Sculpture of a Suicide, by Maurizio Cattelan, Milan, Italy, 2022 (Getty)
It was horrible for a young woman to weigh the pockets of her dress with stones and carry them into the river to die by drowning. I’m talking about Virginia Woolf’s suicide, of course, and some have praised it as heroic. It was also a terrible suicide Ernest Hemingway, who put the spout of the dried fish in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Maybe it’s the only chapter I didn’t like in Hemingway’s biography.
Worse still, it was the suicide of the American poet Silvia Plath The one who put his head in the gas oven and turned on the tap, or the Lebanese poet Khalil Hawi The one who shot him in the head … I apologize to these and others, I have no doubts, there were very painful circumstances that prompted them to do so.
I always come across articles and opinions praising suicides and suicides. There are also books that repeat this same admiration. I thought the topic had some popularity … One of them is that the reader might like that the person who committed suicide was someone else.
I said: I respond to these people by writing about suicide with pleasure, as opposed to desperate suicide.
I write about suicide with pleasure, as the opposite of desperate suicide
Yes, there is a funny suicide, this is what I saw today on the street … The man in his eighties was trying to make a roll of tobacco with one hand that was shaking a little, the second hand holding the phone up he was talking cheerfully, placed the tobacco bag on a low wall near the sidewalk and stopped. .
I said: this also adds up to what I considered a funny suicide … and there’s alcohol suicide, which I never liked. There is a huge difference between the pleasure of the glass and the light intoxication, the creative enjoyment and the alcoholism which is always miserable.
There is the lyrical suicide show that has never left my memory: three men descend into a sea that has become poisonous – they know – on a planet so far from our solar system, and there is no way for them to leave this collapsing planet, whose sun will swallow it in a few hours, and there is no way for them to return to earth.
The three men advanced together in harmony in the shallow waters of the shore, before them the sun, and the calm sea that gradually enveloped them as they sang the harp of a sweet love song without a trace of despair … stop until they drifted away and disappeared completely under the surface .. It happened in a fantasy movie that I don’t remember now except this last scene.
I don’t know who was the first to say: “Death for love” … Too many human behaviors we could define this: Pleasant suicide … Life itself could be one of them.
A Syrian poet living in Paris
