The Clown Wants Silence
Discretion is advised.
“The only reason I haven’t killed myself is because my parents are still alive”. Something I recently told someone.
I think about it every day.
Suicide has been on my mind for over a decade, but recently, the rumination and temptations are becoming stronger.
I know how I would do it.
The day has already been written.
I literally wrote what I would do, and painted a vivid picture which I could enjoy. I may as well have a great day doing it.
It’s real creative too; gotta give whoever finds my body and the subsequent authorities a riddle to deal with.
All I need to do is get some ingredients and find the courage to do it.
But I’m terrified to take action, and I suppose that’s a good thing.
I often find appreciation in Hamlet’s To Be Or Not To Be soliloquy.
I understand every word of that speech.
There’s something comforting that my troubles are not unique, and have been explored since man has asked himself “why am I here?”
Consciousness might just be mental pollution.
A symptom of the machine in which we co-exist; meaningless byproduct. Knowing that you exist doesn’t mean there’s a reason for it.
I’ve recently found routine and a semblance of purpose the past three months by working at a treatment centre for teenagers at high risk of suicide.
I want the best for them, I want them to live because I know there is so much out there to live for, and my paternal instinct would do whatever is necessary to protect them, and yet I feel like a hypocrite.
I ride my motorbike fast along the highway just to remind myself that I don’t actually want to die, and arrive at work, prepared to participate in strengthening up the morale of young people looking down the precipice, while thinking “it doesn’t get easier”.
Maybe I’m wrong.
I hope I’m wrong.
I’d love to be wrong.
Perhaps I will find a way to live feeling like Death.
As far as I’m concerned, Eric died four years ago when he woke up with amnesia, and this version I am now is a reconstruction, a living Madame Tussaud with Blade Runner paranoia about his memories.
I see my hands typing.
I feel the air entering through my nostrils and expanding my lungs.
I breathe, or I’m being breathed.
I am a puppet master controlling a corpse, constantly fighting rigor mortis.
It’s pretty grim to feel both alive and dead.
It’s definitely intriguing.
Exhausting, socially isolating, ethereal, neither here nor there, uninvited in this reality.
I want to live, but I don’t know how to do it with the weight that I carry. A weight around my neck that is illogical, supernatural, which has brought me closer to the Gods, as no longer imaginative explorations of human psychology, but as real, tangible beings sharing a platform with us mortals.
I’ve written about this before, but this tip of the tip of the iceberg bears repeating.
Before waking with amnesia, I wrote a script about a pandemic, and when I returned from the memory-erasing slumber, I found myself in the story that I wrote, and in my attempts at making sense of this new World, for a brief but very real moment, I believed that I had something to do with the millions of deaths from the virus.
However farfetched you might think this is; it changes a man.
For a couple of years, I believed I was the monster.
A sensation that still crawls underneath my skin, ready to pounce at the opportunity to eat, but a symbiotic one who has to work in cahoots with the version of me that doesn’t want mindless destruction.
I attempt to tame it, but he often gets the best of me, and the only way so far I’ve found to calm him is by burning my skin.
Horror Vaccui.
“Something came back with me when I woke up”, I say half-jokingly.
Beauty & the Beast. Dr. Jekyll & Mr Hyde. Two Face. Yin & Yang, and the line between them keeping those sides both separate and working together.
Perhaps I’m in limbo.
Whatever World I live in, assuming all the people I meet are equally conscious and not morbid projections, ghosts or non-player characters, it is difficult to connect with them.
“Don’t cry” the jester tells me as I was crumbled on my knees overcoming what I had done to the planet. “You know, one death is sad, a dozen a tragedy, but millions… well that’s an achievement.”
I chuckled.
Was that my own thought or the whispers from some prompter on my metaphysical stage? The split brains having a conversation in their one skull? Some thoughts have a real alien quality to them, as if I am truly conversing with another.
I still can’t find the right therapist, but thankfully, I recently spoke to someone who seemed at ease with the notion that some things come to us from what Jung called the collective unconscious, and some of us, flirt with its event horizon, capable of accessing a universal mind unchained by the prison of time.
This is likely why I was able to write about the pandemic before it occurred, a consciousness existing in a block theory universe where past, present and future are one.
It’s comforting, but doesn’t answer what I should be doing with myself now that I’ve had this world revealed to me. What is my purpose in this possible eternity? Who the Hell am I in the abyss?
Yesterday, tired of talking, I asked myself for a vow of silence, non-audible communication, perhaps as a form of edging towards self-murder, maybe from the realization that it’s all been said already.
I’m not adding anything new, and the more I look, the more it seems there is truly nothing original in this vast expanse of space and time.
But after only 24 hours of silence, a quick sleep with many dreams, although still adamant of wanting to be mute, I realize that I would lose my job, my income, my rent, my food, and would visibly see the disturbances that my noiselessness would create. If I’m going to do that, I might as well pull the trigger.
Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with me, between having an identity, named Eric, with the friends and family that this body had before the reset button was pressed, and the allurement of a new World, where I can shed the exposition of this character and create a new one.
This may be the same body as the one before amnesia, but this pilot has just been born.
Is this what Joseph Campbell means when he said “from the tomb to the womb”?
I message my employers, tail between my legs, asking for my job back, willing to talk when necessary, and looking like a fool.
“There’s an idea that Jung developed about the trickster, the jester, the comedian”, explores Dr Peterson in one of his lectures about the psychological significance of Biblical stories, “the trickster is the precursor to the savior. That’s one of the things that I learned. It’s so unlikely, you’d never think that, it’s so amazing that might be the case. The satirical and the ironic, and the troublemaker, the comedian, the fool, the fool is the precursor to the savior. Why? Because you’re a fool when you start something new. If you’re not willing to be a fool, then you’ll never start something new, and if you don’t start something new then you’ll never develop, and so the willingness to be a fool is the precursor to transformation, and that’s the same as humility, so if you’re going to write your destiny, you can do a bad first job. You’re gonna get smarter as you move forward.”
We’ll see what will become of me.
For now, I guess I’ll put off killing myself till tomorrow, and this is what I’ll tell myself each day.