Where To Go?

Take a look at this.
- Small scale Hooverville's in California and New York.
- I remember visiting a homeless shelter last fall here in Newburgh, NY and talking to the director. He mentioned how even that summer the shelters were filling up to capacity like he had never seen before.
- The other day I was hanging out with some friends in the City of Newburgh and a guy named Cartier rolled up on a bike. He said someone had thrown it out and he fixed it up. Cartier had recently been released from upstate prison on attempted murder charges. He said he applied to 10 different jobs now that he was out but nobody wants to hire a felon. He was living under the Newburgh Beacon Bridge.
I don't really know how to connect these events, and I won't try to pass judgment. But it seems like there's something to all this, isn't there? Some silent thing which we can all see but which stays silent and moves gradually like a glacier; under the rug?

Art and Suicide

To be or not to be, that is the question;
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep;
-William Shakespeare's, Hamlet

I suppose I should at least pay lip service to the name of this blog. I think when people usually hear the word suicide in America they cringe. It is a taboo. Something flips in their stomach like a fish yanked out of the water and placed on the ground. Perhaps rightfully so. It's not a fun subject for most, especially since when mentioned in any type of serious format, you have to wonder if the person who brings it up it trying to signal you in some subtle or not so subtle way. We live in a nation where you can stream your impending destruction live for thousands of on lookers cheering you on like a fantasy football league. Yet when suicide is combined with art, I believe we re-frame the act of suicide.

I think there's a tendency to see suicide as an affirmation of the deepness of the artist and, by association, their work. It's romanticized. A sad but powerfully emotional tragedy in which the likes of Kurt Cobain "just couldn't take it anymore." In which Heath Ledger became so inundated with his role as the Joker that it consumed him. For Sylvia Plath's son, Nicholas Hughes, it was something that plagued their family. The question remains, what is arts relationship with suicide?

A teacher once told me that your art is supposed to save you. No matter how depressing, negative, cynical or depraved that art may be. Isn't art by it's nature an affirmation of life? In some, by saying "This matters!" aren't you denying death's grasp on life and its inevitably? If by romanticizing suicide with it's relation to art, does that mean that death ultimately is more potent then art? It negates art's larger message?
You can find that suicide in many cultures is considered noble and required. A samurai going into battle against a thousand warriors will do better if he sees himself as already dead, and therefore might do better in his battle. Yet we see here that this isn't exactly suicide. Or is it? Maybe this relates more to Seppuku.
I feel that associating a positive attitude towards suicide's role in art neglects the true purpose of art itself. Do we still romanticize it today? Do you? At the very least, confrontation of the subject shouldn't frighten you.
That being said here's a link of suicide letters, some of which I found pretty poetic, others not. I also found this book.

-James