enough rope

the trouble with imagining sisyphus happy

"Safo", right before plunging to her death, by Miguel Carbonel Selva

“So many, I had not thought death had undone so many.”- T.S Eliot, The Waste Land

Virginia Woolf had this line about using the pen because she couldn't pull the trigger. Until one day she did. Dorothy Parker found little in giving or taking, little in water or wine. This living, this living, this living was never a project of hers. Or yours. Or mine.

Anne Sexton famously laughed, roared “good for him”, upon hearing of Hemingways bullet-to-the-head death. Wonder if she laughed one last time before she wrapped herself in her mother’s furs, started her cars engine in a closed garage for the last time. Good for her, I guess.

There’s that photo of everyone’s darling, Sylvia, in front of Notre Dame. Smiling, youthful, and pretty. Sylvia and that cathedral remind me sometimes even the most beautiful figures end up engulfed by their own flames.

"She had the suicide inside her. As I do. As many of us do. But, if we're lucky, we don't get away with it and something or someone forces us to live." - Anne Sexton on Sylvia Plath

Goethe’s eponymous hero in Faust doesn’t go through with killing himself once he hears the church bells on Easter Sunday. Would Flaubert’s Madame Bovary have survived the anguish of her mind if she’d heard them too?

Mishima, destined to orchestrate his own death with a ritual suicide, wrote one final line of poetry written with a splash of blood. His lovers claimed Mishima would often orgasm while role-playing the act of seppuku. Have to respect someone who literally got off on the thought of killing himself. Here’s hoping he got to leave this world with a final splash of cum too.

“if my devils leave me, my angels will too” - Rilke

"It's terrible [..] to think that all I've suffered, and all the suffering I've caused, might have arisen from the lack of a little salt in my brain." - Robert Lowell

Camus tried to teach me life is Sisyphean. To make sense of its absurdity will only break your heart, he said, for there isn’t any sense to be made of it. The trick, then, is to imagine Sisyphus happy.

I am perhaps forever melancholy. I can only imagine Sisyphus crushed.

I swam out deep. Real deep into the Atlantic. Under the influence of Long Islands ocean waters and a half dozen Arnold Palmers, I cried and laughed while its salt mixed with my salt while the tide filled some holes I’d self-helped my way through patching up. Do you realize we are alone here? I voicelessly asked the waves. The ocean struck me in the face. This will accomplish nothing, it said.

That’s precisely my point, I answered.

“I know I ought to kill myself, to brush myself off the earth like a nasty insect; but I am afraid of suicide, for I am afraid of showing greatness of soul. I know that it will be another sham again - the last deception in an endless series of deceptions. What good is there in deceiving oneself? Simply to play at greatness of soul? Indignation and shame I can never feel, therefore not despair [..] - Fyodor Dostoevsky

“On a cobweb afternoon
In a room full of emptiness
By a freeway I confess
I was lost in the pages
Of a book full of death
Reading how we'll die alone
And if we're good, we'll lay to rest
Anywhere we want to go“

- Chris Cornell