#345

p.277: https://books.google.com/books?id=pE8MBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA273&lpg=PA273&dq=fan+mail+from+foreign+countries,+is+that+fame?&source=bl&ots=so6zG8C4Qa&sig=lu3Z9RwhgVS2SgeQqXr7Y1asViE&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjazb2K0NHJAhXJ4iYKHaY9BrIQ6AEIITAB#v=onepage&q=fan%20mail%20from%20foreign%20countries%2C%20is%20that%20fame%3F&f=false

Back when I was a dreamy, internalized and closet-intense adolescent, I made a deal with myself, and I was serious: If I ever decided (someday, far away, not now) that it was time to end whatever life I was living, instead of actually killing myself I would move to Fiji and grow coconuts. Deal. I realize now that’s probably easier said than done, now that I have some understanding that suicidal depression would follow a person wherever he goes, not to mention the logistics involved, the travel, real estate acquisition, visas, access to coconut markets, and not to mention the cultural insensitivity to the Fijian people that whole concept implies in the first place. But I was young, with an imagination still brimful with romance about square-rigged sailing ships and tropical Pacific islands, and the beautiful topless native girls living there with long, silky, fragrant black hair, wreaths of hibiscus and frangipani flowers around their graceful necks… and…excuse me…wait…I…I need to take a moment....

Okay, like I was saying, and since I more or less knew that many of Tahiti’s beaches were already lined with high-rise hotels, like Oahu’s, Fiji sounded exotic and unspoiled. So it came in a worthy second place to the wondrous but lost paradise of Tahiti. Fiji it would be, and I would simply drop whatever depressing outrage it was that had so appalled that it was time to make my exit. Fiji, the island that produces excellence in coconuts like the chalky slopes of Nuits-St-Georges grow pinot noir, that would be the place to start over.

Fortunately, I’ve never declined quite to that level of depression, and I’m thankful for it. Fiji has been there all my life as my mythical existential back-up, though, and the thought of it actually has helped me through some difficult times.

B. is immersed here in a meditation on self-harm, and there is no imaginary flight to Fiji helping him through it. Hurt yourself in that way, he’s heard, and the hand that did the hurting will be cut from your corpse and buried separately, in disgrace. That stops his hand, but the real thing is his understanding that the wounds to the face, the body, even the disgraced hand, are nothing compared to the emotional wounds on the people left behind. The bonds of love are that actual. To have them broken is one of the most painful things in human experience. Dante saved the very still and frozen center of Hell for those guilty of treachery—those who break the bonds of trust and love for whatever worldly gains may come of it. B. may have had psychological hobgoblins hounding his dreams and his every waking moment, but goblin pain still isn’t as bad as the pain that comes from knowing how much your self-harm will hurt your loved ones. That hurt that comes from imagining the hurting you’ll cause, it’s an empathy that exists because love exists. Love stays his hand, even after he had been quarreling—which is what has been going on here, and what prompted the suicidal meditation in the first place. The thing is, that love is so consuming and so supporting that if it seems withheld after a spat—well, what’s the point of going on then?  Sit still, he says, and eventually the love-strained goblin pain will ebb, and you can go home. The guy may have been messed up, and he was very familiar with emotional distress, but he wasn’t a goblin himself. He would never do to his wife and daughter what he feels someone did to him. If there’s pain in being left behind, he knows all about that. Eventually, of course, the goblins got him. But when he wrote this, he was still a working poet, trying to uphold his emotional commitments as best he could, and if that meant him saying that, as bad as it is, I’m not killing myself out of responsibility for the feelings of the people I love, even though they’re mad at me, then maybe there’s a certain nobility in that. Not all that much, because, geez, this is all supposed to be self-evident. But people end their lives all the time, don’t they? so not so fast. Depression is dangerous, and it’s never right or fair to accuse suicide of stemming from selfishness. But the left-behind sometimes turn to that. I suppose it’s like addiction in a sense: You walk to the bar, watching yourself walk, knowing what this means, and you simply do not have the ability to make yourself stop. It’s hard to understand. It matters if you can stop, so you call on whatever resources you can muster: love, empathy, or fantasies of Fiji.