… are readers from Wesleyan University, opening University Diaries in hopes of finding further information about — maybe even finding a sort of explanation for — a student’s suicide by self-immolation on their campus this week.
At about this time two years ago — Halloween night, actually — a University of Rochester student went to the cemetery next to campus and immolated himself.
In April 2000, an MIT student burned herself to death in her dorm room.
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The cruelty to which you subject your body in this method is only one of its shocking features. There’s also the will to leave in a public or semi-public setting your charred corpse.
The reality is that we’re shocked senseless by self-immolation, especially when, as in these cases, it has no political or spiritual motive.
Without those motives we’re forced back on sheer vindictive rage — against oneself, against the world.
Madness, we say. Lunacy. Yet if we truly believed that, we wouldn’t keep circling the fire.
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University students are young, intense, in their physical prime. Their methods of suicide often reflect, bizarrely, their vigor. They race off of the Empire State Building. They leap over campus bridges. There’s a twisted vigor to self-immolation as well.
“When there’s nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire,” were the words, from a Stars song, the Wesleyan student left on her Facebook as a final message.
Which is strange. If you listen to the song, that sentence seems to be about hyper-vitality, about fiercely illuminating the world with your passion, and when you’ve accomplished that, making your very being a beacon of life. The lyrics affirm a person’s survival of dashed passions; when the speaker encounters an old girlfriend, it’s nothing to him, because he’s put it away. Still impassioned, he moves forward into more life, unencumbered by the past.
You were what I wanted
I gave what I gave
I’m not sorry I met you
I’m not sorry it’s over
The song’s form — an insistent, dissonant, waltz — conveys the brittle nature of sexual passion even as it affirms its reliable recurrence. Broaden the idea out to life itself, and once more there’s the insistence on burning brightly without fear of scorching.
This scar is a fleck on my porcelain skin
Tried to reach deep but you couldn’t get in
Nora Miller took the lines literally. For her, having used up her life force, she could do nothing but direct what force was left against herself.
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Maybe. We can’t, as Donald Justice writes in his poem For the Suicides, know.
At the end of your shadow
There sat another, waiting,
Whose back was always to us.
What we can know, and what I think can help us think about and respond to suicides, is the other side of all of this — the particular incandescence of the not-at-all suicidal lives most of us live. Suicide wounds because it throws in our faces, forces a confrontation with, the foundation of our willingness to live. The question Why did they do it? can’t really be answered; but the question Why don’t we? can. It can be answered, and it should be posed.
As it is posed, again and again and again, in so much of the poetry that we love. Often poets simply want to convey what it feels like to exist, what we adore about the world, how the world comes at us and how we come at it, the mystery of our lives and the electrifying delight we take in them even as we understand almost nothing about the world and human existence.
That’s where I would go in the face of a suicide like this one, that shatters my sense of what life is — to the best poems about what life is. Because if Henry James is right that “Life is, in fact, a battle… [T]he world as it stands is no illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of a night; we wake up to it again for ever and ever; we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it,” then suicide should have us girding our loins.
Take a poem like James Schuyler’s ridiculously long Hymn to Life. It takes him over a half hour to read it! And what is it… It’s a tumbling riot of observation and feeling and meditation… The poem itself, in its luxuriance, is life overflowing, the poet bursting with things to say to us and to himself about … about everything. The seasons, love, God, cities, animals, illness…
… The truth is
That all these household tasks and daily work—up the street two men
Install an air conditioner—are beautiful.
… The days slide by and we feel we must
Stamp an impression on them. It is quite other. They stamp us, both
Time and season so that looking back there are wide unpeopled avenues
Blue-gray with cars on them…
Not
To know: what have these years of living and being lived taught us?
… Attune yourself to what is happening
Now, the little wet things, like washing up the lunch dishes. Bubbles
Rise, rinse and it is done. Let the dishes air dry, the way
You let your hair after a shampoo. All evaporates, water, time, the
Happy moment and—harder to believe—the unhappy. Time on a bus,
That passes, and the night with its burthen and gift of dreams.
… Life, it seems, explains nothing about itself.
… You
Suddenly sense: you don’t know what. An exhilaration that revives
Old views and surges of energy or the pure pleasure of
Simply looking.
… Art is as mysterious as nature, as life, of which it is
A flower.
… You see death shadowed out in another’s life. The threat
Is always there, even in balmy April sunshine. So what
If it is hard to believe in? Stopping in the city while the light
Is red, to think that all who stop with you too must stop…
… Life, I do not understand…
On and on it goes like that, a mind in motion, taking in existence, teaching itself to accept enigma, wondering why the person attached to this mind is so beautifully fitted to the world…
So. UD says: Burned by negation, turn back, full-hearted, to the world.
No, said Mr UD. “Not irony. You leave the world in the place that meant most to you…”
UD quoted the statement in my title about irony to Mr UD as he ate breakfast.
It’s from a blog written by someone who knew Nora Miller, a Wesleyan student who a few days ago immolated herself on the university running field. Miller was a massively award-winning track star, first at Stanford, and then at Wesleyan, where she majored in film.
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Like many suicides among the intense and intensely promising, this one was as expressive as it was enigmatic. It meant, it meant, it meant. It meant like hell. But what did it mean?
A student writes in the Wesleyan campus paper:
Self-immolation is not a quiet act of suicide; it is clearly an intentional statement. I understand that the University had to respect the parent’s wishes to keep details about Nora and her death private, but when a suicide occurs in such a public way on campus property, it is the student body’s right to be able to mourn [publicly] and to be given time to process and think about what has happened.
It bothers this writer that Wesleyan hasn’t said and done more about the event; she suggests that a day be set aside for campus reflection. In this, she registers the staggering impact of the gesture. More should be made of it…
[A] status update on a Facebook account under Miller’s name read, “when there is nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire,” a lyric from a track by the band Stars.
Which made UD think of Cocteau’s famous answer.
Someone once asked Jean Cocteau, “Suppose your house were on fire and you could remove only one thing. What would you take?”
Cocteau considered, then said, “I would take the fire.”
There’s the swift intensity of life; there’s life burnt out.
I encountered the Cocteau story in Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, a novel about our subterranean fires.
…. two suicides among its players in the last five years. UD noted the more recent death here.
One of the team captains, Bradford Blackmon, is remarkably eloquent and thoughtful on the matter.
“Time helps things get better, for the most part,” he said, the heartache in his voice still evident over the phone. “You know Owen’s where he wants to be now. This is actually the second time I’ve had to deal with it, one of my cousins when I was 14. You can contemplate the whys all day, but you’ll never know. They made the decision they were going to make. If anyone could have stopped it, they would have let them stop it.
“You take it day-by-day. You don’t really worry about what’s going to happen next. You worry about what’s going on right now. In May, we addressed it to exhaustion, almost like we couldn’t talk about it anymore. After a while, you just sit in silence. But I think it definitely helps to talk to other people. It’s not something you can control internally.”
… “We had unlimited [campus support] resources, if we needed it,” Blackmon said. “That helped me. Ultimately, you learn that you can’t beat yourself up. Any answer you come up with, either you’re not going to be satisfied or you don’t know that that’s the reason. But that’s the natural human reaction. We just talked about how with people, you never know what’s going on, no matter how things seem on the outside. Either they’re not telling someone else or they don’t know themselves.
“You want to tell yourself that you learned something from this, but you still don’t really know.”
UD likes the honest tentativeness of his comments, his sense of the mysteries. After a while, you just sit in silence.
An interviewer asks architect Charles Renfro about the job market in his field.
Q: What would advice would you give to a student who is thinking of becoming an architect?
A: Go into law.
Q: And if he doesn’t listen?
A: There are many other kinds of outlets that have become available to architects, from making shows to getting into museum and exhibit design to getting into writing online. Hope is not lost. The money is down, however. We were never a well-paid profession, much to a lot of other people’s surprise. Definitely, there’s less money out there to build buidlings. So we all have to be more creative.
… all there is?
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UD‘s already written about the promiscuously self-accrediting law schools of America
here
here
and here.
Every school gets accredited, every fool gets accepted somewhere. New law schools are opening all the time.
Now you’ve got these impoverished unemployed indebted people. Some of them are blogging with a certain degree of anger.
Like this guy, who graduated from Seton Hall, a low-ranked law school. He went to all that trouble and expense and is that all there is?
As they enter the worst job market in decades, many young would-be lawyers are turning on their alma maters, blaming their quandary on high tuitions, lax accreditation standards and misleading job placement figures.
Students claim the schools lie or give incomplete information about their graduates.
On its website, the school currently reports an employment rate of 94 percent for the 2009 class, but does not break that down into full-time, part-time or temporary work. The school also claims a starting salary of $145,000 in private practice, though it does not specify how many grads reported salaries in this area.
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Don’t tell this guy about this.
You know how happy birthday presents make you! Toys!! Toys!!!
Now listen carefully to Mr. Weiler, boys and girls. Your university got a birthday present. From its best friend, Mr. Knight. A wonderful shiny present.
This present looks so pretty! See the present? Pretty presents are pretty!
… “Its a really nice building,” University sports marketing senior Taber Webb said, “but I don’t understand why the best building on campus is reserved for less than one percent of the student population. My tuition is spiking every year because supposedly Oregon doesn’t have enough money, but then you see things like Jaqua and its quartz stone fireplace on the first floor, and you begin to wonder what the deal is.”
… University spokesperson Phil Weiler emphasized that the Jaqua Center was a gift from Knight and the University had no control over how the donated money was spent.
“The building was a gift,” Weiler told the Oregonian. “When someone buys you a birthday present, you don’t ask them how much they spent for it.” …
Someone bought you a present, Taber! A pretty present!
From Cambridge News:
An ancient piece of rock art – unlike anything previously found in Eastern England – has been unearthed in a Cambridgeshire village.
The hand-sized artefact is thought to be 4,500 years old, and it was found by a woman taking part in a weekend geological course run by Cambridge University at Over.
It is a slab of weathered sandstone, with two pairs of concentric circles etched into the surface – a motif which, according to archaeologists, is typical of “grooved ware” art from the later Neolithic era, in 2,500 BC…
… but it’s rare, and therefore newsworthy, when it happens during the summer.
[A] University of Idaho senior died of respiratory arrest, apparently due to alcohol poisoning after a night of drinking to celebrate his 21st birthday.
Emergency personnel responded to a report of an unconscious man at Sigma Nu fraternity at 2:42 a.m. Tuesday. They located Benjamin Harris of Burley on the third floor and began CPR. He was pronounced dead on arrival at Gritman Medical Center.
Assistant Police Chief David Duke says Harris may have had as many as 15 shots in two-and-a-half hours as he celebrated his birthday Monday night…
UD looked up why it is that you can stop breathing when you drink too much. Alcohol depresses everything, including the central nervous system. Drink enough, and you’ll simply be too weak to breathe. Eventually you’ll go into heart failure.
Two male Edinburgh University students have been found dead in a Scottish hotel, in a laptop suicide pact.
UD doesn’t understand how you set up a laptop to inject drugs for you.
[They] used a laptop to deliver lethal overdoses – and may have broadcast their final moments using a webcam.
Police are probing the possibility that the harrowing footage of their deaths may have been aired over the internet.
Last night, a source said: “It looks like this was meticulously planned.
“The room was tidy and they seemed to have set up a laptop so they didn’t have to inject the drugs directly – they appear to have had a reasonable level of medical knowledge and skill.
“It also looked as if they had set up a camera to film what was happening…”