Suicide Notes

A Poem and an Explanation

“Ophelia with a Blue Wimple in the Water,” Odilon Redon (1905).

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The poem first (so you can skip the commentary if you prefer):

Suicide Notes

You measured only that which you desired
to say (not what we needed most to hear),
such paper bullets as pierce the ear
with catalectic lines and disappear.

You marched as well in heavy-handed prose.
Those cloaks of lead (your shoulders ever tired)
like vanity, still inward mired
with doubt, were thinly gold-attired. 

You failed to find the word that we could fear
or one to stir our hearing from repose.
So the paradox of language goes:
For themselves may thoughts themselves dispose.

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A few months after playing the processional music at my wedding, a close friend hanged himself in his apartment in Seattle. He said and wrote all sorts of wild things, but neither I nor his family really saw this coming even though we were all very concerned for his long-term mental health. Generally speaking, medication is only as useful as the user wants it to be, and I was distant and perhaps distracted from other signs by my own concerns. God forgive me.

I wrote this poem partly as an expression of my frustration—even though it might have been as easily directed at my own blindness as his lack of communication. When I shared it with an older and more expert professor of literature, he told me that its greatest weakness was its callous tone. I think I see that now, but I had no intention of suggesting that the self-destructive are invariably selfish—though I suppose my own anger/hurt had its part in shaping the tenor of the verse. Still, there is an important parallel, I think, in the way that writing (or artistic endeavor in general) leans toward self-indulgence and expects a response that its peculiar features somehow failed to elicit. The dual meaning of “dispose” is especially important for suggesting that the stubborn arrangements of our own minds can badly undermine the intended effect. I do not rejoice in the fact, and I try to repent of those tendencies within myself.

Nevertheless, I will leave it to you whether I’ve committed the same sin, i.e. whether the central idea is likewise undermined by the author’s execution.