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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Friday, November 12, 2004

DRAWN TO THE DEPTHS


This weblog has talked about the suicides of college students [UD posts dated 3/27/04, 5/2/04, 9/10/04, 9/17/04, 10/1/04, 10/5/04], and about the suicide of Spalding Gray [UD 3/9/04]. UD has also tried, as have many people, to talk generally about this horrible, perplexing and - I would also say - threatening and enraging act.

Suicide enrages because it intensifies the sound of our own doubts about the ultimate meaning and value of our ambitions, emotions, and engagements. The suicide drops an insinuation into the ears of each of us that we too, after all, can end it. High-profile, eloquent suicides, especially among the gifted and beautiful young, are the most undermining of all.



Iris Chang's sort of suicide, UD thinks, was literally about undermining. Like Diane Arbus and Sylvia Plath, Chang was drawn to, she dug into, what was worst, most frightening, most atrocious, most intractably hideous, about human beings. Tadeusz Borowski and Primo Levi, also suicides, were drawn unwillingly into the extreme degradations of which human beings are capable - they were Auschwitz inmates. But Chang pursued, said her husband after she was found dead, "one heart-wrenching story after another. I just couldn't stand it after a while. The accumulation of hearing those stories, year after year after year, may have led to her depression. But that's just speculation. I think she also pushed herself too hard."

UD proposes something slightly different - that an attraction to darkness and extremity was simply there in Chang, as it was in Plath and Arbus, and that just as their poetry and photography took a certain direction because of that attraction, so Chang's history took a certain direction. Simon Kane, the brother of playwright Sarah Kane once said: "I don't think fears about her work were a significant factor in her decision to commit suicide. I think Sarah's work was much more the effect of who she was and what she cared about, than it was the cause of her depression."





UD, as she has made clear in this blog, is a cowardly sort, and one form her cowardice takes is an active evasion of books like The Rape of Nanking, with their photographs of terrified, humiliated, and dying people. And yet UD did read this book, because she had always wondered about the event, and because reviews of the book made it sound excellent. She remembers being proud of herself - relieved about herself - as she read the thing all the way through.

But that extended encounter, a few years ago, with one particular atrocity, was enough for UD for awhile. You don't want to immerse yourself in atrocity, easy as that is to do. You will note that even the news media blacks out things like Margaret Hassan's weeping entreaty to the world, during which she fainted and was then revived by having buckets of water dumped on her by her captors. It's bad enough to hear such things described.

Some people have a very high level of tolerance for atrocity, and even a keen interest in it, either for voyeuristic or noble reasons. Chang's passionate indignation about injustices unatoned and unacknowledged was noble. It was also self-destructive.