Sunday, October 13, 2013

The Will to Die

I just googled "suicide". At the top of the page was a helpline number that simply said "Need help? In India, call XXXXXX". A desperate hand from cyberspace attempting to stop the desperate reader somewhere, somehow. Of course, the democratic search engine also lends an equally helping hand even before you finish typing the word, offering "suicide methods" as one of your search possibilities.

Wikipedia affirms that opinions on suicides are numerous and that these are influenced by "broad existential themes such as religion, honor, and the meaning of life." A blog attempting to stop the faceless googler from that one irreversible, horrifying step tells them with assurance that the decision is an impulse formed at a moment when the experience of pain exceeds the means available to cope with it. A view that most rational individuals and most mental health professionals would probably concur with.

"I can't go on, I can't bear it anymore" seems to be the most obvious reason for anyone to direct fatal violence against themselves. Almost everyone of us has felt such despair at some point or the other in life. But we pull on -- either because the actual act of violence thankfully takes much more effort and courage than the thought itself, however strong, or because we think of the numerous responsibilities and the bonds that keep us stringed to life even if it is killing in there. Or, like Viktor Frankl suggests, some of us still hold a strong conviction that our life has meaning, for there is a "will to meaning" in certain individuals, more powerful than pain and despair.

Inherent in the whole idea of "will" is the human capacity for, well, obstinacy. An obstinacy to the point of obsession. So we may be obsessed with power or with wealth and that at times is sufficient to drive us through life, even if it may blind us to everything else. Like possessed creatures we go about in pursuit of that which grips our minds. There is obsessive love too, of course. It seems that the obsession to live for some such thing we have convinced ourselves about is one of the only two reasons why most of us don't actually pick up that blade. (Of course, as I said above, after the picking up of the blade, there is a further deterrent in the fear factor.)

The other reason, I would say, is the ability to be securely thick-skinned and thus to carefully stay just within that dangerous line that separates commonplace existence from a tiny but cataclysmic step into disturbance and possible unhinging. We manage to stay put on the needle point, getting inured to its prick over time, knowing that a slip would mean a plunge into that unknown abyss which we are sure is unspeakably worse than this pinned existence. Here are the closing lines of an A.K. Ramanujan poem that captures this common feat in a dry tone that is particularly hard on religious nerves: At the bottom, of all this bottomless/ Enterprise to keep simple the heart’s given beat,/ The only risk is heartlessness. ('The Hindoo: The Only Risk')

But returning to my first point about obstinacy -- and here is my clinching couplet --, eminently capable as we are of being obstinate in creating meaning with our lives, not all of us might exactly be "giving up" in choosing to die. To those who will have either all or none, to those who will fight to their last breath to keep a relationship alive or to see their goals met, suicide might not be the result of mere despair that pushes them overboard. I have a slight objection to the general perception of suicide as an act of crumbling under pressure, a surrender to the might of pain. Obstinate creatures that we are, we also harbour within us an indomitable will to die. Our very stubbornness may prefer dying to a giving in that implies a giving up of what we lived for or believed in. Is such suicide mental illness? If so, this illness is the very quality we admire in the extraordinary -- the quality of grit and never-say-die -- that also manifests itself as a will to die.