Please note that this post discusses suicide. If you are considering harming yourself, please seek help immediately. Crisis lines are available worldwide and they are staffed by caring people who are qualified to listen and to help. A list of crisis lines by country is available on Wikipedia through the following link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_suicide_crisis_lines
Although the Bible apparently contains no specific injunction against it, St. Augustine wrote that “he who kills himself is a homicide”. Beyond the western Abrahamic religions, most faiths the world over prohibit the killing of oneself. In spite of this, suicide remains widespread, and may be variously seen as a mental health issue and/or as the manifestation of a lack of social support. In the United States, issues relating to underemployment,* social isolation, chronic health problems, and similar issues continue to adversely affect wide swaths of the population in spite of occasional reports to the contrary.**
In Hamlet, shortly after Hamlet appears on stage for the first time, he laments the religious prohibition against suicide:
Oh, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt,
(Hamlet 1.2.129-37)
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! O God, God!
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on ’t, ah fie! ‘Tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely.
Underlying this complaint is an idea reminiscent of Buddhist, Taoist, or Hindu conceptions of the universe–that by living in the world, and through our association with it, we become tainted by its vices. The defilement of Hamlet’s “sullied” flesh, bookended by the “unweeded garden” possessed by “things rank and gross in nature”, has also corrupted his thought and perception, making his world seem “weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable”. The strong passion underlying Hamlet’s “O God, God!” tells us that he is not only discouraged and spiritually exhausted, but he is in torment. Because Hamlet is alone on stage at this point, his words are the sole focus of the action, indicating that his protests are not theatrics staged for other characters, but are uttered in earnest. The painted language is evocative, but the thought progression sounds sincere.
Most of us can relate to such exasperation, such deep frustration with the world and with one’s circumstances. The world remains a complicated and difficult place. Even the happiest of us are not always content, and certain vexations seem common to us all:
Sometimes, as Tia Dalma says in the scene from Pirates, life’s pains can be “too much to live with, but not enough to cause [us] to die”. That seems to be the case with Hamlet too, or at least at first. From Hamlet’s monologue above, spoken in 1.2, he muddles on through the rest of Act 1 and four more acts, trying to accomplish his objective of avenging his father’s murder, before succumbing to the widening, disintegrative ripples of vengeance, overwhelming heartbreak and bad luck.
And his luck has been bad. Losing his beloved father and watching his mother beguiled by, and his rightful throne occupied by an uncle he detests is brutal. His uncle declines Hamlet’s request to return to Wittenberg, keeping him close to the source of his suffering, rubbing his nose in it. Hamlet does consider suicide, in one of the most famous monologues in English:
To be, or not to be, that is the question:
(Hamlet 3.1.56-88)
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,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause—there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovere’d country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.
Is it cowardice only then, this hesitation? We lie in a bathtub, in several bathtubs, life’s bombs bursting in mid air around us, sometimes silently rupturing the blue unblinking sky. We crawl through the ruins of what we thought was this or that–our lives, our families, our homes, our weltanschauung. Libraries burn. World unity and peace are put on hold indefinitely while the world’s knees bend to profit motive. We look into the night sky and we see no stars. We never were Atlantis, sinking beneath the waves. Water covering us. Sea above us and below us. Cool. Darkening.
Suicide always beckons. Even to those who seem most fortunate, and sometimes especially them. Calling to that sleep, whatever it may be. Perhaps the stars will reignite and spread themselves again near our feet. Maybe someone will sing.***
In one sense, Hamlet is right. It’s a question of what comes after. “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t” as the old Irish proverb goes. A poem by Pulitzer Prize winning writer, James Wright (1927-1980), captures the dread of what we might find after death:
In Response To A Rumor That The Oldest Whorehouse In Wheeling, West Virginia, Has Been Condemned
by James Wright
I will grieve alone,
As I strolled alone, years ago, down along
The Ohio shore.
I hid in the hobo jungle weeds
Upstream from the sewer main,
Pondering, gazing.
I saw, down river,
At Twenty-third and Water Streets
By the vinegar works,
The doors open in early evening.
Swinging their purses, the women
Poured down the long street to the river
And into the river.
I do not know how it was
They could drown every evening.
What time near dawn did they climb up the other shore,
Drying their wings?
For the river at Wheeling, West Virginia,
Has only two shores:
The one in hell, the other
In Bridgeport, Ohio.
And nobody would commit suicide, only
To find beyond death
Bridgeport, Ohio.
The river remains. The eternal boundary. The fixture of separation. Styx. Lethe. All the crossing and imbibing at the end. Dying and forgetting. Carefully tended roses at the end of the garden wall forgotten. Peonies abandoned. Lilacs growing wild. Summer mornings, early winter dark. In time, we leave all things behind.
Less Time
by Richard Brautigan
Less time than it takes to say it, less tears than it takes to die; I’ve taken account
of everything, there you have it. I’ve made a census of the stones, they are as numerous
as my fingers and some others; I’ve distributed some pamphlets to the plants, but not all
were willing to accept them. I’ve kept company with music for a second only and now I no
longer know what to think of suicide, for if I ever want to part from myself, the exit is
on this side and, I add mischievously, the entrance, the re-entrance is on the other. You
see what you still have to do. Hours, grief, I don’t keep a reasonable account of them;
I’m alone, I look out of the window; there is no passerby, or rather no one passes
(underline passes). You don’t know this man? It’s Mr. Same.
May I introduce Madam Madam? And their children. Then I turn back on my steps, my steps
turn back too, but I don’t know exactly what they turn back on. I consult a schedule; the
names of the towns have been replaced by the names of people who have been quite close to
me. Shall I go to A, return to B, change at X? Yes, of course I’ll change at X. Provided I
don’t miss the connection with boredom! There we are: boredom, beautiful parallels, ah!
how beautiful the parallels are under God’s perpendicular.****
Hamlet himself remains active. He cannot die before the end of the play. His central task drives the play’s action so he must remain. While his character may pause to consider suicide, in utilitarian terms, in terms of plot advancement, it remains highly unlikely that he might kill himself before the end of the play if even then. It is certainly unlikely to happen near the beginning of the third act.
Strikingly, in Hamlet it is not Hamlet but Ophelia who kills herself, although her death remains questionable. Because she is ‘distract’ to ‘half sense’, Ophelia’s drowning may be only accidental, although she certainly goes where Hamlet does not. Hamlet feigns madness, while Ophelia inhabits it. Hamlet soliloquizes death and Ophelia descends into the depths of it. The actual event of her death becomes an embroidered story, related by Queen Gertrude. While the words indicate that Ophelia’s death may be unintentional, the exposition is strangely detached:
There is a willow grows askant the brook,
(Hamlet 4.7.165-82)
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them:
There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element: but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.
With comments like “[h]er clothes spread wide”, this sounds distinctly like an eye witness account, but retold by a witness who seems to have done little or nothing to actually try to help Ophelia. The detached quality of the observation makes it chilling, as does the specific language, which animates the natural elements, suffusing them with an almost conspiratorial awareness. The phrasing “[t]here with fantastic garlands did she come” makes it sound as though the garlands accompany Ophelia as a companion would, almost consciously. Amongst the flowers are some that reach out to Ophelia, those “[t]hat liberal shepherds give a grosser name,/ [b]ut our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call”. The description offers suggestive echoes of sexual experience blended with a death that reaches out to Ophelia with its fingers extended. The sliver that breaks is “envious”, the brook is “weeping”. Meanwhile, Ophelia herself, “chanted snatches of old tunes” as in the stream she consigns herself and her humanity to the realm of memory. She remains passively constrained to the end, not sinking but “pull’d” down by her sodden garments “[t]o muddy death.”
In this sense, Ophelia is “incapable of her own distress”. She has no bare bodkin with which to make a quietus, and to her, it no longer matters whether or not some Bridgeport, Ohio might lie on the other side of water. Her mermaid garments drink in the water until they become part of it, incorporating her into it. She has no wings to dry, at least not on any other side that the audience may see.
When viewed as a kind of shadow to Hamlet, Ophelia’s oppression seems to embody the weary existence expressed in Hamlet’s speech. Her life is sharply curtailed by the various male presences around her. In earlier parts of the play, her brother and father both contradict her feelings and opinions, dismissing Hamlet’s attentions to her as frivolous, baseless, and meaningless. Their cautions deny Ophelia’s budding involvement with Hamlet by questioning her judgement, her intellect, and her very humanity. Her father says “You do not understand yourself so clearly/ As it behoves my daughter and your honour” (1.3.96-7). He focuses “yourself” on the two pillars of her identity as his daughter, and her “honour”, Similarly, her brother warns her:
Then weigh what loss your honour may sustain
(Hamlet 1.3.29-32)
If with too credent ear you list his songs,
Or lose your heart, or your chaste treasure open
To his unmaster’d importunity.
Her selfhood becomes equated wholly with her “honour”, with her chastity, and any self that might lie beyond that is pointedly ignored.
Ophelia’s madness then becomes a kind of final assertive negation in the course of her disappearance from the play. Her insanity is her final expression, and may be understood as an attempt “to be” while her personhood is almost completely denied. It is a cry to be heard, to communicate. “Pray you mark” she says to Gertrude before singing her sad mad songs. Gertrude is told that Ophelia “speaks things in doubt/ That carry but half sense” (4.5.6-7), ironically reflecting a perspective on her character that remains little changed from how others regard her when she is sane.
In her ‘mad scene’ (4.5), Ophelia finally has a moment where her own words cannot be so easily ignored. It is really the only scene in which her character holds the dramatic focus without the polarising presence of a contradictory male. Yet, the general social fabric of the court is still imbued with patriarchal concerns, and those around Ophelia still dismiss her. Her madness consigns her to the permanently marginal, and she has been disenfranchised from any meaningful participation in human affairs. Her fragmented songs and fables, in spite of the rich mythic vocabulary contained within them, are chalked up to grief at her father’s death which has unhinged her reason. As the Gentleman says, her words “Indeed would make one think there might be thought,/ Though nothing sure, yet much unhappily.”(4.5.12-13)
“Though nothing sure”, Ophelia seems to have reached her own conclusion about being, and she comes to represent a kind of absence that defines the questionable ‘sanity’ of the others at the Danish court. When Hamlet and Laertes actually come to blows over her affection (or over the relative strength of their affections for her, which is not the same), they do so in her open grave. Ophelia is represented on the stage by a hole in the ground, and possibly a casket or a body in a winding sheet. She is no longer present, but her objectification, as sister, as lover, remains curiously influential in her absence.
Whether accidental or not, Ophelia’s death seems to represent suicide as a whole. Her character comes to embody that point where one can no longer communicate in any meaningful positive fashion–where one can envision no future that is not distinctly bleak, marginal, and ineffective. Then, the only remaining option becomes the deliberate assertion of absence. Leaving the stage for good.
Life can be a grim business, and the pale horse always gallops just over the horizon. The henchmen come for us, in jailhouses, in castles, on the road, or in our homes. Still, the idea of suicide, no matter how compelling or attractive it might seem in a given moment, fills most of us with dread. Life is short enough, and those great trees in our forests seem to go so quickly. Losing any tree before its time is terrible.
Like Hamlet or Laertes, we do not like to think of losing someone whom we hold dear, someone whom we love, whose presence makes us safer, surer, more secure. We also hate to think of such loved ones in their last moments, in despair and loneliness, when life has overwhelmed them. We cannot help but feel that if we only could have been there, if only someone could have been there, we might have. . . There’s the rub. We might have done what? Offered condolences for loss, for sorrow, or for the vagaries of circumstance? Suicide is often the most private and solitary of undertakings.
For we as a society turn away from it as well, often arguing that we don’t know how to help, turning our eyes aside from homeless beggars with cardboard signs. Oh, we give. We give. Food and clothes. And those who are lucky enough to be employed support charities too, telling themselves that it is enough. We can’t do more than that, we reason. We can’t change the world in an afternoon. Or in a day. Or in a lifetime. Or can we?
Although it seems like a cliché, simply offering kindness to others seems to offer some relief for depression. Contributing to general happiness may be one positive starting point to feeling better ourselves. As Old Merrythought sings at the end of The Knight of the Burning Pestle:
Sing, though before the hour of dying;
He shall rise, and then be crying,
‘Hey, ho, ’tis naught but mirth,
That keeps the body from the earth.’*****
Perhaps even those of us who can’t be, or don’t feel, especially happy in ourselves or in our circumstances may find some solace in offering others what we don’t have. Smile more readily. Be kind. Be helpful. Don’t tailgate. Listen to others. Try not to judge, and be forgiving. Of course, we’ve read all of this before, and sometimes the positive thinking advice seems far too simplistic. But the reason that such thinking remains so persistent is because it can also be enormously effective.
I’m not suggesting that we can save the whole world. Or maybe I am. Courtesy, kindness, costs us nothing, and there is never harm in trying. Life truly is short enough, and we really can make it at least a little easier on one another along the way.
*”Labor that falls under the underemployment classification includes those workers who are highly skilled but working in low paying or low skill jobs, and part-time workers who would prefer to be full-time.” Underemployment is one of the least discussed and most prevalent problems in the current labour market worldwide. Gallup looks at the underemployment rate on a regular basis. After looking at the adults who are either unemployed or working part time (when they want full-time gigs), it estimated that the underemployment rate for adults ages 18 and over was 12.6% at the end of July 2017. Significantly, Gallup ceased routinely measuring this after that date, and (especially considering that the U.S. has the highest priced healthcare in the developed world) the idea of widespread underemployment remains one of the least discussed, and most serious economic realities in the United States today. Speaking of long term under/unemployment, if you are able, please feel free to help support this blog by clicking on the link on the opening page and buying the ghost a cup of coffee. (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/u/underemployment.asp and https://smartasset.com/retirement/how-many-americans-are-underemployed)
**According to the Center for Disease Control, there were more than twice as many suicides (47,173) in the United States as there were homicides (19,510) in 2017. Suicide is the second leading cause of death for those between the ages of 10 and 34, the fourth leading cause of death for those aged 35 to 54, and the tenth leading cause of death overall.
***No, I’m not going to cite American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson’s (1869-1935) “Richard Cory” here because this post is long enough. The poem does fit well here though. Please do google it and have a read.
****Richard Brautigan committed suicide in 1984. He once wrote, “All of us have a place in history. Mine is clouds.”
*****Beaumont, Francis. The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Edited by Michael Hattaway. New Mermaids. London: Bloomsbury/Methuen Drama, 2009.