on suicide http://www.alansondheim.org/P1010509.JPG this is always a difficult topic, rarely discussed, full of trigger warnings, legislation, censorships, stigma, religious mandates, and prejudice; the very mention of it conjures up violence, not choice, and indicates that for all (im)practical purposes, our bodies are not our own, any more than the software on our laptops, bought and paid for, is our own. Cells and bytes are owned by the state, by corporations, by data itself. The misery and debt alone may be ours to keep. growing old is a complex of outlasting and being outlasted; the curtain of memories and production becomes tattered and one is no longer considered interesting or having a say in the world. one has rarely, now, a say in one's body, no matter one's age or the glistening productions of athleticisms and the continuous breaking of records. healthcare veers close to annihilation, to be sure. and speaking, not being spoken to or spoken with, is evanescent at best. DIWO, doing it with others, requires community, access, and funding in the first and last places; DIM, doing it myself, requires an impossible fortitude, as if every personal gesture mattered, not only to oneself, but somehow to the world at large. the gestures don't matter at all; the world is replete with the failure of f2f communication, the sliding of representations and presences of the body into imaging, databanks, and projections. machines may listen to my music, and soon machines will produce it, and very little else will be necessary; humans and their suffering are becoming byproducts of data streams. i participate in this; i'm aware of my invisibility, a set-in or set-back as a result of age. every person addressing me as 'sir' is dismissing me at the same time. but this isn't about age or disappearance, it's about absent ontologies, species, race and gender and religious representations disappearing into finance, the right, and data-banking: classification is also a form of face-to-face annihilation. suicide is the last holdout, the last hold of the body onto the body, the last sight, the last sound, the last of everything. even when multitudinous, it concerns one, the disappearance of a singularity before the singularity is even recognized, acknowledged replete. fecundity appears only in the destructuring of its absence. there are people who do not want to live, no matter how 'want' or desire becomes embedded in legislation, the good or bad advice of friends, local and imminent circumstance. and what of this? and what of who or what they leave behind? we are always in attendance to the world, the world is always in attendance to us. the ending of the dancing is always the dancing of the end. here, rhetorical figures take over, suture, the pain beneath the surface. here ends the fragment of the essay, what is left is unsayable, an unsaying. _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
