Funeral for a Friend

In between the time I wrote the last blog and the one that you are currently perusing, there have been many activities that have kept me busy; especially playing the bass and reading; one particular incident shattered the peace and the relative well being of my every day affairs.

For the second time in three years, another close friend committed suicide. He hung himself. He didn’t leave anything dramatic. He was 27.

Suicide is a concept that seems to be taken lightly by observers and listeners. There seems to be some lack of understanding as to the finitude of Man; we have taken it to be that we live for a certain amount of time; no ‘experience’ of any man’s infinite physical and coexistent being coupled with streaming historicity and cultural phenomenon has been noted over the years (I have not considered any witchcraft or Karmic capabilities for any individual at all). We have attributed a ‘Godly’ status to only those individuals who constantly push barriers and who survive the drift no matter the current state of affairs. Regular, ordinary, everyday people are forgotten; and why remember them when we all seem to be struggling with the self same problems?

At an existential level, I would go on to say that yes, it is possible that the majority of the world’s population agrees on the absurdity of life and that the real reasons for why we are here is absolute nonsense if at all any ontological conclusions have been drawn from it.

But when you know someone; when you have spent time with someone; what’s ultimately connected is that your own historicity and facticity are constantly being asserted in the present tense, being determined by the association of a social (and if necessary, the personal) order that ceases to be by the death of the ‘other’. Without getting into the philosophical implications of the Other and I, at the level of friendship or a deeper acquaintanceship, it is often difficult to suppress at the emotional level, the core of the tear in the fabric of personal relations.

The core has in it, an implicit reality that exists independent of human relations; it may be something that brings us closer to either understanding ourselves in the light of the current social hoo-haa or being able to assert some fundamental psycho-physical association.

When a person commits suicide, the core is well understood, a choice is made, and there is nothing more present than the act itself. It is being- for- itself in one sense but strangely, it is also a being-in-itself that transcends the sphere of the psycho-physical being; it is a penultimate rejection of the individual’s place in history, facticity, and more importantly, a complete break from fluid time.

When I heard the news, I was shocked; but its actuality only sunk in days later. I remembered at that time the protagonist of Camus’ The Outsider arriving to see his dead mother’s body and not feeling anything dramatic or heartbreaking as he was experiencing (a strange experience in real time in which the very notion of experience is being tested) in all the other people present there. Somehow through the veil of their tears, an almost non-moral precept is derived by the protagonist; that when clubbed with an internal anguish, belied a contradictory nature in the finality of things, of people, and even, of concepts shaped after hundreds of years of the collective experience of Man. The mother ‘died’ merely as the imminent loss of a physical form; the implications of the death would be the future now that the death has taken place. The central point that I’m trying to draw the reader to is simple- the notion of Death is not the opposite of life, and neither is it an end to life. It is more or less, a being that we are intended for and when this is clear in terms of a life’s constructs (it almost decides how we agree to live and love), we live towards it.

There is nothing pessimistic or un-humanitarian (or even barbaric) to consider this premise.

I have also begun to accept that Suicide is a very natural thought; a suicide of a self is almost a rejection of death more than a rejection of life. The very thought of nihilating oneself both in physical and historical form, is a classic rejection of the better things that are in store for us. It is also a heartfelt affirmation of an essential negation; to transform from a being- for- itself to a being- in- itself that ultimately resides in Being (as Heidegger would aptly put it) which is neither heaven or hell, but is simply a negation of what is- to- be, or futurity if you like.

Unfortunately, a majority of people seem to think that it is either an act of a failed martyr or an act of a troubled mind; what these people fail to conceive is the amount of tension it withholds deep inside the cavernous minds of individuals who are striving to become a being- in- itself; the state of affairs today that determine a success (I’m using this word loosely here) for an individual is clear; there is money and cash flow, and then there is Ego, the same Ego that for years Psychology has mistakenly associated with a self or worse, a consciousness. It is this behavioral construct that has been labeled and neatly confirmed to individuals for their job interviews and their appraised benefits.

These constructs kill individuals. They (the constructs) ensure to make people glassy and transparent so that mechanization of human activities for the goal of mass production continues to go on and on. Individuals who die along the way are apparently ‘misguided’.

He was a good man; he had no reasons to commit suicide aside from the obvious ones I have mentioned above; beyond this, we are meant for better things and that will continue to remain true so long as there are creative bents of mind, and an unfaltering imagination that continues to work long after the last brick of behavioral constructs have been built.

We build an ontological system day after day when we should be trying to understand what is out there, for us, and what it means to someone else when we are gone. I deeply miss him and I have thought about what such a death means.

I’m sure it was not martyrdom that he was looking for; maybe a peaceful exit from an otherwise complex ontology of a being-for-itself.

There is not a shred of finality I intend in this but there is food for thought.