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.

A most dangerous habit

So, what do you have to say about those who read books? Those who, that is, love reading them, are always found with them and have gathered a reputation as 'voracious readers'?

There is the regretful voice of teachers and mothers who think that internet and sms have brought doom and gloom to the future of their children who simply don't want to pick up a book. You hear conservationists campaigning for keeping the reading habit alive. If you listen to this group, you must think that reading must be a blessed preoccupation indeed. And we have read those numerous poems from Englishmen encased in nobility who have sung to the glory of books.

But think of witty women, headstrong women, women with opinions like Lizzy Bennett. Women who think, who dare to knock at the doors of universities like Virginia Woolf. Women who like to read about women like them, women who read and agree with the opinions of women and men like them -- no, I am not talking about the 'feminists' alone, though they may certainly be part of this group.

To be found with a book suddenly becomes the opposite of cooking, wiving (no, that's not the right word, is? It should be 'husbanding' -- now 'husbanding' has a pretty domestic air about it), mothering and all those cultivated, feminine things that a woman must do. If she reads in spite of them, some kind of little novel or poetry book as deemed fit for the fairer sex since the eighteenth century, reading is again a good habit, ain't it?

For the most part, however, women would like to keep their intellect and their habits intact, methinks. Women who read, like women who think and women who study and women who assert their rights are dangerous creatures.

So, would you encourage your girl child to read?

The first lesson again

Today, I learnt Swati Tirunal’s oft-heard kriti in Mayamalavagoula, ‘Deva deva kalayaami’. The familiar intonations of the beginner’s raga completed yet another cycle in learning music. “Anda ga-va-attara ashakanam” said my teacher reminding me that the Ga in Mayamalavagowla contained glimpses of three notes. Another of the realisations that form the everyday in learning and relearning music. 

Sa-Ri-Ga-Ma... and so on we are taught in that very Mayamalavagoula  in our very first class on Karnatik music. Then to now is a long way indeed, as is now to the many ‘then’s in future!

Meanwhile, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson here are telling me how reason is not completely conscious but mostly unconscious. That it is shaped by the body, and constrained by it. That we deal with a cognitive unconscious. How we learn in spite of our fundamental unconsciousness of the way we learn has always hugely intrigued me. And even as I try to consciously understand, through speculation and science, through the bizarre language of neurons and through the pleasure of having consciously realised what I have half-known for years, I find myself equally interested in tapping our unconscious learning abilities to enhance our methodologies of education as well as our creative endeavours.

To end this post, I like what Rashmee said the other day on FB: art helps digest. I would like to add, art helps rearrange. As we rearrange, add or brush off a shade, a note, an imperceptible so much here and there, much more than the shade or note, picture or tune, gets rearranged.  And that could be potentially as big as the butterfly's flapping wings.