In the experimental and deeply personal essay-documentary The Joy of Life (2005)—a work of grief, drift, and creative synthesis—filmmaker Jenni Olson explores the lengthy and disturbingly busy history of people taking their own lives by leaping from San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. One fact leaps out at me above all others: though only a very tiny number of people have ever survived the plummet and impact, they all unanimously report that on the way down they wished they hadn't jumped.
At a drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility in San Clemente, California, in 2006, one of the inpatients had concealed a credit card upon admission and one night not too long into his stay in residential treatment he left—shortly after sunset—and got some beer and whisky and went to go kill himself in a hotel toilet. The truly chilling thing was that he died in the hotel lobby...trying to get help.
I overdosed on heroin in 2003, turning blue and the whole deal, so I know how easy and unfussy a way to go that is...should they fail to resuscitate you. I feel like guns are much worse than intentional drug overdoses. With a gun you really can kill yourself so fast you almost don't even have to think about it. I am not ever going to own a gun though we did have them when I was growing up (my father was fastidious about storage protocols). And I've been mostly off hard drugs since 2003. I wouldn't know where to cop smack for the life of me. I'd have to go hang out outside the homeless shelter where I used to work and wait for an Artful Dodger to lead me down the emerald path.
What the world really actually needs is prayer and meditation, with also actually means tenderness, care, and the daily interrogations of ones own presumptions and prejudices that allow one to grow and foster better connections, even if just at the level of the nerve fibres. It's mostly the former drunks and dopers who go to great lengths to live this way, unreservedly, on a daily basis. Yes, they have a second lease on life, the twelve-steppers, but it is conditioned by abyssal foresight and grievous suffering. Hope and wonder will keep a soul alive and drawing breath, come what may. I bet on it, and not any more lavishly than does my main motherfuckin' man, Blaise Pascal, may he rest in power.
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Hope is the most dangerous evil on Earth—and the worst thing about it is that you can't ever be completely done with it. Yes, people regret suicide when they are at the verge of dying—but what does it matter? What does it even matter to mourn the dead if we keep giving for granted the living? How can one love or care for another being when doing it only leads to mockery and abuse? What is even the point of living if only the threat of death makes one want to give life another chance? There are no better connections to be made—that's the glimmer of hope saying that the next coming thing is gonna be better. This is merely the power of seduction which is exactly what hope is: a filthy seduction. There are no better connections to be made. There is only a 'working through' the connections, an 'improvement' of the ways of relating—but that would imply acknowledging the other, talking to and working with the other. Who is even willing to do that? Actions and gestures that match words, the capacity to communicate with the other, to regret and repair instead of punishing and ovepowering: this is what the world needs. But this is never going to happen because nobody wants to do the work. Nobody even wants to be told that this work needs to be done. Sure, nobody likes to see anybody dying, but nobody wants to listen either, nobody wants to know anything about the other's pain. We are all going to end up preaching in a fucking desert of our own making—some because are unwilling and others because are banished from relating to the other. And the world will keep going more blind, more deaf, more dumb—until it is completely unlivable and unredeemable.
As for tenderness... I gave tenderness to someone once and he told me: "I grew to dislike you". That's what tenderness will grant you.
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