… is a nascent movement born of the latest attack on gun rights – the rollback of open carry while grocery shopping. Studies show that absent regular visual and physical access, inside and outside the home, to AR-15s, Alaskans’ impulse to detonate their heads will be significantly mitigated.

As famed for red pulp as Florida is for orange, we Alaskans have stood at the top of America’s suicide rate until recently, when we were very slightly overtaken by Montana. As local legislators keep an anxious eye on that slippage, POSR joins ranks with the Alaskan Independence Party to militate for nationhood, and the self-determination that accompanies it.

Meanwhile, join with us in singing our anthem:

TO HIS COY PULPER

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s aim and that gun’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I reach for thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
       For thy sweet barrel finger’d such pulping brings
       That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Some interesting commentary on the death of Epstein.

Sometimes you stumble on a fact that seems to you to belong not just in the headline of a story, but on the national news. Blasting your head off via one of your several household weapons is already wildly rampant all over Utah; quiet yourself for a moment, reader, and consider how beyond-rampant head-blasting is in the tri-country area…

And of course “depression and suicide aren’t talked about [in the region] because of a fear of having guns taken away.”

Surely the masses of men (most are men) who are doing this to themselves understand at this point that the guns they so anxiously cherish are about suicide and sport, with self-defense a distant third. When (to quote the Beatles), it’s all too much, The Gun is Utahan for Death With Dignity.

“Injuries and accidents, keeping your job, having a job tomorrow. It’s so up and down,” said Val Middleton, a former oil and gas safety instructor at Uintah Basin Technical College in Vernal. “The guys don’t eat right typically. No exercise, hard work, long hours, no sleep. That’s what adds up. The divorce rate is high. Really high. The family life is low.”

Val forgot to add alcohol.

Is this corner of Utah the wave of the future? Can freedom also be thought of as the scope to debrain yourself when you can’t stand it anymore? Says here that shitty life + immediately lethal instrument + sudden moment of hopelessness = suicide. If that’s true – and it seems pretty obviously true for hundreds of thousands of people – and if our culture perceives suicide as a bad thing, a sad thing, a thing we should try to prevent – why aren’t we paying any attention to massively suicidal, gunned-up places like the tri-county area? UD proposes that the hypermasculine culture of autonomy in such places makes suicide both inevitable for many and – in the eyes of many – sort of routine. Sort of okay.

… presents agonizing problems for universities. How do you mark it communally without risking contagion? What if the student’s family has begged you to preserve its privacy? Students may want to discuss whether it points to larger problems with campus mental health care, or with quality of life at the school altogether.

Like other large urban universities, New York University has had more than its share of student suicides, including suicide contagions. It has had to retrofit its library to keep students from jumping off its high atrium.

This year, there have been two suicides in the med school, and, at the beginning of this month, an NYU freshman threw himself in front of a subway train. In the med school cases, the school announced each death, expressed sympathy, and reminded students of available counseling. It has very carefully not gone beyond this, even when prompted:

[Journalists asked NYU] if the school was concerned over a trend of suicide among medical professionals and if any larger efforts are being made by the university to prevent future instances, but the Medical school’s response didn’t tackle those questions.

“Because of the sensitive nature of this issue, we will not be commenting further,” the spokesperson said.

The school has been even more subdued about the 18-year-old male freshman who killed himself this month. Asked why, a spokesman said:

“If we believe that refraining from sending a broad communication can reduce the chances of a contagion effect, we are more than willing to absorb any resulting criticism.”

The spokesman cited “the university’s own research and personal experiences with suicide along with consultations with national experts.” Rather than make a large public announcement, the school has acted locally, contacting “anyone the university deems … in close proximity to the student: family, friends, professors, floormates and sometimes even the student’s entire school or degree program.”

*************

The real problem, if you ask me, is that suicide seems to all of us one of the most eloquent things we do. We attach all sorts of broad existential significance to the act, even if most actual suicides are, in the words of A. Alvarez, “a terrible but utterly natural reaction to the strained, narrow, unnatural necessities we sometimes create for ourselves.”

Postmodern techno-efficiency dispenses with irrational exuberance about suicide rates in America. If you want to keep rates high, make the act very simple and one hundred percent fatal.

The University of Wyoming’s latest marketing slogan (which UD has cited and … extended a bit … in her headline) is generating controversy.

NOT because cowboys (plus all them guns, natch) have given Wyoming jest ’bout the country’s highest suicide rate, but because the slogan’s offensive.

With the nation riveted to the subject of suicide, Utah attracts more and more attention with its astoundingly high rates.

This blog has already noted the many suicides this year at just one Salt Lake City-area high school.

Yet Utah seems distinctly not in crisis mode – there’s little in-depth coverage of the problem in the local press; state government vaguely gestures toward a youth summit here, a not-well-funded research inquiry there…

UD will now suggest some of the possible reasons Utah holds this sad distinction.

Many of the people who live there hate government, and don’t want to pay the sort of taxes that might sustain serious treatment of the problem.

It is illegal in Virgin, Utah not to own a gun. Everywhere else in Utah is awash in guns, though you can choose, legally, not to own one.

Guns are used in over half of American suicides.

If you’re a young Utahan growing up gay, you’re quite possibly at heightened risk of suicide.

It’s a toxic combination of elements.

… more of a possibility with the death of Anthony Bourdain in France.

*******************

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

*******************

A 2016 New Yorker article about the suicides of two high-profile French chefs.

********************

Reading and thinking about Bourdain, I find myself recalling August Kleinzahler’s comment on his wild and brilliant brother, who killed himself at 27:

He wasn’t designed for the long haul. Not everyone is.

*********************

I am fucking furious with him.

This reaction, from one of Bourdain’s friends, rings very true to UD, since the same sort of anger was certainly her first reaction to her father’s suicide.

*********************

In line with my two recent posts on horror:

“Sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human condition,” wrote Graham Greene in his second autobiography, Ways of Escape, a book which the chef, author and travel show host Anthony Bourdain, who died on June 8 at 61, kept on his nightstand.

… has had UD thinking about horror. So here is her sermon on horror.

This is Part One, because Les UDs are going out for a meal soon.

She begins with this text, from the novelist Harold Brodkey’s memoir, written as he was dying of AIDS:

Life is a kind of horror. It is OK, but it is wearing.

It is OK – that is, we can take it, we do take it; or we ignore it (“I have wondered at times if maybe my resistance to the fear-of-death wasn’t laziness and low mental alertness, a cowardly inability to admit that horror was horror,” Brodkey writes elsewhere.), or we – and this is where it gets interesting, if you ask ol’ UD – we cultivate that admission as an important awareness.

Brodkey rightly identifies his inability to admit that horror is horror as cowardly: Keep your mind in hell and do not despair is the epigraph to Gillian Rose’s early-dying memoir, and it goes to the ethical imperative, if you want to be a serious, reflective person, to evolve and sustain the double vision implicit in Saint Silouan’s famous statement.

Even our writers, though, seem reluctant to help us out here. In his essay, “Inside the Whale,” George Orwell points out that “ordinary everyday life consists far more largely of horrors than writers of fiction usually care to admit.”

*****************

Taking on board the horror means not merely acknowledging as fully as you can the first noble truth of suffering; it also means (I suppose this is a subset of suffering; but hold on, cuz my sermon wants to focus on our love of profoundly horrifying films) acknowledging how intimately, sickeningly, undone we are by the lifelong spectacle of just how enigmatically grotesque and grotesquely enigmatic are both grounded human existence and ungrounded cosmic reality.

I read somewhere (can’t find the source) that the best way to get through life is engrossed in “reasonably short-term, manageable anxieties.” Your kid needs to get a job; you want to pay off the mortgage in five years; you want to take fifty points off your cholesterol score. If you can manage, for most of your run, to keep your head down and contend not at all with the incommensurable violent isolating madness just over the atmosphere, bravo. Or maybe it’s cowardly. But anyway, it’s functional, and you’ll get by.

Think of all those great books about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. Most people would prefer to be John Roebling, totally engrossed for decades in iron probes, than doomed, metaphysical, Hart Crane.

You probably don’t get Chartres or the Brooklyn Bridge built if, like John Koethe, you spend extended time wondering this:

What feels most frightening
Is the thought that when the lightning
Has subsided, and the clearing sky
Appears at last above the stage
To mark the only end of age,
That God, that distant and unseeing eye,

Would see that none of this had ever been:
That none of it, apparent or unseen,
Was ever real, and all the private words,
Which seemed to fill the air like birds
Exploding from the brush, were merely sounds
Without significance or sense,
Inert and dead beneath the dense
Expanse of the earth in its impassive rounds.

Horror vacui is a place many of us have been, and fine, because the capacity to entertain the possibility of nihilism is, I think, a mark of a sensitive, educated person.

But there’s also horror plenitudinis, no? That moment in our lives, wrote Rilke, where

the pure too-little

into that empty too-much.

And this is where the horror film comes in.

***************

My opening text on that subject is this one, from one of many excited reviews of Hereditary:

Despite the challenge of watching the film, reviews so far have been almost universally glowing. Critics have lauded Hereditary’s ability to get under their skin, noting that it’s the kind of movie you just can’t shake, as much as you’d like to. The feedback suggests that people turn to films like Hereditary because they want to be fucked up…

This is SO unfair.

He still has two kids left over whose suicides he can assist.

… appears.

A career on the brink of success as the starter for a big name coach in a power five conference had derailed, and he had finished his college career playing his last game at Yager Stadium in Topeka, Kansas. In front of an announced attendance of 5,403 he had rushed for 17 yards on 13 carries and caught three passes for forty yards. And that was it…

[One day Brandon Bourbon] retweeted a link to an article from Scientific American that just a single concussion has the ability to triple the long-term risk of suicide. Bourbon suffered at least one concussion during his time at the University of Kansas, missing time in 2011 as a result of that injury. It is not hard to imagine that he suffered others during his playing days as well.

This single tweet, mixed in amongst Bourbon’s other Tweets, may have been a stab in the dark at an individual trying to understand and comprehend the lasting effects of head trauma…

… It is unclear what led Bourbon to take his own life. Did his 2011 concussion play a role? Was it years of subconcussive trauma to the head? Were there outside factors of which no one is aware? Was it the rapid descent from starter for a team in a power five conference to unable to continue his career at that level because of injury and NCAA rules? Was it the fact that he had lived and breathed football for decades, and with the end of his college career, the driving factor for the majority of his life had been removed?

Background here.

One student stabbed another and then jumped out of a window.

The stabbed student is recovering.

**************

Update: The students were acquainted:

[B]oth were from Manchester, New Hampshire, and the Daily News reports that both belonged to a conservative Yale Political Union group called Party of the Right. According to [Tyler] Carlisle’s LinkedIn, his “primary interests [included] political theory and defending a coherent and cohesive justification for Conservative politics.”

Carlisle was the attacker.

Drugs? Psychotic break? Many possibilities.

********************

9/27/2015: UPDATE: Alcohol, three-way sex, and jealousy. And, it seems, a sudden psychotic break.

The Yale Daily News coverage of the release of the police report is really two stories: The sad details of the stabbing and suicide, and the anger of some in the Yale community that its newspaper published these details.

UD has read very similar comment threads whenever a suicide – with or without violence – is covered in the press. Our human instinct seems to be homicide:public; suicide:private.

UD‘s George Washington University experienced multiple student suicides earlier this year; the University of Pennsylvania continues – with Amanda Hu’s apparent suicide last Sunday – to deal with this horrible event.

You put all the people who come to help you or who just happen upon you at serious risk. The method is appealing because it’s easy to mix the household material, and death comes fast and reliably.

Even if, like a student at Rensselaer Polytechnic this morning, you leave notes in your dorm room warning people off, exposure to others may well happen.

Six people were treated at a hospital; a hazmat unit spent hours cleaning up the building.

The next time an American gun enthusiast tells you there’s no correlation between gun ownership and suicide (and many of them will tell you this), you could mention that the Israeli army disagrees.

******************

This column goes one better on the subject.

But let’s suppose science could establish that people who obtain firearms do indeed increase their death rate (or the death rate of their family members) from suicide. So what?

Buying a car may shorten your lifespan, since traffic accidents are a major killer. Building a backyard swimming pool creates a potential fatal hazard to you and your loved ones. But nobody says the government should interfere with such decisions.

Personal safety is a far more central matter of individual autonomy than those choices. A mentally stable person living in a crime-ridden neighborhood should be free to judge whether she’s more at risk from street criminals than from a spell of intense depression.

One imagines survivalist Nancy Lanza reading that last line and feeling relieved.