It’s all make believe, isn’t it?
Marilyn Monroe
suicides say
the darnedest thing
Wiggle Room
Lane Dean, Jr. the character in David Foster Wallaces book
The Pale King relates “It was the first time he contemplated suicide.”
comme ci comme ca like this like that
Wallace didnt leave himself any Wiggle
Room
it was the final story he wrote
his wife
discovered his body at their Claremont California home he hung himself
12 September 2008
Wallace was 46
in his short story When I Look at
a Strawberry, I Think of a Tongue Edouard Leve wrote The best day of my life
may already be behind me.
he agreed to meet with his editor on 18 October 2007 regarding the
publication of his proposed book
Suicide
17 October 2007 he hung
himself in his Parisian apartment
Leve was 42
in a creative frenzy Vincent Van
Gogh painted more than 70 canvases in 70 days in Auvers-sur-Oise France
one oil in particular Wheat Fields Under Threatening Skies is suggested to have portend his suicide
La tristesse durera toujour. The
sadness will never die. were his last words conveyed to his brother
Theo as he lay in a bed at Auberge Ravoux after mortally wounding himself in
the chest
Vincent died two days later 29
July 1890
he was 37
Marilyn
Americas blonde goddess
the story goes
It’s all make believe, isn’t it?
was suspected of a Nembutal
overdose
or so Dr. Thomas
Noguchi believed
The Coroner to the Stars
he said It’s folly to shrink in
fear, if this is dying. For death looked lovely in her lovely face. quoting Italian Renaissance
poet Petrarch
5 August 1962
she was 36 her
psychiatrist Dr. Ralph Greenson insisted she was not suicidal
then theres Hunter S. Thompson
whose Gonzo journalism making himself the story was published
in Rolling Stone The Kentucky Derby is
Decadent and Depraved
was written
under duress he insisted
he left in his typewriter
centered on the page his last word
counselor
while talking on the telephone to
his wife Anita he shot himself in the head
his son Juan and grandson were in
the house
had to wonder why hedidnt take himself out behind the woodshed instead
bad reception
20 February 2005 Aspen Colorado
Hunter was 67
he said That is seventeen years
past fifty. Seventeen years more
than I needed or wanted.
last but not least
earnestly Ernest
Hemingway who President Kennedy remarked when learning of his death
. . . he almost single-handedly transformed . . . literature . . . For
Whom the Bell Toll
leaving no suicide note his wife
Mary made a statement Mr. Hemingway
accidently killed himself while cleaning his gun at 7:30 a.m.
this after he discharged from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester Minnesota
after two months of treatment for hypertension
bad hypertension
2 July 1961 Ketchum Idaho
. . . clad in a robe and pajamas and was found in the foyer near the gun
rack in his modern concrete home.
he was 61
Above is poetry.
Dramatic, poetic
investment
in our Humanity
for the choice
between Living or
Dying,
whether we have the
right,
or that we should assume
how others might feel about a suicide,
as they are often reviled for their diecisionreviled by those left behind.
A terrible
determination by those who remain.
Look. Very.
Hard.
Suicide
is self-annihilation.
but if “It’s all make believe” then
it should not raise anyones ire
we are either waking from a dream
or our part in the play is ended and were onto a new part
perhaps our next consternation
a new part or just the next part
Thursday, 17 3.
23
1540, day-between-2-Ts, 2 8.
23
