LUDIC LOG

Bad day today. One of those days where the thin line of decent behavior that keeps me from thinking the entire human race entirely irredeemable is very hard to see. With our government on the verge of another war-as-P.R.-exercise, the fruits of free market capitalism on daily display, and my personal life as prickly and unmanueverable as ever, my thoughts drift like clouds on a breezy summer day to the idea of destruction.

Not destruction of the human race, of course; despite years of yearning and heavy investments in black leather and mustache trimmers, I have yet to become a megalomaniacal supervillian with the desire, let alone the capacity, to wipe mankind off the face of the earth. No, today, as with many black days, it's destruction of the self that catches my fancy. The Big Sleep routine. Cashing out. Riding the little black train.

It's one of the few things (along with putting drugs in your front and penises in your bottom) that you are prohibited from doing to yourself. William James noted that no educated man existed who has not considered it; Albert Camus saw it as the only really serious philosophical problem; and Graham Greene, with the offhanded incisiveness that marked his novels, noted that it was purely a question of mathematics: "However great a man's fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance ­ so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival."

I think it's strange that we cast it only in terms of despair, of surrender, of an insanity or horror to be forever forestalled; never do we seem to think of it as an act of power (this is something I can do; this is one thing they cannot take away from me) or the ineluctable conclusion of a serious consideration of the reality of one's life (this has become intolerable, and I think it will not get better; I am choosing to walk away). Odd that after thousands of years, we have become regressive rather than progressive in the face of the phenomenon; the ancients were far more comfortable with the idea than are we. Is this a sign of our increasing insistence of control? Perhaps it's a reflection of our belief in the cultural dominance of our time; our society is so wonderful, why would anyone choose to leave it?

Anyway, not to worry; I'm not closer to killing myself than I ever was. But it's a powerful notion. The reality of death -- no matter the hand that inflicts it -- colors every decision we make, and by thinking about the possibility of suicide we can more easily wrap our heads around the actuality of life. When I can walk comfortably beside my own personal Grim Reaper, it's a lot easier to trudge through these bad days.