Suicide Note Writing 101

Simon Critchley

If Kierkegaard were a student at The New School he would undoubtedly have taken Simon Critchley’s “Suicide Note Writing Workshop.” The author of Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death, might also have been able to exchange chatter with such famous suicides as Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Virginia Woolf and Primo Levi, provided they too had been students of his at The New School. “We’re not mocking suicide,” Mr. Critchley, a professor of Philosophy and author of a number of books including The Book of Dead Philosophers told the Times (“A Writing Class Focuses on Goodbyes," NYT, 5/19/13). “We’re doing this as a way to understand it. And why not be a little insensitive? People are terrified in talking about death.” Actually according to the Times piece the course itself was not given at The New School, where Critchley teaches but as part of a “monthlong series of performances, installations and lectures called the School of Death by Cabinet Magazine and the Family Business exhibition space on West 21^st Street.” But no mind if this is just the equivalent of a 100 level course for beginners (those merely contemplating suicide), one can’t wait for the 300 level senior seminar, in which there is a competition for spots. For that one you would have to be pretty far along, or far gone and not just a victim of suicidal ideation, but someone who had a near death experience or actually crossed over. This latter case would pose complexities for the registrar, but with Yahoo buying Tumblr and opportunities for social networking increasing by leaps and bounds, it shouldn’t be long before professors will be able to teach on-line courses in the hereafter as well as the here-in-now.  

Jokes and the Conscious

Freud wrote a tome call The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconcious. Here’s a joke which talks about humor’s relation to what is perfectly conscious. The husband asks his wife if she wants to have sex. She says no she has a gynecologist’s appointment the next day. Do you have a dental appointment too? is the husband’s rejoinder. It’s really a simple joke and not particularly dirty by today’s standards, nor is it complicated enough or linguistically interesting enough to have been the work of great transgressive pundits like the late George Carlin. But the joke does epitomize a number of things about both sex and the invention or lack of invention that goes into the creation of excuses. From the point of view of sex it’s an anecdotally sociological comment on the lack of reciprocity that's characteristic of most domesticized sexuality. Sex when it becomes a part of the routine of every life is no longer about desire. It’s a power play having to do with who's going to get his way. The husband in the joke might just as easily have asked if his wife wanted to eat franks and beans for dinner, though then too she might have begged off with the excuse that she had a gynecologist’s appointment and didn’t want to risk being gaseous when she was in stirrups. However the joke is even more interesting when it comes to excuses. There's really no rationale for not having sex before a gynecologist’s appointment. In fact, one would think that it made sense to have sex so that if anything untoward occurred during the sex act, it could be reported to the gynecologist. And the rejoinder about the dental appointment is equally irrational when you come down to it. The husband is plainly arguing for oral sex as a surrogate due to the fact that it’s unlikely the wife will also have a dental appointment on the same day she has a gynecologist’s appointment. Playing the devil’s advocate, one could take the position that if avoiding seeing a dentist and a gynecologist the same day is the game plan, then oral sex, which could easily dislodge a filling, is not what the doctor ordered.

Frances Ha

“This apartment is very aware of itself,” comments one of the characters in Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha, the director’s love song to his co-writer and leading lady, Greta Gerwig (Frances). Greta is a dancer and the movie which employs a great deal of jump cuts also lingers on Gerwig in motion whether she is philosophizing about the virtues of reading Proust in Paris which she calls doing “what your supposed to be doing when your supposed to be doing it,”falling on her way back from finding an ATM machine (a shot that moviegoers are likely to remember the film by) or merely standing in the elevator of Moishe’s self storage. About her choreography Frances says, “I like things that look like they’re mistakes,” and that is source of the love that Baumbach lavishes on his character, a poor little poor girl who looks like a poor little rich girl, a dance major from Vassar by way of Sacramento who won’t take avocation for an answer. But what might be said about the apartment could also be iterated about the movie which being shot in black and white immediately cites all your favorite French New Wave films starting with The Four Hundred Blows, Woody Allen’s Manhattan, John Cassavetes’ Faces (both shot in b&w) along with a host of earlier b&wAmerican classics that are filmic versions of the Bildungsroman, or coming of age novel. Frances even misses the opportunity of meeting a Leaud look a like on brief trip to Paris. But as much as we may admire the low definition of b&w which by failing to fill in the blanks, leaves the imagination unfettered, it’s a big leap to sit down and make your your 2013 version of Little Fugitive about a Vassar girl on the run, as it were, without invidiously comparing the film to the masterpieces it cites. You might say that there’s something contrived about the film, right down to its earnestness, minimalism and seeming lack of contrivance. Like a lot of Vassar grads, Frances gets on her feet. The chances that the character takes are like that of the filmmaker who is more calling attention to, than actually opting for, the kind of risks he would have you believe he is taking.

Ben Marcus’ s "The Dark Arts"

Dusseldorf

There is a brilliant moment in Ben Marcus New Yorker short story, “The Dark Arts,”  ( The New Yorker, May 20, 2013). Julien the central character has come to Dusseldorf for treatment for a chronic and unspecified illness. He is staying in a hostel called the Millerhaus and waiting for his volatile girlfriend, Hayley who never seems to be coming. “He even felt sort of healthy, although it made him nervous to think so, and damned if he knew what healthy meant anymore. He’d long ago lost track of how he was suppose to feel…Perhaps he had been fine this whole time. He wasn’t legitimately sick. Perhaps this was just what it felt like to be alive…Did everyone else, he wondered, feel listless, strange, anxious, dull, scared—you could pretty much go shopping from a list of adjectives—and did other people just clench their jaws and endure it, without running to the doctor, as he did, again and again?” Then an etiology is uncovered involving the suspicion of a brain tumor. “If you tell me it’s all in my head now...you won’t be lying,” Julien quips to his German doctor. The ambiguity remains, but one almost wishes that Marcus hadn’t opened up the possibility of the tumor explaining everything. In our culture there is a tendency to take a pill for every ache and then the pill taking goes on even when the ache fades since there’s the aftermath, the wake left by the injustice of the discomfiture itself. People have lost the ability to tell whether they are in physical or mere psychic pain and they’re no longer sure which pain they’re medicating when they seek out painkillers. Both Freud and Heidegger wrote about the word Unheimlichkeit and if you hit the hyperlink you’ll read how one very eloquent Australian blogger writes about the term. The word literally means “not feeling at home,” but refers to the sense of estrangement and dislocation that Freud called the “uncanny” and may be the fate of the wandering cosmopolitan individual, metrosexuals and the like, uprooted from tradition and victims of a pleasure principal that makes the absence of pleasure feel like pain. It’s also a condition that conducive to the making of art. Marcus’s character Julien fits the bill. Another way to put this is that Julien is a latter day Hans Castorp only his Zauberberg is Dusseldorf.

The Master Builder at BAM

If you didn’t know Ibsen’s The Master Builder you might at first think that the character played by John Turturro in the current production at BAM was someone who had an exaggerated sense of his self-importance. In fact, Turturro’s Solness bears an unpleasant resemblance to another architect. Robert Roark, the hero of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, rendered by Gary Cooper in the King Vidor movie. And if we were looking for referents in contemporary culture then the sexualization of Solness’s muse Hilde Wangel (Wrenn Schmidt) and his amanuensis Kaja Fosli (Kelly Hutchinson) could easily recall Fifty Shades of Gray. Of course a helluva lot more is going on in both the play and in Andrei Belgrader’s direction, but there’s something in Ibsen that conduces to the kind of distortion that sees the romantic conception of the uncompromising artist as form of bombast and tyranny, with those surrounding him as submissives. The play can easily be turned into The Masturbator rather than The Master Builder. The very name Solness, the state of “soul ness,” sounds like an iteration from one of the great German idealist philosophers. When you step into late Ibsen, you enter the world of aspiration, in which being is trumped by the notion of becoming, and happiness is the price one pays to create  “castles in the air”—the expression Hilde uses to describe her master builder’s calling. The German word for passion is Leidenschaft and leiden means suffering, a kind of suffering that can lead to the ultimate sacrifice, the famous Liebestod of Tristan and Isolde. The recently released Andre Gregory: Before and After Dinner contains scenes for a work in progress of The Master Builder that has been going on for years. It reveals another approach to the play, based upon conversation and devoid of hyperbole. Freed from the burden of melodrama, Ibsen’s play becomes as complex as say a Bergman movie.