Your Custom Text Here
Here’s a little clip I’ll call Navigation about finding our way in the world, to Dickinson’s beat.
The Wonder Paradox is out in the world! It’s been a very exciting time, so action packed that I’m only now trying to keep track of it here. Hope you are having a great late winter and ready to coast into spring!
I made this Animated collage as a tiny book trailer for The Wonder Paradox: Embracing the Weirdness of Existence and the Poetry of Our Lives. It’s not exactly about the book, but I make collage animations and I wrote this book.
I’m back. I was thinking of talking to you about something and here I am doing it! How’s that for follow through? Pretty good if you don’t count that I haven’t posted in years. Pretty bad if you don’t count that I was writing a new book that whole time, called The Wonder Paradox in case you’ve missed it plastered all over this website. Hell folks I’m super excited that I still know how to update this website. So that’s pretty good.
What I’ve got you here to talk about is I was wondering how many people in the world can people watch from their own windows. And how many think of it as a regular pastime. I love to look at them go by out front, my husband doesn’t engage in the sport, and Goldie loves to do it most of all and as you may have surmised she is the dog. Out back, it’s Wild Kingdom and that rivets all three of us. Why so wild in Brooklyn? Well, one day I got an unopened bag of birdseed from a stoop giveaway and by the time I hit the bottom of the bag I was hooked, or rather some bluejays and a pair of cardinals, as well as a crusade of sparrows had gotten their hooks into me. We stare out at our aviary after I’ve broadcast seeds and squee with the color and the song except for those of us who just want to chase the squirrels.
I wonder if it lowers anxiety, spending time hypnotized by the doings of the living. Maybe that’s why I indulge, but it doesn’t sound quite right regarding Goldie, right? What about you? People watcher? Bird observant? And is it ocular zanax? lmk
We used to think suicide rates were highest around the winter holidays but now we know that T. S. Eliot was right, April is the cruelest month. Why? Because it “breeds lilacs from the dead land,” which is to say that everything wakes up and if you are not in the mood for that, it can be pretty off-putting. The winter was dark for everyone, now everybody but you is out there in the sun shaking their booties. Depressing. So I say we use that information to boost our moods now! How cozy are these darkest hours. How intimate our separate longings. How dormant all that nonsense and humidity. Winter! We, of all people, are present, if accounted for (if for which unaccounted). How absurd. In the twenty-first century, no less! At least, let us together mourn the weather. At best, let us let failing and winning take its rest. Got a little poetic there. Ex oh ex.
Fascinating to be thus reviewed in The Christian Century.
Some highlights:
The distinguished poet Jennifer Hecht is a kind of philosopher and a first-rate historian of ideas. In her previous book, Hecht traced the vicissitudes of the meaning of doubt in our culture, and in these beautifully written pages she jogs our collective memory about the topic of suicide.
Most arguments contra the moral legitimacy of suicide are built on premises of faith, on the view that you are robbing God of God’s property. Hecht, in contrast, is intent on providing secular reasons ...
Hume’s claim that suicide adds to the common good contradicts Hecht’s main point: that the ramifications of suicide are long and destructive. As the old adage goes, “I have a right to do what I want as long as I am not hurting anyone else.” This belief prompts the conclusion that we are morally entitled to take our own lives. Hecht, however, marshals many facts in support of her axial position that suicide not only devastates families but “causes suicide.” She pins this well-established fact on the board: “A suicide by a parent while a child was under the age of eighteen tripled the likelihood that the child would commit suicide.”
Hecht is wise to remind us of the mysteriously powerful impulse to imitate those with whom our lives are inextricably bound up.
This gift of a book is as much about the issue of pain in life as it is about not ending your life because of the pain. Following in both a religious and secular tradition, Hecht submits that suffering is soul-making.
Hecht has the wisdom to understand that life is not an argument. She is simply intent on providing people who are at the razor’s edge a reason to endure, a reason to stay. She writes: “I do not mean to pass judgment on those who have committed suicide. I mean instead to express to the suicidal person who has rejected suicide that you deserve gratitude from your community and from humanity.”
This tender and well-reasoned book is sure to save lives.
Went on HuffPost this morning. Big studio on Astor Place. Really interesting interview questions.
The spot's called "Do we have a responsibility to live." The twitter comments at the end are intense, people feel more committed to arguing than when I've been on the radio over years talking about religious and philosophical doubt and atheism.
Jennifer
I'm very glad to report that one of the most prestigious and oldest medical journals, The Lancet, (formed in 1823) has run a review of my book "Stay". It is written by Simon Wessely, who has been called the most important psychiatrist in Britain (more on him below) - and has been knighted for it! He balked a bit at my conviction on a few points about which he seems undecided, but it's a great little essay. "Preventing Suicide: Are the Best Barriers Physical or Philosophical?"
March 8, 2014
Simon Wessely, THE LANCET
some highlights:
Hecht’s starting point was the anguish she felt after the suicides of two friends But what she has written is less a plea from the heart, but one from the brain. She has produced an intellectual history of the morality of suicide…
She focuses on two themes. The first is the harm that suicide does to those left behind. She quotes a line from Arthur Miller’s After the Fall to telling effect – “a suicide kills two people Maggie, that’s what it’s for.” …Who knows but any clinical psychiatrist, let alone anyone who has been bereaved by suicide, will need no convincing of the profound and long lasting ghastly impact of a suicide.
As a society we now routinely endorse measures that seek to erect physical barriers to suicide – literally… “But what”, writes Hecht…”about a conceptual barrier, a secular argument for why suicide is morally wrong?...We need such an argument to counteract the belief that suicide is morally neutral, even the right of every individual.” ... Hecht assembles many scholarly references to support the notion of suicide contagion. Much of this is well known, but no less interesting for that.
[H]er discussion of the need for responsible media reporting is certainly persuasive. We should not write about successful or unsuccessful suicide, for example…instead let’s talk about completed or uncompleted. ...[When teaching] I tell the students that those who have by a random chance survived, an act that nine times out of ten would have been fatal, often are relieved to have survived… We usually conclude to give the patient the benefit of the doubt, and that whatever we do should assist in the preserving of life, not the opposite.
Simon Wessely is President Elect of the Royal College of Psychiatrists
"Wessely is Professor of Psychological Medicine at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London and Head of its department of psychological medicine, Vice Dean for Academic Psychiatry, Teaching and Training at the Institute of Psychiatry, as well as Director of the King's Centre for Military Health Research. He is also honorary Consultant Psychiatrist at King's College Hospital and the Maudsley Hospital, as well as Civilian Consultant Advisor in Psychiatry to the British Army. He was knighted in the 2013 New Year Honours for services to military healthcare and to psychological medicine. In 2014 he was elected president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists." He is also involved in a heated controversy over the cause of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, which he argues is partly a matter of psychological coping mechanisms.
The Dish has asked me to participate in one of their Ask Me Anything interviews, to be taped soon.
Weigh in on what questions they should ask me!
See the list HERE and add to it!
Jennifer
Here's a question and answer from a new interview on FORMER PEOPLE: A JOURNAL OF BANGS AND WHIMPERS
Other than religion, why do you think the defense of community as been largely ignored as an argument against suicide?"
Well, read these and then we’ll talk: ("enisled" means set off as an island)
(From) To Marguerite – Matthew Arnold
Yes: in the sea of life enisled,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live alone
Islands – Muriel Rukeyser
O for God’s sake
they are connected
underneath.
People used to be connected, right on the surface. You needed tight social ties to get anything done. We need more than a barn raising party to put up a house, but that human interaction is low on the human. In the past you were stuck in the faces of a relatively small group who all knew your business. We voted with our feet and went to the anonymous city, where most of us now live. (Through all settled life before now most human beings, by far, lived in farm villages.)
People used to sit in one room together, where the best fireplace was, and tell stories or sing, there was little else to do; same for the breezy front porch in the summer. Now we all have our own rooms with heat, ac, a TV, and the web. It is possible as never before to avoid millions of dull random conversations (and accidentally miss out on many good ones, and even the human ties of the dull ones). So our connection is less, but deeper down it still makes sense of our whole lives.
If you want to know about the highly social mole rat, taking one specimen to the lab and watching it is not going to help. Nor for us. We are still a group animal, in many deep ways. We follow each other into both practices both dangerous and healthy. We matter to each other. The shock of modernity made us see ourselves as utterly alienated, but we overshot the mark. It is not the peak of rationalism to say love doesn’t exist. It clearly does, and is rich and strange. Things exist between people that are quite uncanny. It is not rational to deny that. The argument in Stay started as literary and philosophical but became scientific when the statistics robustly backed up the reality of suicidal contagion.
"As a suicide attempt survivor, I found this book most enlightening. It provided me with a platform on why not to attempt to take my own life again. Hecht’s approach to attach the survivor with society is quite powerful. She has accomplished what she sets out to do from page one: to convince the person contemplating suicide to 'consider the arguments (for not taking one’s own life) and choose to stay. After that, anything can happen. First, choose to stay.'”
David Rosman, New York Journal of Books
I just found this review and was surprised by this last paragraph. The rest of the review was a more intellectual and somewhat neutral (lightly positive) reading of the book. I'm struck by how the personal note at the end allows some fresh air in the room regarding our secret lives and masked pain. And thereby makes the world more honest, and more empathetic. It's very moving.
I wrote the below for an essay I'm working on, speaking to some of the reasons I've been writing about (against) suicide:
I’m interested in human meaning, especially the kind that exists outside the individual, in the culture and the community. I believe that the feeling of meaning is sufficient to the definition of meaning, just as the feeling of love is sufficient to the definition of love. (Of course we sometimes don't feel love, but that doesn't make us say love doesn't exist.) I believe this question of suicide allows us to see ourselves as more profoundly connected to others, and able to relax our need to each generate the entire meaning of life on our own.
Guy calls the doctor, says the wife’s
contractions are five minutes apart.
Doctor says, Is this her first child?
guy says, No, it’s her husband.
I promise to try to remember who
I am. Wife gets up on one elbow,
says, I wanted to get married.
It seemed a fulfillment of some
several things, a thing to be done.
Even the diamond ring was some
thing like a quest, a thing they
set you out to get and how insane
the quest is; how you have to turn
it every way before you can even
think to seek it; this metaphysical
reframing is in fact the quest. Who’d
have guessed? She sighs, I like
the predictability of two, I like
my pleasures fully expected,
when the expectation of them
grows patterned in its steady
surprise. I’ve got my sweet
and tumble pat. Here on earth,
I like to count upon a thing
like that. Thus explained
the woman in contractions
to her lover holding on
the telephone for the doctor
to recover from this strange
conversational turn. You say
you’re whom? It is a pleasure
to meet you. She rolls her
eyes, but he’d once asked her
Am I your first lover? and she’d
said, Could be. Your face looks
familiar. It’s the same type of
generative error. The grammar
of the spoken word will flip, let alone
the written, until something new is
in us, and in our conversation.
from Funny by Jennifer Michael Hecht. Winner of the 2005 Felix Pollack Prize in Poetry. Copyright © 2005. By permission of The University of Wisconsin Press.
Click here to hear Garrison Keillor read this poem. (Worth the click. Poem's there too.)
I wrote this poem before the second shoe dropped, before the essay, before the research, before the book idea. When Keillor featured it recently he invented the parenthetical and more easily remembered title "don't kill yourself." I like it in part because it reminds me of how a Jukebox would have some songs listed by title and also (as if behind their hands) by the line everyone knows. De facto title.
Don't kill yourself. Don't kill yourself.
Don't. Eat a donut, be a blown nut.
That is, if you're going to kill yourself,
stand on a street corner rhyming
seizure with Indonesia, and wreck it with
racket. Allow medical terms.
Rave and fail. Be an absurd living ghost,
if necessary, but don't kill yourself.
Let your friends know that something has
passed, or be glad they've guessed.
But don't kill yourself. If you stay, but are
bat crazy you will batter their hearts
in blooming scores of anguish; but kill
yourself, and hundreds of other people die.
Poison yourself, it poisons the well;
shoot yourself, it cracks the bio-dome.
I will give badges to everyone who's figured
this out about suicide, and hence
refused it. I am grateful. Stay. Thank
you for staying. Please stay. You
are my hero for staying. I know
about it, and am grateful you stay.
Eat a donut. Rhyme opus with lotus.
Rope is bogus, psychosis. Stay.
Hocus Pocus. Hocus Pocus.
Dare not to kill yourself. I won't either.
"No Hemlock Rock (don't kill yourself)" by Jennifer Michael Hecht from Who Said. © Copper Canyon Press. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
Medscape.com
January 27, 2014
The article is behind a pay wall, but here are some highlights:
[T]he ethical status of suicide is not a question that psychiatrists can ignore, any more than we can ignore human values in general.
Recently, the moral status of suicide has been scrutinized by the poet and philosopher Jennifer Michael Hecht in her book Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It. …In essence, Hecht argues that suicide cannot be evaluated solely in terms of "personal autonomy," as some modern ethicists might claim; rather, we must hold suicide up to the clarifying light of communal values.
Hecht argues that "when a person kills himself, he does wrenching damage to the community." In general, I agree -- and this damage, arguably, may be counted among the "moral harms" of deliberate self-destruction.
[T]he communitarian argument made by Hecht is compelling.
As an ethicist, I largely agree with Jennifer Hecht, that suicide's communal damage is a compelling reason to urge our suicidal loved ones to stay, and respectfully to suggest that life isn't too hard to bear -- only, as Hecht poignantly puts it, "almost too hard to bear."
I'm incredibly moved by this.
Former Ranger Ted Janis had a moving, smart essay in The Daily Beast this week. It's about surviving the suicides of two Ranger friends and then losing another a few months ago.
"The week after my friend’s funeral, I read David Brooks’ article on suicide in the New York Times where he describes Jennifer Michael Hecht’s book Stay: A History of Suicides and the Philosophies Against It. With my friend’s death still haunting me, one passage in particular stood out.
“Suicides happen in clusters, with one person’s suicide influencing the other’s. If a parent commits suicide, his or her children are three times as likely to do so at some point in their lives… People in the act of committing suicide may feel isolated, but, in fact, they are deeply connected to those around them. As Hecht put it, if you want your niece to make it through her dark nights, you have to make it through yours.”
Or rather: if you want your Ranger buddy to survive, you have to accept help and fight through your own battles."
Read the whole essay if you have a chance, it's really insightful and well done.
- Jennifer
By Bel Mooney in The Daily Mail 1/24/14
The recent controversial suicide storyline in Coronation Street caused some people to worry that it might encourage desperately ill - or just desperate - viewers to take their own lives.
That fear is not scaremongering. Between 2007 and 2009, 25 people between the ages of 15 and 28 killed themselves in or around Bridgend, South Wales, and experts were surely right to talk of this as a ‘cluster’ - a local epidemic of the desire to leave this world, among young people who unwittingly fed each other’s lack of hope.
Such copycat behaviour is not new, as Jennifer Michael Hecht makes clear in this life-affirming book, subtitled A History Of Suicide And The Philosophies Against It.
She reminds us that Plutarch wrote of an epidemic of suicide among young women in the ancient Greek city of Miletus that was stopped only by the warning that their naked bodies would be dragged through the streets.
In the past 45 years, suicide rates all over the world have increased by 60per cent and Hecht wonders if this may be because the old religious prohibitions have all but disappeared. It used to be a crime against God to kill yourself; now people argue that it can be the ultimate act of self-determination - I am free and therefore I can choose to take my own life.
But Hecht will have none of that. She makes it clear she is not talking about those who wish to take their own lives because of terminal illness (the Coronation Street storyline) and/or intolerable pain, but for the rest who might succumb to despair she holds up a hand and cries: ‘Don’t.’
This powerful book was prompted by a double personal bereavement; two friends (poets and academics, like herself) who seemed to have everything to live for killed themselves within a year. Deeply upset, even angered, by these losses she wrote what amounted to a passionate manifesto for life.
‘I’m issuing a rule,’ she announced. ‘You are not allowed to kill yourself. When a person kills himself, he does wrenching damage to the community. One of the best predictors of suicide is knowing a suicide. That means suicide is also delayed homicide. You have to stay.’
Her passionate plea drew a huge response and then led to this book. Stay is a fascinating, intelligent exploration of the way suicide was regarded in the ancient world, reminding us of the punishing treatment meted out to the poor corpses, then describing the change of attitude in the 18th century, when a turning away from religion led to a secular philosophy tolerant of suicide.
Hecht’s approval is for those through the ages who argued against the suicidal impulse - like Albert Camus, the existentialist novelist, who suggested that once we see that life is always absurd and accept that fact, we can accept life, too. This is not to ignore real despair. It is to assert that it can be overcome and that ‘more life’ is always ‘better’.
To reach the heart of Hecht’s own belief, we can go back to John Donne’s famous sermon beginning, ‘No man is an island’. The idea that we are all interconnected, like a vast jigsaw of souls, leads logically to the ringing assertion that ‘any man’s death diminishes me’.
This is the core of what the author calls ‘the human project’ - the root of all compassion, all empathy, everything that makes us truly human in the best possible sense.
Hecht’s history, from ancient texts and the Bible through to modern thinkers is essential (and accessible) reading for anybody interested in the subject, but what impressed me most of all was the freshness of her passionate belief that ‘human beings contribute just by continuing to persist in life and rejecting suicide, despite anguish’.
It is true that she fails adequately to address the type of depression which leads some people to kill themselves. The point about Stay is that it provides a message which needs to be heard amid the too-easy relativism of modern life.
Hecht is crisp: ‘Clear as it is that suicides can cause more suicides, it is clear that talking to people about rejecting suicide can help them reject suicide.’ And convincing: ‘When we cannot see our own worth and are tempted to leave life, we are doing a shining service to our community and to our future selves when we choose to stay.’
When I review a book I underline special passages, stick post-it notes and write comments in the margin. By that token this one has inspired me more than anything I’ve read in a very long time. Full of life and spirit and hope, and deeply moving, it communicates a generous love of suffering, flawed humanity. I cannot praise it highly enough and feel grateful to have read passages like this, which confirm all I hold dear: ‘None of us can truly know what we mean to other people, and none of us can know what our future self will experience. History and philosophy ask us to remember these mysteries, to look around at… the surprises life brings - the endless possibilities that living offers - and to persevere….Bear witness to the night side of being human and the bravery it entails, and wait for the sun.’
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-2544694/Must-really-Why-not-stay-talk-STAY-BY-JENNIFER-MICHAEL-HECHT.html#ixzz2rdhKC2LJ
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
I received an email from a reader saying that he didn’t agree with me that suicide is wrong, but…if anyone he knew were suicidal, he would give them my book.
Many people who think we all have the right to take our own lives would save most people from that fate, if they could help.
There are intellectual arguments that suicide is morally neutral because we own ourselves, but they don't seem to apply when we think of young people, or our friends who we think could make it through, or parents of young children, or anyone we think might later be glad they stayed around.
Nobody should die without having heard the arguments against suicide. They are about community and about your own future self. They have been around for hundreds of years.
If you stay for the sake of community, you are our hero. If you stay for the sake of your future self, you are your own hero.
Hill Center DC-Drummond Hall, 921 Pennsylvania Ave SE, Washington, DC 20003 (Eastern Market Metro)
Jan 12, 2014
2pm - 4pm
REGISTER HERE: http://action.centerforinquiry.net/site/Calendar?id=104141&view=Detail
Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It
Worldwide, more people die by suicide than by murder, and many more are left behind to grieve. Despite distressing statistics that show suicide rates rising, the subject, long a taboo, is infrequently talked about. In this sweeping intellectual and cultural history, poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht channels her grief for two friends lost to suicide into a search for history’s most persuasive arguments against the irretrievable act, arguments she hopes to bring back into public consciousness. From the Stoics and the Bible to Dante, Shakespeare, Wittgenstein, and such twentieth-century writers as John Berryman, Hecht recasts the narrative of our “secular age” in new terms. She shows how religious prohibitions against self-killing were replaced by the Enlightenment’s insistence on the rights of the individual, even when those rights had troubling applications. This transition, she movingly argues, resulted in a profound cultural and moral loss: the loss of shared, secular, logical arguments against suicide. By examining how people in other times have found powerful reasons to stay alive when suicide seems a tempting choice, she makes a persuasive intellectual and moral case against suicide.
Jennifer Michael Hecht is the author of three history books, including the best-selling Doubt: A History, and three volumes of poetry. Her work has won major awards in intellectual history and in poetry. Hecht teaches poetry at the New School University in Manhattan and lives in Brooklyn, NY.
* Public Admission + Stay book $26
* FOC Admission + Stay book $24
* Public Admission $5 advance registration / $7 at the door
* FOC Admission Free (Registration required)
Support the Center with your book purchase.
The venue is wheelchair accessible. People with disabilities who anticipate needing accommodations or who have questions about physical access may email sdavis@centerforinquiry.net in advance of the event.
REGISTER HERE: http://action.centerforinquiry.net/site/Calendar?id=104141&view=Detail
RSVP on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/252290798262384/?source=1