THE KICKER:A WHILE BACK there was a spell of about a week when I seemed to be surrounded by stories of suicide, writes John Butler
These tiny patterns often appear: an unusual word that seems to recur, hearing the one song you know by a marginal band othe radio on a few different occasions, seeing three strangers wearing deerstalkers in one afternoon. For me that week the concept and the grim reality of suicide were everywhere.
It started when I happened upon The Bridge, a particularly bleak documentary about jumpers from San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, which opened with footage on a shaky long lens of a man scaling the guard rail, briefly looking around, then opening his arms and jumping. The man flies through the air feet first, his form holding in an oddly static manner so that only his flapping clothes and the changing background betray the fact that he's moving at all.
Then the camera struggles to keep him in the shot and he is lost in the gathering downward pull of terminal velocity. We find him again just at the moment of impact, which seems oddly benign until you remind yourself where it all began. That was no diving board. I watched The Bridgejust before bedtime, and, predictably, I dreamed about what I had seen that night in harrowing fragments. I had never seen a person take his own life before.
The following day I was to visit an exhibition of the work of Francis Bacon. In the later years of his career the painter became preoccupied with the suicide of his lover, George Dyer. Standing in front of Bacon's horrifying, visceral triptychs, I found myself recalling the nightmares. He's undoubtedly a genius, but Bacon's not easy to commune with; the mangled innards and violent slashes of red are not for the faint-hearted. I couldn't understand why the mother in front of me had brought her twin five-year-old daughters.
"What's that, Mummy?"
"It's an entrail."
"What's an entrail?"
Sigh. "The picture is obliquely referring to the Holocaust, dear - not the most glorious period in human history. Now, let's go and find Daddy."
That week the coincidences continued to stack up. Elliott Smith kept popping up on my random iTunes playlists - harrowing songs of addiction and self-loathing from the singer-songwriter who stabbed himself with a bread knife in LA five years ago. Between the Barswas playing as I drove over the Severn Bridge on holiday that weekend - that British bridge being another landmark where yet another musician, Richey Edwards of Manic Street Preachers, disappeared in 1995. Elliott was still singing when we saw the first sign for Bridgend, the Welsh town that found itself in the headlines after a series of teenage suicides in the area that may or may not have been discussed on the social networking site Bebo.
The point about all this is not that fate or some hidden hand conspired to present all these examples of suicide to me in one week; rather it's that I hadn't really thought about the concept of taking one's life in a meaningful way before that week. Suicide is so common in Ireland that it's wrong not to consider the idea of it. I hadn't thought about it as a general notion because I haven't considered it for myself, and this is why people find suicide so hard to understand. Unless you have felt the need to end it all you can't ever understand how someone could take their own life. The least empathetic - those who say it's a selfish act - must be the healthiest people of all.
The final coincidence occurred at the end of that weekend, when I read this: "Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence . . . Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor."
David Foster Wallace wrote that, and I read it after hearing about his suicide on the radio. In addition to being a great novelist and essayist, the man who wrote Infinite Jestalso exhibited intense humour and compassion in his life and his writing. The excerpt comes from a commencement speech he gave to graduates at Kenyon College, in Ohio, in which he spoke about trying to see the world through the eyes of others. What becomes clear upon reading his speech, and the touching tributes in McSweeney's online magazine after his passing away, was that for many of the bereft fans of Wallace, his work had amounted almost to being a guide for staying alive.
For a while I thought that in some way his not being able to carry on cast a tiny aspersion on the work. In some way David Foster Wallace the man had to abide (his favourite word) for the work of David Foster Wallace to be judged as anything more than exquisite wordplay. But my obsession with living is little more than a fear of death itself. DFW does abide on the pages of his novels, as does Bacon in his brush strokes and Elliott Smith in those double-tracked vocals.
Everyone who jumped remains clear in the memory of those they left behind. Afterwards, perhaps their divine spark finds itself in the body of a mountain goat chewing grass in a galaxy far away. I just hope that there's more than one way to abide.