We’ve seen this before, at Caltech.

Caltech, like this school, also featured a professor’s suicide.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

[T]he Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, one of the most academically-challenging and prestigious universities in South Korea, is in the media spotlight after the suicides of four students since January, with the fourth occurring last week. And over the weekend, a KAIST professor also killed himself.

All of the Caltech students were Asian Americans.

A suicide cluster (seven of the deaths were suicides) emerges at North Carolina State, and the dreadful thing is that each suicide risks nudging another student on the edge over the edge. Suicide is contagious.

This is presumably (aside from privacy/family considerations) why the school fails to describe methods – you don’t want to give on-the-precipice students ideas.

 “In any community there is always a certain number of people who are on the edge, and something as emotionally charged as a suicide (or multiple suicides) in the community (especially a small community) is frequently enough to tip more of them over.“

What we do know about the school’s suicides is suggestive. Anyone who followed the male/Asian clusters at other engineering schools not that long ago will wonder about the ethnicity of some of the students at NC State/engineering who may have killed themselves.

How many were gun suicides? UD wouldn’t be surprised if it were one hundred percent. It’s North Carolina, where guns are everywhere. Guns would help account for the school’s high number: With a gun you almost never, as it were, miss. Every other method gives you a bit of a fighting chance.

As for the draining, shell-shocked sensation NC students who are watching all of this report feeling: Well yeah. Jesus.

It’s been difficult, probably because, as Nadezhda Mandelstam writes, “The fear that goes with the writing of verse is about … our mysterious awe in the face of existence.”

Frightening poems don’t typically narrate frightening things. That’s Stephen King’s job. They’re more about evoking one human being’s basic awe/terror at being itself.

And while this is scarier than a prom queen with telekinetic powers, it’s also harder to convey.

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Here’s the winner of UD‘s Scariest Poem contest. It’s by Weldon Kees.

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Homage to Arthur Waley

Seattle weather: it has rained for weeks in this town
The dampness breeding moths and a gray summer.
I sit in the smoky room reading your book again,
My eyes raw, hearing the trains steaming below me
In the wet yard, and I wonder if you are still alive.
Turning the worn pages, reading once more:
“By misty waters and rainy sands, while the yellow dusk thickens.”

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It’s a moment. A passing moment only, but one profoundly under construction for awhile, during those weeks of Seattle rain. You move through a gray mothy setting like that for weeks without responding much, but it’s working on you latently; within you the Seattle rain has been guttering and muttering, until a random moment comes when you’re sitting around reading a book and the morbid stream suddenly finds an outlet.

Since you’re recording a brief moment, a flash of fear, your poem will be brief. Since you’re conveying your flinty emotionally suppressed modern consciousness, you’re going to write casually and neutrally, as if sketching a few notes: Seattle weather: — That colon after the phrase tells the reader You’re not getting expansive descriptive lyrics out of me. If you want Romantic brooding upon damp weather, read Wordsworth.

Indeed, breeding moths and gray summer echoes T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land: breeding lilacs out of the dead land. But Kees’ later modernism will dispense even with the ironically recycled motifs of Romanticism (lilacs) that you find in Eliot.

On the poem’s title, by the way: You and I probably have no idea who Arthur Waley might be; he could be a fiction, like the fictive personality “Robinson” who appears in many Kees poems… But the poet will conclude the poem with a line apparently taken from the work of Waley, so maybe he’s real. Don’t know yet.

This poem is an homage, and on top of that, it’s a direct address to this Arthur Waley: reading your book. And reading it again. Like the Seattle rain, that book has been working on the poet. He reads its “worn pages” repeatedly.

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This is also a claustrophobic poem. Driven in by incessant rain, the poet exhibits a double interiority – he’s inside a room, and he’s inside a book. His dialogue is with a fellow writer, a specter – “I wonder if you are still alive.” He is talking to words on a page, or to a ghostly projection of whoever wrote those words. The larger nimbus of obscurity he’s evoking throughout the poem (“smoky room”) deepens yet more the sense that we’re in a mysterious and somehow malign world in which people are driven in on themselves.

“My eyes raw” – The only dry things in this poem are the poet’s eyes as he reads and reads the worn pages. The world storms without; within, the poet, in a protective, banked-in mode, reduced to mere debilitated sight, seeks repeatedly to focus on poetic fragments that seem to convey something of great value to him.

The “trains steaming” in the “wet yard” are let’s say the poet’s fevered – angry? – consciousness rolling through a hopelessly mysterious outer world.

I wonder if you are still alive. In the pulled-back, depressive, barely-there atmosphere of this poem, that line can be read not merely as a direct address to Waley’s ghost, but as self-inquiry. Am I still alive? (For readers who know about Kees’ mysterious last days – or were they his last? did he commit suicide? his body was never found – this line will be especially eerie.)

Now, with his last line, Kees quotes directly from the text he keeps rereading:

By misty waters and rainy sands, while the yellow dusk thickens.

Let’s look that up, shall we?

Waley was indeed a real person, an important translator of Asian poetry, and part of the Bloomsbury set. Ezra Pound was among the first to publish his translations. He was also a close friend, as it happens, of T.S. Eliot. (The woman with whom Waley spent his life is described, wonderfully, as “the veteran of three failed Platonic and vegetarian liaisons.”) Kees’ final line, the line that gathers up the symbolic hints of his poem and takes them to a conclusion, is taken from one of the poems Waley translated.

Doubly interiorized, intersubjective, interpoetic on three different levels (Waley is himself translating the work of yet another poet), intercultural (west and east), intertextual… Homage to Arthur Waley‘s got it all if you’re looking for ontological creepiness, for a fully evoked sense of the frightening convolution of the world, the self, and other selves. (Want more? Don’t even go there…) With great recurrent effort, the poet begins to sense and admire (“homage”) the capacity of Waley’s rendering of his own ghostly poetic precursor’s effort to articulate the horrible ominous fact of the curtain of the world becoming more, not less, occluded (“My eyes raw” – those rainy sands making the yellow dusk are throwing sand in the poet’s eyes) as we mature toward the end of our existence. The yellow dusk thickens. Life narrows. The veil of rain darkens.

… Camus writes about suicide.

Although every suicide is private and enigmatic, certain types of people seem particularly susceptible. Two years ago, Cal Tech experienced a cluster of suicides among Asian American students. A writer in Time magazine notes:

[C]ertain sub-groups of the Asian American community have higher rates of suicide compared with the nation as a whole — in particular, older Chinese women and Asian American students.

Satto Tonegawa, a student at MIT, and the son of a Nobel Prize-winning MIT professor, probably committed suicide (suicide has not been officially confirmed) two days ago in his dorm room.

…”got a running start and cleared a barrier on the observation deck, on the 86th floor” of the Empire State Building in order to commit suicide, was a Yale undergrad.

Berkeley College junior Cameron Dabaghi ’11, an East Asian studies major from Austin, Texas, took his life in New York City on Tuesday, Yale College Dean Mary Miller said in an e-mail to the College community Wednesday morning.

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UD thanks David for the link.

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Update: Some details —

A Yale University junior left a suicide note in his dorm room before heading to New York, where he apparently plunged to his death by jumping from the Empire State Building, police said Wednesday.

Cameron Dabaghi, 21, from Austin, Texas, jumped from the 86th floor observation deck Tuesday during evening rush hour. His note said he was sorry and he would be jumping from either the George Washington Bridge over the Hudson River in upper Manhattan, or the Empire State building, police said.

There were seven other people on the observation deck at the same time, and one person tried to talk to the jumper as he climbed over the barrier, but was unsuccessful…

Not sure if this can be right – the part about “climbed.” He seems to have jumped over the barrier.

… writing from a Brown University student, as he struggles with his sense of implication in the suicide of an NYU student he didn’t know.

In places this opinion piece gets too highfalutin. But who cares. It’s that rare bit of writing which sheds protective covering and just says it.

With full awareness of the mystery of the act in general, and his distance from this person in particular, the Brown student makes two suggestions:

… The first line of business I’d proffer would be Brown’s departure from the heinously overrated U.S. News and World Report rankings, with a clear statement from President Ruth Simmons that Brown is withdrawing to fight the elitism of Ivy academia. Expressing to the general public that higher education is not about exclusion would reshape the expectations of parents and students, almost certainly alleviating academic pressure.

Another measure would be an encouragement of student-faculty relationships. Bringing undergraduates closer to professors would assist in augmenting self-confidence and inclusion. My thinking is faculty dinners and coffee dates funded by the University (I do know that Brown-RISD Hillel has begun something like this through Shabbat dinners). In these more intimate settings, we can emphasize community…

Although I think the student’s right that isolation and pressure play into some university suicides, I don’t think statistics support the idea that there’s something special about the Ivies, and similar places, like NYU. The two most recent student suicides both happened at St. Cloud State University. It’s true that Caltech has had three suicides in the last few months, all Asian-American males; but my sense of the situation, from covering these events for many years, is that a feeling of intense academic and social pressure can be experienced on any campus.

The faculty-student relationships idea seems to me a good one; it’s likely that greater warmth from professors would make students happier and give them a boost. But administrators have lots of worries about inappropriate closeness; the writer’s language (“intimate settings”) might well scare them. And professors worry about fairness. If I take this bright, fascinating, charming, student in my class out to lunch, will it seem favoritism …?

… I didn’t know any of the students personally, but it’s still scary when this kind of thing goes on around you. And three in a few months seems like a really high number. I talked to a good friend of mine who happens to be a counselor, and he said that actually groups of suicides are a decently well understood phenomenon. In any community there is always a certain number of people who are on the edge, and something as emotionally charged as a suicide (or multiple suicides) in the community (especially a small community) is frequently enough to tip more of them over.”

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Caltech had one student suicide in May, one in June, and one in late July. All were Asian-American men, and the second copied the first one’s method.

Long Phan, 23, a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, was found dead in his rental apartment. He is the third Chinese-American student at the school to have committed suicide in the last three months. According to the World Journal, Caltech President Jean-Lou Chameau responded immediately by creating an on-campus mental health task force. According to the article, the suicides started in May, when Brian Go killed himself by helium inhalation. Hong Kong immigrant Jackson Ho-Leung Wang ended his life on June 10.

Time magazine writes:

[C]ertain sub-groups of the Asian American community have higher rates of suicide compared with the nation as a whole — in particular, older Chinese women and Asian American students.

… “Although we don’t have good statistics [yet], we believe that many Asian American students are prone to feeling depressed over a lack of achievement,” [Stanley Sue, a professor of psychology and Asian American studies at U.C. Davis] says. Getting Bs instead of As on a report card may not seem like a great sin to most students, Sue says. But in a culture and family structure where sacrifice by an older generation for the advancement — and education — of its children is a deep-seated tenet, feelings of shame for “failing” can become unbearable, Sue says, noting that this pattern is most evident in families with immigrant parents and among foreign students sent to study at U.S. universities by their families.

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UD‘s familiar with suicide clusters; her own university, GW, has had them, as has NYU. Back in 2005, two students at William and Mary killed themselves within hours of each other in exactly the same way – in a restroom, with a gun just bought at WalMart. I think only one of the students I’ve mentioned in this paragraph was Asian American. There were women as well as men among them.

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A British columnist, reflecting on the suicide of a recently graduated Oxford University student, notes that this student, like some other student suicides in English and American universities, was addicted to drugs and alcohol.

It’s difficult for universities. I think it may be easier to spot a student with, say, manic depression or schizophrenia, than to identify, and help, an “addict” – and by addict I just mean an individual whose use of substances is affecting his or her life really badly. Nearly all students drink too much and almost as many take some illegal drugs. But only a small number are driven into depression, or worse, by their drinking or drug-taking. And it’s practically impossible to spot an incipient alcoholic in an environment like a university where colossal boozing is the accepted norm.

I had a student once, a guy, in my DeLillo course. Missed a lot of classes — though he was very smart and up on the reading when he was there — and looked way unhealthy. Approached my desk at one point and shocked me with his paleness, thinness, not-thereness… Eyes jutting about. Black hair askew, heavy black earrings, wispy black t-shirt. Perfectly coherent things came out of his mouth, and, as I say, in class his comments were informed and perceptive. But there was a nobody’s-home feel to the guy for sure.

What did UD do?

Nothing. Unless you call keeping a maternal eye on the guy something. I figured he might be insulted — might see me as patronizing him… Was he, you know, just emo? Plenty of high school and university students (UD was one of them… Actually, she’s still at the stage she’s about to describe.) go through a black-suited Nietzschean thang … What if he had philosophical, aesthetic reasons for what he was doing, rather than the pathological ones I was worried about?

He did okay in the course – not as well as he could have done – and … well, here’s one thing UD did do.

The following semester, I saw him in the Starbucks across from my office. I barely recognized him — plenty of skin on his bones, a face ruddy and bright, eyes focused. I went up to him.

“You look good. That’s a relief. Last semester, you looked a bit peaked.”

“Yeah thanks I was in bad shape last semester. Got over it.”

Maybe he got over it because some other professor without all of UD‘s complexes about other people’s privacy, etc., was more aggressive with him. I don’t know. I do know that the British writer is correct when he says it’s both difficult to identify with some confidence an endangered undergraduate addict, and yet more difficult to intervene.