The quiet is pervasive. It’s the sort of silence that makes you want to reach inside and stop your heart for fear that its next beat will ruin the moment. The sort of silence that brings that image back to your mind, that image of the earth from 4 billion miles away. And what you think about is how it’s just a wet rock amid myriads of burning bodies.
And this is the sort of silence that’s intrinsically linked to your sense of insignificance.
And for good reason.
Your boots, the ones with the worn heels and rusty buckles, meet the wet blacktop that looks like obsidian. The streetlights reflected orange and fine between the rocks and cracks of the road make you think of some far off night when… never mind.
You bend over instinctively at the sight of a dime. You pinch it between your thumb and forefinger and pick it up. You put it in your pocket, still wet with dirt clinging to it. In the space of two or three breaths you’ve forgotten the entire moment.
You continue on—one foot pulling the other forward and brining the rest of you with it—because what else are you going to do? What else is there to do? Another revolution of the engine, another breath, another step.
And you think of how combustible all this is—your life, your world and your body. You think of roman candles and striking sparks against the things that try to slow you down. You think of a furnace that burns everything down to ash that blows away in time. And you know how you want to burn—in mind, body and spirit (as though you really believe in any of those things as separate)—and how you want to exhaust the fuel and leave the cinders for someone else to wonder at.
Then the smell of woodsmoke—or better: of a fire extinguished—hits you all at once and reminds you of your place in time. And, as though that thought weren’t dismal enough, you remember picking up that dime. And how bad you actually need it.
You know life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. But knowing it doesn’t make a lick of difference. One booted foot swings out ahead of you, finds purchase against the obsidian blacktop, pulls you forward, and you continue on. Because this is what you do: survive.
I tend to think of things in terms of what will burn and what will not. Maybe this is vestigial—some mental remnant of my days as a preteen firebug. Nonetheless, I look at what will sustain a flame as valuable and what won’t as expendable.
I suppose it really goes back to watching the faint orange glow behind the soot-blackened glass of my parent’s woodstove. Remembering those moments as irreplaceable and defining makes warmth and fire somehow more important than anything else.
Consider:
Buddhist monks in Saigon, 1963, burn themselves to death as a protest against the Ngo Dinh Diem regime.
In 1965, 82 year-old German imigrant Alice Herz committed suicide by self-immolation in Detroit as a protest against the Vietnam war.
In the same year Norman Morrison, a 32 year-old father of three, set himself on fire outside the Pentagon office of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara as a protest of the destruction of a Vietnamese village by napalm.
The same year a 22 year-old Catholic Worker Movement member named Roger Allen LaPorte burned himself to death before the UN building, again, to protest Vietnam.
In 1968 a Polish lawyer, Ryszard Siwiec, burned himself during a Communist ceremony in Warsaw to protest the Warsaw Pact intervention in Czechoslovakia.
In 1970, Kostas Georgakis self-immolated in Genoa to protest the Greek military regime.
Need I go on? I have examples from 1970 right up to this year. How about Heo Se-wook who took his own life by self-immolation on the first of April of this year to protest South Korea’s freetrade agreement with the US?
Not close enough to home?
In November of last year Malachi Ritscher immolated himself by the Kennedy Expressway in Chicago to protest America’s occupation of Iraq.
A little over a month later a man in Bakersfield California set himself on fire (along with a Christmas tree, an American flag and an American Revolutionary flag) in front of the Kern County Courthouse as a protest against the Kern High School District who had voted to change the names of their schools’ winter and spring breaks to “Christmas” and “Easter” breaks. He had a sign that read “Fuck the religious establishment and KHSD”.
I guess that’s why the song Ash Ground into Concrete by Ann Arbor hardcore band A: The End Result resonated so strongly with me when I first heard it. A lyrical sample (that heavily influenced the intro piece to this entry):
“Which way would you say you’d like to spend the rest of your days: letting the embers burn out on the hearth, or throw fuel on the furnace burn it all down to cinders and take the inferno to heart?”
The sixth rule in The Thinking Person’s Guide to Suicide is this:
Have a good reason. Losing your job or your partner or your mind is not good enough. If that’s all you’ve got then swing one foot out in front of the other, find purchase on the ground and pull yourself forward.
Have a good reason, because there have been plenty of people before you who had damn good reasons.
And this is the sort of silence that’s intrinsically linked to your sense of insignificance.
And for good reason.
Your boots, the ones with the worn heels and rusty buckles, meet the wet blacktop that looks like obsidian. The streetlights reflected orange and fine between the rocks and cracks of the road make you think of some far off night when… never mind.
You bend over instinctively at the sight of a dime. You pinch it between your thumb and forefinger and pick it up. You put it in your pocket, still wet with dirt clinging to it. In the space of two or three breaths you’ve forgotten the entire moment.
You continue on—one foot pulling the other forward and brining the rest of you with it—because what else are you going to do? What else is there to do? Another revolution of the engine, another breath, another step.
And you think of how combustible all this is—your life, your world and your body. You think of roman candles and striking sparks against the things that try to slow you down. You think of a furnace that burns everything down to ash that blows away in time. And you know how you want to burn—in mind, body and spirit (as though you really believe in any of those things as separate)—and how you want to exhaust the fuel and leave the cinders for someone else to wonder at.
Then the smell of woodsmoke—or better: of a fire extinguished—hits you all at once and reminds you of your place in time. And, as though that thought weren’t dismal enough, you remember picking up that dime. And how bad you actually need it.
You know life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. But knowing it doesn’t make a lick of difference. One booted foot swings out ahead of you, finds purchase against the obsidian blacktop, pulls you forward, and you continue on. Because this is what you do: survive.
I tend to think of things in terms of what will burn and what will not. Maybe this is vestigial—some mental remnant of my days as a preteen firebug. Nonetheless, I look at what will sustain a flame as valuable and what won’t as expendable.
I suppose it really goes back to watching the faint orange glow behind the soot-blackened glass of my parent’s woodstove. Remembering those moments as irreplaceable and defining makes warmth and fire somehow more important than anything else.
Consider:
Buddhist monks in Saigon, 1963, burn themselves to death as a protest against the Ngo Dinh Diem regime.
In 1965, 82 year-old German imigrant Alice Herz committed suicide by self-immolation in Detroit as a protest against the Vietnam war.
In the same year Norman Morrison, a 32 year-old father of three, set himself on fire outside the Pentagon office of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara as a protest of the destruction of a Vietnamese village by napalm.
The same year a 22 year-old Catholic Worker Movement member named Roger Allen LaPorte burned himself to death before the UN building, again, to protest Vietnam.
In 1968 a Polish lawyer, Ryszard Siwiec, burned himself during a Communist ceremony in Warsaw to protest the Warsaw Pact intervention in Czechoslovakia.
In 1970, Kostas Georgakis self-immolated in Genoa to protest the Greek military regime.
Need I go on? I have examples from 1970 right up to this year. How about Heo Se-wook who took his own life by self-immolation on the first of April of this year to protest South Korea’s freetrade agreement with the US?
Not close enough to home?
In November of last year Malachi Ritscher immolated himself by the Kennedy Expressway in Chicago to protest America’s occupation of Iraq.
A little over a month later a man in Bakersfield California set himself on fire (along with a Christmas tree, an American flag and an American Revolutionary flag) in front of the Kern County Courthouse as a protest against the Kern High School District who had voted to change the names of their schools’ winter and spring breaks to “Christmas” and “Easter” breaks. He had a sign that read “Fuck the religious establishment and KHSD”.
I guess that’s why the song Ash Ground into Concrete by Ann Arbor hardcore band A: The End Result resonated so strongly with me when I first heard it. A lyrical sample (that heavily influenced the intro piece to this entry):
“Which way would you say you’d like to spend the rest of your days: letting the embers burn out on the hearth, or throw fuel on the furnace burn it all down to cinders and take the inferno to heart?”
The sixth rule in The Thinking Person’s Guide to Suicide is this:
Have a good reason. Losing your job or your partner or your mind is not good enough. If that’s all you’ve got then swing one foot out in front of the other, find purchase on the ground and pull yourself forward.
Have a good reason, because there have been plenty of people before you who had damn good reasons.
