cloudless sky. Imagine it! Inventing new colours, finding another degree to the musical scale, going above and beyond what we comprehend. We were there. We knew. We could see. And then, suddenly, the will to life, the will to compete grabs hold. Why do we put chains on people made from the very same matter as us? We do we enslave people who are our equals (for, after all, in terms of mathematical probability, we are all equal, as we all had an equally negligible chance of creation). Like Lucifer we were born with the brightness of lightning. Like Lucifer our greed grips us and causes us to descend.
IV
(tacet)
V
"Make me a channel of your peace..."
He was shaking because he was afraid of the dark; even his lamp seemed to have turned traitor, creating shadows in the corners of its sparse beams of light, shadows where the darkness lurked, mocking him.
"Where there's despair in life let me bring hope..."
It was rather stupid for someone who was afraid of the dark to live in tunnels below the ground. The thing was, it was even darker above the ground. Even the brightest day couldn't clear the dark fog which had descended on the city.
"Where there is darkness only light..."
It wasn't a fog like London's smog of the 50s; that was poisonous, but temporary. This fog lingered. Even when you went through the endless suburbs, even when you tried to find one of the few patches of green and pleasant land which remained.
"And where there's doubt true faith in you..."
You couldn't see the fog. You couldn't smell it. But it was there. Choking. Suffocating. Enveloping another victim. Down here in the tunnels, despite the eternal darkness of being shut away from the sun, it was the brightest place in London. The brightest place in England. The brightest place in Europe... And that made him shake.
VI
(tacet)
VII
If you were dizzy, you would attempt to catch onto a handrail. I can't find the handrail. Who moved it?
VIII
I. Am. Just. An. Accident.
But what an accident!
IX
(tacet)
X
(tacet)
XI
(tacet)
XII
Bakers trays of buns, look at the numbers, 12. 12 apostles as well, and 12 knights of the round table. Why? Why 12? 12 is only a mystical number because it fits, see? It is the first number which can be organised in more than one way.
oooooo
oooooo
or
oooo
oooo
oooo
Now, look at 9. It can only fit in one way,
ooo
ooo
ooo
The same with 8
oooo
oooo
Try it with every number up to twelve, you will find that there is only one option (except for one long row. I'm not counting that, if you want to, then bugger off you deconstructionist, you're missing my entire point trying to get one over me. It's very easy to get one over everything, the real skill lies in adding to what has been said, like Japanese paintings; I will do it the same as my father, except just that little bit better. Of course, that's unnatural, because we want to grow and adapt and create; we are pioneers because our very existence is just a reaction to the fact that there's a space, so we find more spaces. But I'm going ahead of myself)
And so on. We flock to twelve because it is adaptable, and shapable. It yields to our touch, it is flexible. We can change IT, rather than IT changing US. We want OPTIONS, because deep in our heart we know that we are without any options, we are on a conveyor belt. So step off? Is it that simple? I want to, I can't. I can't get off. Nobody can, except in their little visions in their mind. So, having no choice in our existence, we find another choice, good and evil. Neitszche attempted to transcend them, seeing them as unnatural barriers to human thought, based on morality and a hope of salvation. But like 12, we choose it because it FITS. It is NATURAL and organic. And so in a way it is not a choice at all, but an INEVITABLITY.
XIII
Good and evil are not a CREATION of nature, but a consequence of them- what aids growth and what prevents it? Of course, if nature is a creation in itself, then why does it have to grow? Possibly because where there is nothing there is always the potential of something, and where there is something, there is the need to grow, expand and find nothingness to fill.
If you have a blank piece of paper, you want to write on it. We are uncomfortable of emptiness because for a brief uneasy moment it reminds us of nothingness. So we graffiti the empty space. And so we colonise the emptiness. So what goes against this will to grow, to expand, to live, must be evil. It makes sense; killing, stealing, it's all stopping somebody else grow, it's all going against the constant push outwards and outwards and outwards, if the space is there, we will keep on pushing and it will keep on growing and expanding and moving forward and onwards and upwards and the void will be filled and every space, every tiny little gap between the whizzing electrons (think about that; it's interesting that we are all space, most of us is not solid, it is gaps in between particles whizzing around) will be filled and filled and filled, and the tiny gap down the side of the suitcase where you might just be able to fit in a toothbrush or a book or a telephone to contact the outside world will be shoved in and in and in until there is no space left.
XIV
When will the balloon burst?
(His Television Set)
I turn on my television.
An image confronts me
Blurred and twisted,
Confusing or confused?
Millions upon millions of small flashing lights
Invite you to invite yourself into a vacuum.
Cold hand grasps in the warmth for heat,
Heat it can devour
Leaving nothing.
Absolute zero.
You long for a cleaner image.
One sharp hit to the side.
Contact.
Two more flashes,
The first a stutter, the second only a futile flicker.
Then darkness. Silence.
The image is no longer distorted.
(Serf)
Nothing left to believe in except cynicism.
Nothing left to cling to except scepticism.
Nothing left to fight for except apathy.
Nothing left to inspire except a sense of lottery longing and the TV soap cliffhanger.
No need for apartheid and ghettos today; their consensus is one of shared identity.
You can tell from collective uniforms, shared symbols of belonging,
Shared music, shared style,
Shared culture, shared tastes,
Shared opinions, shared view, all
Collectively and cheerfully bland so as not to cause offence
Or make anyone feel in any way deviant.
Highly convenient uniform, a bit like drive-thru Macdonalds.
Or microwaves.
Or the second family car.
You can leave your individuality hanging in a wardrobe with your Sunday best
To be brought out on special occasions.
Like funerals.
Not slave;
Not with your union representation and generous stakeholder pension.
Not slave;
You have the right to choose not to exercise your freedom of expression.
Not slave;
What slave cheerily claps on his chains after the 9 to 5 for an evening out?
Not slave, but serf.
Ploughing the same furrow day after day because There Is No Alternative
Thankful for your blinkers which stop you being confused by other furrows.
No job for life today.
But at least you have the security of a role for life.
Serf.
Labelled, compartmentalised, instructed, indoctrinated, assigned, consigned, satisfied, dead.
Serf.
(Epilogue)
I have a recurring dream. You are not meant to able to read text in your dreams. Yet it must be possible. Or else this recurring dream was not a dream at all. Anyway, I am writing a letter. I have no idea who the letter is to. As each word leaves my pen, I feel blood coursing through my veins. Although the letter was long, I can only ever remember one paragraph, which you will find here.
The prose is melodramatic, yes. Childish. Cartoonish even.
"You will find no confession for what has taken place here. Let them rot side by side. I pity the maggots who are forced to feed on their loathsome, putrid remains. In my opinion, death was not good enough for those mendacious oppressors. I'd rather have hung them up, feeding them the bare minimum needed to survive, then watched as their flesh began to rot, and insects and rats fed on their remains, laughing as they scream out for the mercy they were so slow to deliver. But I digress."
I can't remember if I ever returned to the subject from my digression.
The vision switches from first to third person.
I see myself lying in the grass, blood trickling from the corner of my mouth, set in stark contrast against my face.
I am dead.
The letter was my suicide note.