… 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.
********************************
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.
**************************************
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.
************************************
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.
Emory University cardiology professor Bobby Khan already has lots of money, but he couldn’t pass up this opportunity to make tons more:
… Khan acquired material nonpublic information regarding the acquisition of Sciele Pharma, Inc. (“Sciele”) by Japanese pharmaceutical company Shionogi & Co., Ltd. (“Shionogi”) from a long time business associate and friend, who was then an officer of Sciele. Following his receipt of this information, Khan opened an online brokerage account, his first since 2003. Khan then transferred approximately one-third of his then-liquid net worth into that account and purchased a combined total of 4,000 shares of Sciele stock, days before Shionogi’s public announcement of its tender offer for Sciele shares on Labor Day, September 1, 2008. Following the tender offer announcement, Khan sold all of his Sciele shares in October 2008, realizing substantial profits and returns in less than two months.
The SEC has charged him with insider trading.
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.
*******************************
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.
Matt Yglesias detects the specific stink of the Martin Peretz situation. He begins by quoting Harvard’s defense of its celebration of Peretz (background here):
“We are ultimately stronger as a university when we maintain our commitment to the most basic freedoms that enable the robust exchange of ideas,” the statement said.
Yglesias comments:
It’s really too bad that Harvard has chosen to take this tack. Obviously the only person in this conversation who’s questioned anybody’s right to “free speech” or exhibited a weak “commitment to the most basic freedoms” is Peretz himself. Equally obviously, Peretz’s right to be a bigot does not create a right to be honored by prestigious universities. My alma mater is doing a disservice to their brand and to public understanding of the issues by deliberately obscuring things in this manner.
It would be more honest to say that Harvard is a business run for the benefit of its faculty and administrators. The business model of this business is the exchange of prestige in exchange for money. Peretz has friends who have money that they are willing to exchange for some prestige, and Harvard intends to take the money. It is what it is.
As an alum, I’d like to pretend to believe that I find this particular transaction outrageous, but it merely goes to illustrate a point I’ve made before. If you’re a person of some means who wants to make a charitable donation to make the world a better place you have a lot of options available to you. And one of the very worst things you could do with that money is give it to a fancy university. If you’ve specifically decided that you want to make a charitable donation to a provider of education services in the United States, you should find one that has a good track record of serving poor students. There are plenty of charter schools and colleges that fit the bill, but none of them are famous fancy schools with multi-billion dollar endowments.
[T]he reason Peretz’s friends are giving money [to Harvard in his name is that Peretz] has a deservedly bad reputation in many quarters, and in exchange for money Harvard University is willing to try to raise his reputation.
But… talk about LIVING! Dr. David Feinberg himself is soaring, baby. And it takes a lot money to keep his mojo working. You don’t keep the money coming, fuck you.
… [A]t a time of … difficult financial decisions, the [UCLA] regents … [have] antagonized some critics by boosting the annual compensation of UCLA’s top hospital executive by $410,000, to about $1.3 million.
… Feinberg, UCLA’s hospital system chief executive officer, will receive a $210,000 bonus. But in a more divisive matter, UCLA officials also received the regents’ approval to give Feinberg an extra raise of about $410,000, boosting his total compensation to more than $1.3 million.
UCLA Chancellor Gene Block said Feinberg was doing an excellent job and was being wooed by other employers. “Keeping this team together is essential,” he said.
It’s not like Feinberg’s a doctor or anything, who feels a moral commitment to what he’s doing here. If we don’t keep not only giving this guy raises, but giving him extra raises, he’ll… he’ll leave us!
And then what’ll we do? We … we couldn’t go on without Feinberg! The team has to be kept together. And what a great team member Feinberg is, with his willingness to sacrifice for the good of the university…
Yes, it’s essential that this great team player be kept on. Essential. I’m the chancellor, and I’ve just said that to the newspapers.
**********************
So Feinberg knows what he has to do next pay cycle. $500,000 more in bonuses, plus I’ll take an extra raise of … of… $500,000!
Okay! Anything you say.
As with the students of Mark Hauser, so with Suchitra Holgersson’s students: You can’t train them in empirical methods and then expect them to look the other way when you fudge things.
… Holgersson, who joined the [Sahgrenska] Academy [in Sweden] two years ago, [has been found] guilty of severe science fraud in several cases where she has fabricated data … and distorted results, and also in that she has forged documents in attempts to mislead the expert [review] panel itself during the investigation.
Professor Holgersson’s own PhD students blew the whistle on her.
Holgersson studies transplantation and immunity.
In 1972, Mr UD, a graduating senior at Harvard, went to a party Martin Peretz threw for Social Studies concentrators. (Peretz was acting chair of Social Studies while Michael Walzer was on leave.)
“I remember having one conversation with Marty. I don’t remember what we talked about. What I remember is that a group of us got together at one point and cautioned each other not to try putting ketchup on our burgers anywhere near the Rembrandt.”
UD‘s only encounter with Peretz happened a few years ago, at the Harvard Club. Peretz gave a talk at the annual ACTA meeting there, and instead of the short polemical thing about the betrayal of the humanities UD expected, it was a rambling, self-indulgent, insider’s attack on various Harvard faculty members.
He seemed to me precisely the sort of person outsiders assume populate places like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton – a clueless insular snob.
The reality is that very few people at these schools are like this. But Peretz seems to be.
********************************
Peretz is currently in trouble for some remarkably ill-timed remarks, in The New Republic, about Muslims:
Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims. …I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.
“Privileges?” Mr UD said, reading this. “Marty thinks they’re privileges?”
********************************
The timing thing involves these statements (Peretz has apologized for the First Amendment remark) coinciding with the announcement of a high-profile We love and honor Marty Peretz event at Harvard. Harvard has issued a We’re distressed of course but free speech thing; but Mr UD points out that you can honor free speech and withdraw your institutional association with an event at the same time…
Anyway. Having seen Peretz in action, UD can’t be surprised that this is his response to the situation.
Reached by phone, Peretz offered the following response to [critical] comments before hanging up: ‘The notion that after teaching 45 years at Harvard and people giving money in my honor that I have to defend myself – please.’
First note the simple illogic of this. People love me! They give money in my name! Plus I taught at Harvard for decades! Clearly I don’t have to defend myself when I dehumanize swathes of humanity.
And then notice his clueless indifference to the whole thing, the way his remark and his hanging up the phone conveys the very worst of this or any country’s smug elites.
As Jack Shafer writes, “The current furor will have no effect on Peretz, whose pride, wealth, and self-image as the big boss has made him deaf to his detractors.”
I’m sure he’s right. But Harvard’s still free to take a stand.
**************************************
UPDATE: People on the Social Studies Committee at Harvard have sent out a petition opposing the Peretz celebration, as well as the research fund being set up in his name.
One Social Studies concentrator points out that celebrating a person whose views on Muslims are largely indistinguishable from those of Glenn Beck isn’t very seemly.