To be frank--and in the present case anything else would defeat the purpose, which is not poetic--no topic in fifty years of writing has blocked me as thoroughly and persistently as this one, my own suicide. For six months and more I have been unable to write anything that pleases me. Why not skip the suicide then and go on to something else? One needn’t and can’t turn every experience into a piece of writing. Sometimes in the past I’ve made this skipping maneuver and dropped a whole aspect of my life out of my literary consciousness, and then have been able in a short while to go on to other things. But that won’t work now, and the reason why it won’t is what I want to elucidate if I can, hoping to free myself and so return to the normal life, if there is such a thing, of a writer.

But this may not work either, because I do not wish to make public the circumstances, including peripheral actors, in which the event occurred; they are private and should remain private. Yet these circumstances may be precisely the factors that are causing my blockage, and what do I do then--give up being a writer? This would mean casting away the whole mental and emotional apparatus I have acquired, by luck and hard study, in a lifetime devoted to many kinds of writing. I’m sixty-seven years old. Obviously I’d be reluctant to take such a course, but I know I may have to and I’m not altogether unwilling.

Early in the morning of February 24, 1988, I intentionally and massively overdosed myself with every pill I possessed. Since I had been treated by doctors over many years for insomnia, anxiety, depression, cardiac irregularity, occasional spinal pain, and I don’t remember what else--except that I’m by nature hypochondriacal and usually go to the doctor three or four times a year no matter what--and moreover since no one in the past, meaning primarily my doctors had ever suspected me of suicidal propensities, I had a fair collection of partly used bottles of medication. I opened them one after another and washed the contents down with loathsome port wine which someone had sent me from California. I was surprised, not disagreeably, by the quickness of the effect. It seems to me still that I began to feel myself going under immediately and that the process itself lasted no more than a few seconds--though I know from what I was told afterward that this cannot be true--just long enough for me to experience a sense of relief amounting to euphoria and to tell myself that this was the first time I’d been happy in years. The next thing I knew I was flat on my back, too weak to stir, with nurses, doctors, relatives, and friends staring down at me. Again I was surprised, again not disagreeably. In fact I was astounded. How could this be? I thought to myself, this guy is invincible, he’s like the soldier in battle who believes he can’t be killed and consequently isn’t, he’s never going to die. Then right away: that’s a myth, that’s poetry. Even in the turbulence of awakening, my mind was literary.

I was in the intensive care unit of a hospital, of course, which is anything but poetic. I awoke fourteen or fifteen hours, I think, after I had lost consciousness, though to this day I have no clear notion of the sequence of events or the length of time they took. In fact for several months after I was discharged from the hospital I thought the whole episode had occurred a week later than it did, and I learned my error only when the bill from the hospital, giving the date of my admittance, finally reached me after its useless meandering in Medicare. For a while after I awoke--maybe a day, maybe longer-I drifted in and out of consciousness. I remember somebody saying, "This guy isn’t going to make it." I remember a nurse saying, "Hayden, we have to give you a shot now, we have to paralyze you," followed by a dream-vision in which I saw my own body as a heap of jumbled bricks that all at once sprang into neatly ordered rigidity, a wall--not in the least painful. But I was indeed paralyzed, couldn’t move a muscle. Afterward I was told this had been necessary because I was pulling the tubes from my mouth and nose with my hands. I remember bright lights and electronic noises. I remember someone remarking, "He can’t weigh that much, he’s got a pot belly but it’s not as big as mine." I remember occasional sharp pains in my stomach or my hands and arms, pains that subsided almost instantly. Etc. But now I cannot put these sensations and scraps of language into any consecutive order.

Gradually but, everything considered, quite rapidly, I returned to full consciousness. I found myself with tubes in my mouth and nose, one of which passed between my vocal cords and prevented me from making a sound, IVs in my arms and hands, an arterial tap in one wrist, catheters in my heart and bladder, a respirator that wheezed rhythmically somewhere out of my line of vision and was apparently in control of my breathing, and numerous electronic monitoring devices attached to me here and there. I was not uncomfortable. Presumably I was being drenched with painkillers. I dozed a good deal. Once or twice I made panicky attempts to communicate, first by trying to speak or at least whisper or at least make intelligible mouth movements, all to no avail, and then by trying to write with a pencil and pad that were put in my hands; but I was unable to form a legible word. I had to give up and content myself with nods and smiles, which most of the time was easy. After a while, perhaps a couple of days, some of the tubes were removed, and an oxygen mask (wet and ill-smelling) was attached to my face. After several more days the mask was replaced with a double tube running on either side of my head and ending in two little nozzles fitted into my nose. I came to despise the odor of oxygen, though I was told it has no odor, and then to understand that it was all in my head, that actually I had no remaining sense of taste or smell at all. They were gone. Would they come back? The nurses said probably. The food brought to me on trays tasted and smelled like oxygen or what I took to be oxygen, a chemical smell that could more accurately have been formaldehyde. Months later, I still smell it occasionally; it seems to exude from my fingers. I had no appetite, no taste for anything but ginger ale, though I tried to force something down at each mealtime. I was x-rayed several times a day and my blood was constantly tested for its content of gases--mostly oxygen, I presume. Finally, days later, the oxygen was turned off momentarily and I was permitted to disengage from the cardiac monitors long enough to go to the bathroom. I could sit in a chair from time to time. I was even taken for a wobbly stroll around the center of the ICU with a nurse holding me by the arm.

Twice I sneaked a cigarette from the pack I’d had in my dressing gown, along with matches, before I came to the hospital. Apparently no one had bothered to look in the pockets. I blew the smoke toward the ventilator, and never knew whether anyone detected the smell or not. The fact that I was using fire only a couple of feet from the apparatus controlling the oxygen and that this was dangerous, to say the least, did not occur to me. Then once late at night a nurse, a very likable, kind-hearted nurse who was a smoker, took me to the nurses lounge, where we each smoked a cigarette. It made me cough, and later I found out that that cough had been recorded on my dossier as a bad sign. Otherwise I went without tobacco.

As I say, the pain was not bad. What I had expected to hurt me, such as the removal of catheters, really didn’t, though when they pulled the catheter out of my heart I had a brief unpleasant sensation of being turned inside out. The worst was that the doctors would prescribe no aid for sleeping. When I asked my principal doctor for a sleeping pill, he spun on one foot and motioned outward with both hands, like an umpire signifying a foul ball: "I’ll be damned if I’ll give you a sleeping pill," and he stomped out. In the circumstances I couldn’t blame him exactly, but I did wonder if he’d had any experience, personal or professional, with chronic insomnia. After I had recovered enough strength to stay awake, I think on the third night, I lay for five days and nights without a wink, 120 hours, which is a record for me. At one point I wrote a half-delirious "poem" in my head about sleep deprivation as a means of torture. I even wrote down parts of it I could remember the next morning. As poetry it was disjointed and sloppy. But it described accurately enough how I felt: weak, jittery, a little crazy. At night in the light of a small lamp that was part of the monitoring console I read crime fiction, books that people bought for me at the drugstore, and sometimes I played extended jam sessions in my head, hours and hours of blues, up-tempo, moderate, and draggy. At other times I felt enraptured for no reason I could ascertain. I watched the heart monitor on the console behind my right shoulder until my neck got sore from being twisted like that. That little green puppy leapt endlessly for the unreachable biscuit, each time falling back and springing up again. I experimented with controlling my pulse rate and discovered I could bring it down to about 75 by consciously relaxing myself, though most of the time it remained at 90 or higher. As their shifts changed, by day, evening, and night, I talked with the nurses when they were between chores, sweet-natured, intelligent women who came and sat by my bedside and seemed to enjoy being there; they told me their stories, often in detail, their hopes and disappointments. They told me about life in the hospital and complained about hours, assignments, and this supervisor or that. At last I began to sleep fitfully for two or three hours a night. Sleep deprivation is a torture all right, Amnesty International says it and so do I. But in fact it didn’t have much to do one way or the other with my recovery, and of course in the hospital I had no work to do and it didn’t matter whether I could think straight.

Eventually I learned from the nurses, chiefly by letting them talk and not asking questions, what had happened to me or at least some of it. They seemed eager to tell. For one thing, the doctors had loaded me with charcoal, which was supposed to absorb the toxins in the pills I’d taken. No doubt it did; but it also caused me to vomit, which in the nature of the case must have been intended, while at the same instant I aspirated a sizable amount of the stuff into my lungs, which presumably was not intended. Not until much later, after I had been discharged from the hospital, did I begin to think that those in charge ought to have foreseen this possibility, or even probability, and to have prevented it, which might have been easy. If someone had turned my head toward the side, I might not have breathed in all that junk. But I don’t know when or where the charcoal was administered, in the emergency room or the ICU, or even in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. No doubt the people were working as hard as they could and events were occurring rapidly. I don’t blame anyone. In effect, however, I ended up with suffocation and radical pneumonia, the latter continuing to be the chief problem after I regained consciousness, not the poisons I had given myself. I’ve said I suffered no pain, but there was a time--maybe more than once--when the doctor pushed a rod down into my lungs to make me cough. 1 don’t know if this was a pain or not, but it was horrifying, the choking and gasping, the thumping of my heart. It was like being asphyxiated right there and then. I had an impression of the doctor, a stocky man, leaning over me, his knee on the bed, one hand holding down my shoulder, the other pushing this thing in and out of me. It was a rape, it was terrifying, one of the most awful things that ever happened to me. I remember Ray Carver telling me about the same procedure after his operation for lung cancer. He said it was the worst part of the whole ordeal. In my case it had the desired effect and some of the junk came up. But some stayed down, and until the day I left the hospital the doctors and nurses continued to hear sounds of pneumonia when they listened to me, as they did unrelentingly even after I felt okay and ready to go home.

One doesn’t know, lying there, how weak one is. Or how awful one looks. On the seventh or eighth day, when I was first permitted to go to the bathroom, I saw my face in the mirror. To get shut of the urinals and bedpans was a break, a big one, but the shock of the vision, the apparition, in the mirror was a more than equal shove in the opposite direction. My beard, which I’d worn for more than twenty years, was gone, but I had known that because I’d fit the sharp stubble with my fingers; the nurses had told me it interfered with the tape needed to hold my tubes in the right positions. But what a face was revealed! I had lost weight precipitately, of course, twenty pounds or more; my cheeks were hollow, my eyes much larger than I’d ever seen them, like frogs’ eyes, and my skin was dark and bruised, covered with tiny creases as if it were tanned cowhide. I looked eighty years old. In fact I looked like my mother when she was eighty-five, paralyzed by stroke and dying. I gaped in revulsion and dismay. Then I became fascinated and stared at myself until the nurse rapped on the door and said loudly, "Are you okay in there?" I flushed the john and walked out and went back to bed. But after that I always studied myself in the bathroom mirror when I could. It was like looking at myself as painted by Dürer or Ivan Allbright. It was as close to seeing myself dead as I expect to come.

What had I seen when I had been dead? Not myself, but not much else either. I remember what Carl Jung wrote in his memoirs about the vision that occurred to him when he was near death, how he had found himself in space near a floating castle, a place of serenity and happiness which would have been his destination if his recovery from whatever was wrong with him had not intervened. What trivial nonsense! At least it’s trivial to me because, although I can’t say for a fact that Jung was deceived or was lying, at the same time I can’t see what relevance his vision has in the real world, which is the only world. At best it must be a kind of wishful dreaming or hallucinating. A good friend of mine has told me of a similar vision she saw when she was close to death, a vision so in keeping with her benevolent and sensitive character that believe, myself, it was just an extension of that character. Indeed, if one is conscious at such a time of any perception at all, dream, fantasy, hallucination, or whatever, to my mind it means only that one is not sufficiently dead.

What I saw was blackness. It was neither underground nor in outer space. It was not the darkness of a closed room. It was neither a solid, a fluid, nor an atmosphere. I cannot think of any analogy or metaphor to explain or describe it. It was blackness, nothing else, and it was enclosing me--except that "I" was not there and no action, either of enclosing or any other, occurred. Yet somehow I was aware--aware of the blackness and that it was not quite entirely still. It was composed of indistinguishable particles, perhaps what the ancients meant by atoms, which were in flux, not going anywhere but moving in a slow dance backward and forward. Since I could not "see" this, even inwardly, I don’t know how I "knew" it. But no doubt my perception of the movement meant that I was still technically alive, as of course I was, when I arrived at the hospital, even though I exhibited none of the ordinary "vital signs"--breath, pulse, pupillary reflex, etc. My brain was still generating electrical impulses, or doing whatever a brain does. If the motion of the blackness had ceased I would have ceased--entirely--and there would have been neither motion nor blackness nor anything else.

I "remembered" the blackness and its motion when I first became conscious in the ICU. In fact I think the "memory" existed before I became conscious, so that at the very first instant of awakening, or just before that instant, I was "in" the blackness. At any rate it was the first impression I was cognizant of after my going under, and it had the kind of "depth-beyond-time" that dream-reality often has when one remembers it just after waking up. That is, the blackness existed in another "state," which was literally timeless: it could have been a minute, a year, or a century; or it could have been faster than instantaneous, occupying no time at all. Is that eternity? I don’t know; I am ignorant of this. Eternity means no more to me now--but certainly no less--than it did when I was five years old and gazed in fear and wonder at the stars. But whereas the idea of "eternity" has always made me unhappy, or at least uncomfortable (which behaviorists say is the same thing), my "memory" of the blackness was not at all uncomfortable but quite the contrary: it was happy. Not in the sense of ecstatic as we normally use the term now, meaning sexual or generally appetitive transport, being "out of this world," but rather in the sense of blissful, a replete contentedness. It was a state of mind I had never experienced before, and I mean that literally; but it was present in my mind clearly and strongly when I first came to, and it has been present ever since. It has become part of my being. I don’t mean that after my suicide the fears, angers, weaknesses, and other obsessive responses of my prior mind did not return; they did, all of them, at times very powerfully. But the sense of strange, new, astounding happiness has remained with me as well.

I was not afraid. I felt no fear whatever. Emphatically. If no "scene" or "vision" appeared to me in the blackness, then nothing to frighten me could be in the blackness either, no conventional sense of the "void," the "beyond," the "mystery." I know this means giving up a notion so dear to even the most hylotheistic imaginations that it seems a stark necessity. The mystery of death has always in every time and place been the most constant element of human feeling, as we know from art and writing, even though it must always be evoked indirectly. Proust gives us a sense of it in the final volume of his huge novel when he writes about soldiers on leave in Paris during the First World War:

It seemed almost that there was something cruel in these leaves granted to men at the front. When they first came on leave, one said to oneself: "They will refuse to go back, they will desert." And indeed they came not merely from places which seemed to us unreal, because we had only heard them spoken of in the newspapers and could not conceive how a man was able to take part in these titanic battles and emerge with nothing worse than a bruise on his shoulder; it was from the shores of death, whither they would soon return, that they came to spend a few moments in our midst, incomprehensible to us, filling us with tenderness and terror and a feeling of mystery, like phantoms whom we summon from the dead, who appear to us for a second, whom we dare not question, and who could, in any case, only reply: "You cannot possibly imagine."

From "the shores of death," exactly. Even as great a word-spinner as Marcel Proust must resort to cliché. These soldiers have been to those shores and have returned with nothing more than a bruise on the shoulder, meaning that they are men like the rest of us and cannot say anything about their experience of mystery with which we might assuage our tenderness and terror. There is no mystery. Or rather, the mysterious thing about death is that it is not mysterious. Our elemental sense of fitness is appalled by this--death ought to be mysterious--and we are beset by great romantic frustration because it isn’t. Well, we are people of the world as it is this minute, the modern world, and as human beings who wish to wear our humanity with a certain grace--though what we really wish is to justify it--we acknowledge our frustration and go on with and go on with our lives. Above all we do not ask what we can know. In the ordinary sense of cognition we cannot know death any more than we know most other states of existence, such as the mind of a newborn infant or a dinosaur, or even the fullness of our own minds in their commonest moments, walking along a street of our home town, tying our shoes, etc.

This was how I felt in the hospital. And although my image in the mirror was shocking, repulsive, peculiarly fascinating, and took some time to adjust to, my happiness was not diminished. I was high--and not from the oxygen either. I was high on life, my recovered life, even though "life" for me at that time was thoroughly elemental. I couldn’t go anywhere or do anything. I could hardly think. I don’t remember any mental activity that wasn’t involuntary. But the animal in me was responding to this remarkable turn of events like the rabbit that is dropped unaccountably from the eagle’s talons. I was alive. I had been happy when I was dead and now I was happy when I was alive. It had nothing to do with thought, but only with sensory experience, touching my own arm or belly, swallowing, excreting, being touched by the nurses, listening to the music in my head, etc. I carried on presumably intelligent conversations with nurses and eventually with visitors, but only in a kind of academic autonomia, my tongue still running--like a cartoon character running in the air above a chasm--from the impetus of the classroom; or maybe I was talking nonsense, babbling uncontrollably, and the nurses and visitors were too kind to tell me so. I talked to everyone, doctors, nurses, aides and technicians, the young woman who mopped the floor of my room and told me about her 1965 Mustang and gave me copies of Road and Track to read, without the least discomposure. I was manic, I suppose, though I don’t care for clinical language. "Carruth," I said to myself, "you are experiencing exactly the conditions you have all your life and in all your acute and chronic psychopathology feared more than death, being in a hospital, locked up, among total strangers, no way to escape, nothing to quell the scream bubbling in your throat, etc." Yet I felt none of the anxiety that had destroyed large parts of my life during the sixty-six years before I ended up in the ICU.

A lot of people are talking about rebirth nowadays. It’s the fundamentalist fad in these last years of the old millennium. Apocalyptic behavior is to be expected, we are told. And all of us are sometimes fundamentalists, all of us who take the trouble--and trouble is what it is--to face "ultimate reality" from time to time. I don’t know about being reborn in the exuberance of an evangelical camp meeting, but if it’s anything like being reborn in an ICU, it’s wonderful. And it lasts a long time. Not that such a course as mine can be recommended; it obviously can’t. Nor can it be faked; near suicides and theatrical suicides, perhaps compulsive suicides of any kind, won’t work. One has to have a clear and resolute intent to die, which apparently everyone agrees--medical doctors, psychiatrists, etc.--was the case with me.

Of course everyone agreed I was crazy too. Doctors are by profession devoted to life and to saving life; for them to believe that suicide can be anything but insanity, at least in ordinary American middle-class life, would require them to be crazy themselves. And of all people who are not crazy the most not crazy are doctors. In their world this is axiomatic. So there I was, surrounded by doctors, under the control of doctors, my life and being regulated by doctors, and though they were kind enough to pretend they thought I was rational, especially after friends pointed out to them that I was a "professor"--I dislike the word myself--and a somewhat well-known writer, it was understood by everyone that I really was crazy and that my friends were as well. Consequently, when it came time for me to be discharged from the ICU, the doctors would let me go only with the proviso that I pass immediately into the laughing academy, the hatchery, the local asylum. I had no choice; I was still too weak to dress myself and walk out the way heroes do in the movies. But even then, when I had agreed to their condition, two days more were required--at better than $1,000 a day--to negotiate the terms and methods of transfer from one hospital to another, so that both hospitals could have in writing, certified and attested, exactly the point at which one hospital’s responsibility ended and the other’s began. Perhaps this was partly impelled by fear of legal liability, which we know has become a grave enough problem for medical people in recent years; but I believe the doctors would have behaved the same even if no question of legal liability had been posed. I was a suicide and I was crazy, and that was the end of it. The result was that eventually I was taken from one hospital to the other, a journey of about an hour and a half between two cities, in a locked ambulance with two burly young men to attend me and with impressive receipts and delivery invoices signed by both parties when I was handed--which is the precise word--from the locked vehicle to the door of the locked loony bin.

I could have protested. If I had done it vigorously enough, I could have succeeded. Legally, I was not a certifiable nut, was still responsible for myself. But in such circumstances who has the strength for that? Not only the doctors but friends and family, having been "counseled" by the doctors, all believed I must go to the psychiatric hospital. I had made phone calls to friends who were shrinks, and they said the same thing. Every one said the same thing, so what was I to do? I was the only one who knew that the hatch was the wrong place for me. But though I knew this--partly because I had spent a long time in the hatch thirty-five years earlier in a vain attempt to deal with the psychoneurotic anxiety--and knew also that what I really needed was to go home and relax, the truth was that I didn’t have a home, and I knew this too, knew it well, with the consequence that I didn’t protest and found myself in a locked ward with a number of people who were hollering or banging the walls or walking around full of Haldol, stiff, jerky, headed for tardive dyskinesia, God help them. On the other hand this was not a hospital that treated violent mental illness, I got out of the locked ward and onto an open ward after about three days, and I remained in the hospital only two weeks altogether. Not a bad hitch compared to the fifteen months I had served thirty-five years earlier.

And I was happy the whole time. Happy as a clam, and for the same reasons: I was alive, more or less comfortable, protected. But the chief reason was being alive. Again, as in the ICU, I talked to everyone, made friends with nearly all the other patients on the ward, about forty people, plus scores of staff workers of every description. I said little about myself but listened to account after account of personal miseries, including the complaints of injustice at the hands of the hospital administration heard again and again from nurses, aides, and technicians, I attended scores of "group therapy" sessions, which were a farce when they weren’t a persecution, making people cry, etc., especially the women, young and old, and one noted that nearly all the group leaders were men, even the leaders of the special "women’s group"--what could be more ridiculous?--though when I asked one of the women if she wasn’t affronted by this, she said, "No." Also it’s worth noting that of the forty-odd people on the ward, only two of us were men, and even if for unknown reasons these numbers were extreme at that particular time, I can’t believe the disparity isn’t significant.

At the same time many changes for the better had been introduced since the last time I’d been an inmate. For one, the hospital had no shock room; the few patients for whom electroshock was prescribed were taken to another hospital, and no one ever suggested it for me. (I had had a series of ten shocks in 1954, which were no help at all.) For another, all of us had ready access to the phone. Our outgoing mail was not read by doctors. Two days after I was admitted a person from an independent legal organization came and informed me of my rights, including the right to dispute and I think interdict any medications I thought were wrongly prescribed, and he gave me a printed leaflet confirming my legal status. All this was markedly different from my earlier immurement, when one could not make free contact with anybody outside the institution, certainly not a lawyer. Moreover I was not now subjected to any of the foolish treatments I had had to undergo formerly, "hydrotherapy" (in which one stood naked in a tiled stall while being battered by two cold and high powered jets of water), "occupational therapy" (making belts and neckties) or "physical therapy" (though I could volunteer for exercise classes if I wished--I did--and a weight-lifting room was provided for younger people). But the greatest change is in the length of time one is expected to stay. Earlier I had spent a year and a quarter in the hospital and had known others who had been confined for many years, but now of the forty-odd people on the ward only three or four had been in the hospital for more than a month and most were discharged in two or three weeks. On other wards, such as those for people addicted to drugs or alcohol or with eating disorders, the expected time until discharge was longer, and there may have been wards I was unaware of. But I saw only one patient who was a chronic long-time loser, an elderly senile woman who was said to have been in psychiatric hospitals since she was seventeen. She spent her days in a reclining chair in the lounge, talking unintelligibly to herself and making strange angry noises. Nothing could be done for her. It struck me that she was there more to furnish an example--edifying without doubt--for the rest of us than for any benefit to herself.

This lounge, in fact, was the greatest discomfort in the hatch. It was the only place where smoking was permitted. It was also the only place where a television set was turned on from six in the morning until midnight. Dozens of times a day I was up against the choice of a cigarette with MTV or the smokeless quiet of my room. Not much of a discomfort. Even less, considering that most of the time I could find someone to talk with in the lounge, someone who would join me in facing away from the tube and ignoring its racket. We were not permitted to have lighters--the institute has not changed in this--but an electric lighter, similar to a car lighter but with a fine wire mesh across the front of it, was fixed on the wall and could be made to glow by pressing a button. Most of the patients were smokers--the opposite proportion to that outside; let the surgeon general make of it what he will--with the result that hundreds of times a day, perhaps thousands, someone would walk into the lounge with a cigarette ready, go up to the button and press it, then lean close to the lighter to get the smoke going. It was ritualistic. Kissing the wall is what we called it.

"Hey Jim, you going to kiss the wall?"

"Damn right."

Well, I was there two weeks, as I’ve said. I went to a fair number of group therapy sessions, took many psychological tests, was interviewed by various doctors and other people, saw a psychiatrist who had been assigned to me for fifteen minutes each day, went out several times with groups in a big Dodge van to visit parks on the outskirts of the city, and toward the end went out with friends to dinner. I was mildly scared a couple of times when younger patients got into a fracas. I was irritated late at night when I couldn’t sleep and the nurse in charge wouldn’t authorize anyone to open the lounge (locked from midnight until six o’clock) and let me smoke, though sometimes, inconsistently, this was permitted. But mostly I was happy. Not only that, I was cheerful. This is confirmed in the "report" that was written on my case, which was given to read after my discharge and which summarized the immense file that had accumulated in only two weeks, hundreds and hundreds of observations by doctors, nurses, technicians, aides, and who knows how many others, plus data from physical and psychological tests of many kinds. It was a file three inches thick--what an expense of paper! The report said I was outgoing, good-humored, etc.--not my usual self at all, not a pessimist, skeptic, and grump. I was a new man. Exactly.

Seeing my psychiatrist once a day in the hospital, incidentally was another change from earlier, when I had been lucky to see a doctor once a week. I can’t say the psychiatrist assigned to me in Syracuse, Veena Kayastha, who is a wise and magnanimous woman from India, taught me anything I hadn’t known before--after all my years in psychotherapy this would have been unlikely--but she changed the angle of vision from which I looked at myself; and this was indispensable. I have continued to see her, though less and less frequently, since being discharged from the hospital.

In many of the group sessions the question came up of the acute embarrassment most suicidal patients feel before friends and relatives afterward, and of the hindrance a history of suicide may be, once it gets on the record, to finding a job. Many patients on the ward were suicidals, I’d guess more than half, ranging from high-school girls, fresh and pretty and naïve, to people my age or older; some were long-time repeaters. When one of the group leaders asked me how I felt about this, I said, "Well, in my line of work it’s more an advantage than a disadvantage." By this time nearly everyone knew I was a poet. So my remark got a laugh, and a laugh was by no means a bad thing in that place, though the group leaders often didn’t think so: they’d look annoyed and then right away put on a false smile and get back to the serious business of making somebody squirm. I became annoyed with their implacable Rotarian optimism and formulism, their essentially authoritarian methods--they always knew best--and their moral impeccability. Once I tried to suggest that attitudes toward suicide are relative and derive from diverse cultural sources. Social, religious, and ethnic factors are variable. We all know about the spy who keeps a dose of cyanide in his ring so he can do away with himself when the going gets rough. A fictional stereotype; yet I have no doubt he exists in reality. Even in our Christian culture, which since the days of the early church has regarded suicide as a sin, most people would agree that someone facing extreme physical torture ought to have the choice of taking his or her own life. In Japan a politician who has failed in office is expected to retire, not to his estate in the country, but to the next room, where he sticks himself with a horrid big knife. This is the honorable thing to do. For centuries in India a new widow, even if she was still in her teens, was expected to commit suttee by casting herself on her husband’s pyre. Again it was the honorable thing to do, no matter how sexist and stupid. I wonder if Christianity may not be the only prominent religion which proscribes suicide categorically as sinful, i.e., denies suicides a burial in the common, consecrated graveyard. At any rate attitudes toward suicide vary. Even in our ordinary American social cross section attitudes toward suicide are more variable than the doctors care to admit. For that matter, doctors themselves have a higher suicide rate than many other professions, perhaps--who knows--right up there next to the priests.

I have had three close friends who died of the same kind of cancer within the past year. One of them lingered longer in the final stage than the others, and everyone agrees that the latter were the luckier. Death for them was a blessing. In fact this feeling has become so commonplace with respect to victims of cancer that we scarcely wince any more when we express it. The sooner one dies the better.

Some years ago I had a friend whose domestic life was in a shambles. Part of the trouble was not his doing, but he was so bound up, so repressed, that he could talk to no one, either psychiatrist or friend, about it. He was forty-five years old, had three minor children, was a success in his work, a liked and respected person. He went into the woods and shot himself. I had to go with the search party three days later; when we found him I had to identify him. It was awful. Anyone could have told him that what he should do was forget the whole mess and go to California, the common, effective American expedient. He was simply incapable of this. Incapable. In such a case can anyone say certainly that his suicide was wrong?

The idea of suicide makes everyone shudder, even those who have done it. It’s the frisson we feel when we encounter the nonbeing we carry inside us, when somebody, as we say, walks over our grave. Perhaps this is why we make excuses for suicide, excusing ourselves in the potential future. John Donne, who was as rigorously devout in his later years as anyone could be, in his Biathanatos excuses religiously motivated suicides, against the teaching of the church. Indeed, almost every philosopher has discussed suicide in one work or another because the topic is obviously, almost conveniently, close to the heart of all moral problems. The most famous example in our time is Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus.

I’ve always thought that if we must have capital punishment--and I don’t accept the necessity--the Athenians invented the best, most humane method when they gave Socrates the cup of hemlock and let him administer it to himself: At that same time not far away the Macedonians, Spartans, Israelites, and others were hacking at people with axes or roasting them over fires or nailing them to crosses. For that matter who today would not, if allowed to do so, choose suicide over hanging, electrocution, or the gas chamber, no matter how "painless" these methods may be? Irrational, yes. But when an inevitability has been established, presuming philosophically that all inevitabilities are in themselves and of necessity unjust, at some point the human being then wishes to choose it, to make it his or her election, even in the case of the death sentence, as if to ratify not only the injustice but his or her own autonomy by acting in the semblance of freedom. Whether or not this makes good sense, it is good psychology.

Suicide has been chosen by many and all kinds of people, including many writers. Off the top of my head I think of Lindsay, Mayakovsky, Yesenin, Teasdale, Virginia Woolf, Crane, Hemingway, F. O. Matthiessen, Kees, Cesare Pavese (that most vigorous of poets), Berryman, Jarrell, Plath, Sexton... etc. And painters too: Van Gogh, Mark Rothko. Again and again they do it, many different people for many different reasons. And is anyone able to say that all these people are wrong?

Some say that suicide is against nature. This is the "faith" of the doctors, I think. All nature strives to live, is what they say, the survival of the fittest, elan vital, etc. But in the first place this is wrong. Among some species it is death to copulate, but they copulate anyway. Among others a parent will give up her own life for the sake of her young. Among still others individuals that are old or diseased cause their own deaths, or conspire in them. And in the second place it doesn’t matter what nature does. What matters is the human mind and spirit, as I assume I need not argue.

My own mind and spirit became filled, during the time in question, with happiness, as I have said. It was a peculiar feeling, something like the high I experienced in the ICU during my all-night, internal jam sessions, and I can’t say enough about the excitement of that. I’ve been playing the blues all my life, sometimes on musical instruments but, like most musicians, even more often in my head, yet I never knew another time when I felt the exhilaration I felt that night. I was flying; my whole body was buzzing and writhing; though I was too weak to walk, almost too weak to raise my head, I was incandescent with energy; and I believed--but who can tell?--that my musical imagination was soaring in extraordinary new inventions. I was drugged? Maybe. I don’t know what was flowing into me through those tubes, except for the oxygen, and my experience of drugs otherwise (except for alcohol) has been limited. But I can’t believe (1) that I could achieve so high a high or (2) that I could perceive and remember it so clearly if I were merely intoxicated. And this was the feeling, this happiness, that I felt, varying in intensity, all the time in both hospitals and continue to feel to this day. A feeling of frothiness in my head, of effervescence. It is like falling in love ten times, but not successively, simultaneously and with no other person implicated. The happiness is generated entirely within myself and directed entirely back to myself.

Yet the knowledge of it is sharable.

Is this what St. Theresa felt? For pages I’ve been skirting the idea of mystical experience. I have used the word spiritual and I have alluded to rebirth. I suspect that in its sensational manifestation my happiness is indeed close to religious ecstasy. But at the same time I’ve been a backcountry Yankee pragmatist and cynic all my life, and I cling to this conviction still, not only because it seems to my mind, which has been drawn to the question since I was a child, to be right, but because it is one of the very few continuities in my life that can hold thought and experience and feeling, my personality, together. I do not believe at all that a contradiction exists between my happiness and my rationalism. I resist to the end--this is part of the clinging--my friends who smile and say, "Well, we knew you’d come round to god at last." God has nothing to do with it, if only because he or she is in my view functionally nonexistent, an abstraction with no power and no intelligence. And no mystery; the mystery is within oneself, at the bottommost pit of oneself, and to call this a god is to commit suicide in a more drastic and distraught way than I ever contemplated with my mere overdose. It is to give up one’s humanity, which is precisely our being not godly, our incapacity. Elsewhere I have argued for the notion that spiritual and mystical experience are different. The mystic is someone who has immediate knowledge of supernatural power. This has never happened to me; all the hallucinatory incidents in my life can be convincingly explained by rational means. (Of course, this does not at all preclude mystical knowledge in other minds; it does not even preclude the fact of this in my own mind. I have a friend who is a painter, for instance, and when she is stumped by a problem in her work, Picasso tells her what to do by means of messages transmitted through a pencil held in her left, nonwriting hand. I believe what she says. But nothing remotely like this has ever happened to me.) Spiritual, as distinct from mystical, knowledge is all knowledge of the human spirit in its surpassing of material cause in Aristotle’s sense of the word. The human spirit is human, grounded in our bodies, but it is still spirit. Spirituality is an extension of materiality, in the same sense that love is a refinement of sex, but is no less spiritual for that. The differences between spiritual and esthetic experience, or between either of them and emotional experience, are too abstruse for discussion in this essay, but to my mind, briefly, these differences entail discriminations among states or levels of feeling and have more to do with the way the feelings are evoked or produced than with their intrinsic qualities.

Is this a cynical view? It is necessary to bear in mind that cynicism does not mean merely a sardonic attitude toward life, love, or any other value, although this is what the word most often signifies in ordinary discourse. My dictionary says: "The Cynics [in ancient philosophy] taught that virtue is the only good, and that its essence lies in self-control and independence." It is easy to put too much stock in self-control and independence, as some cynics have, which results in a kind of puritanism; but it is equally easy to dismiss them altogether, which results in quietism. For me virtue is indeed the only good. Self-control and independence are the states of being toward which I strive continually, acknowledging that I’m damned lucky to attain either of them for even a moment.

And luck has a good deal to do with virtue, and with self-control and independence too. Any artist knows this. A poet or painter must work in exceptional and solitary diligence to sustain technique and the required pliancy of imagination, that is, to keep the artistic apparatus in a state of readiness for the stroke of luck that alone can materialize a genuine work of art when it comes; more than this, the artist must not only work but live in a state of devotion to things greater than himself. But no dereliction from hard work and devotion is implied in deferring to luck. Deference is a recognition of reality, what Wallace Stevens called "the necessary angel," who must mediate the imaginative procedure. A work of art--a work of virtue--is luck welcomed and accepted, the success of chance. And happiness is the feeling that goes with it. What I mean to say is that happiness itself is not virtue, in spite of the official American philosophy to the contrary, but it is the feeling that accompanies virtue. Often it’s the feeling of being lucky.

The example may seem crass to some, but not to realists: happiness is winning the lottery. Everyone knows this. The guy who goes to bed with a million dollars more than he had when he got up is happy without a doubt. (It’s a fact that the words happen and happiness both come from the root hap, which means chance.) Money is not everything, and for those of us who are serious about virtue it is not even much; we would rather produce a fine poem or painting than a fat bank account. Some of us would even rather produce a good action in the world. And we believe that our feeling when we do these things is happier by far than the gambler’s mere rapture. In my case the happiness I’ve been speculating about came from the luck of being alive. And what is being alive at all if it isn’t luck, whether good or bad? At any moment in our lives we know we might never have existed; our conception, that obscure beginning, was the extreme fortuity--chance as the absolute foundation--and awareness of this stays with us always. My suicide was a reminder of it, as my recovery was a resumption. I don’t believe I experienced rebirth, which can come only from an unimaginable reconception and in effect would be a second origin--a contradiction in terms. Each of us has only one origin, one fundamental piece of luck (good or bad). In my suicide I experienced a renewal of luck. And I believe that because I was an artist, a person who had devotion and worked in discipline, I was ready for that renewal and for its reward in happiness.

Why worry it like this? What is this need to understand and explain? My luck was not a change of knowledge but of vision. My happiness was not a state of doing but of being. Why not accept what had been given to me and be grateful and let it alone? This is what many of my friends--and especially those who are artists--would recommend.

I can only say that acceptance without questioning is contrary to my nature. The urgency in me--in my mind, my soul--is precisely to understand and explain. When I am presented with a gift, my impulse is to examine it, to look it in the mouth. How else can one appreciate it? How else can one arrive at an estimation of value, of moral and esthetic quality? In sessions of group therapy at the hospital I was accused of being too intellectual; both the staff and my fellow patients thought my responses to questions were too abstract and buried the essential feeling or instinct in an array of complication. I’ve been used to this all my life. The only thing to do when it happens is shut up, which is what I pretty much did. But I felt violated. Everything I know as writer and critic, everything I know about poetry and life, tells me that the effort to analyze a feeling makes that feeling stronger, not weaker. At the same time any effort to suppress or circumvent one’s own intelligence leads to self-rebuke and depression. As my friend Paul Goodman used to say, I can’t be any stupider than I am. But I should add that for me analysis is rather close to what I think other people mean by meditation.

The recognition of these things--the lucid recognition, as Camus would say--is important to me. And this too has to do with vision.

Another way to look at happiness and luck is under the rubric of time--the way people always look at it. True luck is not money but time, additional time: ask any veteran of Vietnam. Not one of them would take a million dollars for the extraordinary luck that brought them through alive. Poets and theologians have insisted from the beginning that happiness is an escape from time, human time, either through a life after death or, before death, through an experience of spiritual communion or mystical or esthetic transport. But a third way, as mythology attests, is to die and come back to life. This is the meaning in Western culture of the descent to the underworld, from Inanna to Dante. If one dies, then one’s life is ended, meaning that the human computation of time, which is imposed on us by death, has ended, has been, as people say, terminated or wiped out. If one comes back from death then one must either begin a new life, which is impossible because all the defining elements of one’s personality have already been established, or one must live in a new, different computation of time. Can one die twice? Of course; no human being has ever returned to life without eventually dying again. (The gods were always jealous and hard-nosed on that score.) This seems to mean that one’s new computation of time would be imposed by one’s new forthcoming death, however near or remote, and that in consequence this new computation is not much different from the old one. This is the logic of it. But the psychology of it, the spirituality of it, is another matter. One’s inner intuitive organ of cognizance knows that dead is dead; but it cannot know the distinction between all-but-dead and dead. That is to say, one’s inner intuitive organ of cognizance cannot accommodate itself to the idea of dying twice. If one all-but-dies, then the awareness of time as a human computation dies too, and the new, regained time when one returns is uncomputed.

This is what people call "borrowed time" or even "stolen time," which are mere folkifications, a common irrational wish-fulfillment. From whom or what could one possibly borrow or steal it? No, uncomputed time is much closer to what is called "free time," in both the sense of time with which one may do what one chooses and of time that is given without the normal payment, which is death. It is time outside the ordinary understanding of succession. And what I mean by "the ordinary understanding of succession" is precisely the imposed computation of one’s lifetime under the pressure of predictable death that I have pointed to in the last paragraph. Free time is what Proust was talking about when he said that a remembered sensation in its sensory immediacy but temporal remoteness gives one an experience outside of normal chronology. It is the time that Alice found when she popped down the rabbit hole. It is the time that old people find when they fall in love, a release or reprieve from the predicted progression of sexuality-to-impotence-to-senility-to-death; Ford Madox Ford gave us a wonderful picture of this in his poem called "Heaven," and it was no accident that he chose--or more likely acceded to--the metaphor of an afterlife to represent the state of erotic gratification in old age. But in all these cases--Proust’s, Alice’s, and Ford’s--the free time was acquired through complicated procedures entailing extra-personal agents or events. My free time, on the other hand, has come essentially from the experience of death, which is as inward and personal as any experience can be. In this my experience is like the mystic’s, though the mystic would probably say that his or her experience is on the contrary as outward and impersonal as any experience could be, thus raising the question, which is unanswerable, of whether the utterly inward and utterly outward may not be the same thing.

All of which seems to mean that the luckiest kind of luck is that which gives one free time or time-outside-of-time. Moreover it is that which occurs solely within consciousness and with no reference to any externality whatever. Hence it goes without saying, at least in the terms of this essay, that this is what gives one the greatest happiness. One could achieve it by catching Alzheimer’s disease and then arresting it just at the stage before complete loss of self-consciousness; one could achieve it in ways I have never thought of and would be unlikely to imagine. But one way to achieve it is by all-but-dying, and probably, though I see no way to demonstrate it, the degree of happiness resulting will be in direct ratio to the nearness of one’s approach to death. One of my doctors remarked that my attempt at suicide had been "lethal," and it was clear from the context that this was meant literally. (The dictionary: "lethal is applied to that which by its very nature is bound to cause death or which exists for the purpose of destroying life.) So my luck, my unintentional discovery of time-outside-time, has been great indeed, and, leaving aside questions of possible brain damage or other physical impairments, so has my happiness.

A further consideration arises under the heading of identity, which is, heaven knows, a hackneyed enough refrain in the literature of my time, both fictional and clinical. I won’t pursue it here. But it’s worth mentioning that during my whole life prior to my suicide I had never been able to identify any part of my ego that might be central to the rest or that functioned in a way beyond the mere response to external stimuli. Among writers this is called style or voice. When I was young and under the influence of W B. Yeats, I believed I knew his voice so well that if a new poem turned up purporting to be by him, I could tell right away, simply by reading the lines aloud to myself, whether the claim was genuine. But I could never find so distinct a voice in my own work, which instead seemed a disconcerting concatenation of voices, other people’s voices mimicked or faked, including in some poems the voice of Yeats himself. This is a matter of perception, of course, and other people tell me that no matter how many personae appear in my poems, they recognize in the language, the thought, and the feeling a consistent personality. I hope they’re right, but I don’t know if they are. What is important here is that I discovered in suicide a way to unify my sense of self, the sense which had formerly been so refracted and broken up. This will seem bizarre to many of my friends, including my students. The truth is, however, that the practice of writing poetry, to which I have given a lifetime, has always seemed to me suspect, not quite legitimate, while suicide is without doubt an action in the world, something that one has done or not done, really and objectifiably. This is what I am. This is my identity, whatever anyone may think of it. Suicide is not only what I did but what I was capable of doing. Elemental thought it may be, it still gives shape, integrity, and a certain fullness to the figure of myself--minuscule, of course--that I see out there in history. It isn’t much, but it’s more than I had before. And this is a real and significant feeling in me, no matter how other people may recoil from it, as I myself would have recoiled if it had been presented to me in my ante-suicidal Ignorance.

At any point in this discussion but particularly at this one the question is whether my suicide was a mistake. I see no way to answer in terms of what had happened before the suicide. I’d had a long run of bad luck, no doubt of that, precluding the possibility of virtue, at least in my private life. But exactly how bad was it? And how bad must it be to justify suicide? We have no measurement. The church is right, from its standpoint, in making a blanket rejection, because even if absolute objective criteria could be found, which they can’t, they could never be applied reasonably in individual cases. When you and I have been infected by the same flu bug, do we suffer equal pain? No, evidently we don’t. But beyond this, the crudest observation, we can’t say much about our relative qualities and quantities of pain, any more than we can about other elements of our relative subjectivities, including our need for suicide. All one can say in this respect is that at some point suicide may become feasible in anyone’s life. This is not saying much, and it doesn’t satisfy our need for something conclusive in such a difficult moral predicament. We are left where we, as mundane and imperfect human beings, always are.

But in terms of what followed after the suicide, I don’t see how anyone, even the doctors, can maintain it was a mistake except in fare-thee-well doctrinairian terms, which I reject on every ground.

Another point: my suicide occurred at a moment in life when death would not have been ill-timed. I had done about as much as one is normally expected to do. This doesn’t mean I had no obligations still outstanding; at any point in anyone’s life responsibility is always present; but I had generally done what I could. In my writing I had concluded my best work some years earlier. Even in teaching, which for me was in any case a late development and not something that could be called professional, any time at which one chooses to depart is as appropriate as any other. Teaching is like working on the assembly line of an auto factory; the semesters go past, one applies an air-wrench here, a soldering gun there; but the task is repetitive and can be interrupted with equal felicity or infelicity at any point. Hence in every sector, disregarding the fortuity of what has happened afterward, my death at the moment of my suicide would have been as opportune as anyone’s.

If my suicide was a mistake, it was such a mistake as is a part of life. Suicide in this respect is like any death, a part of the experience of living, consequent upon one’s original luck. It is something existing within the potentiality of life. Is this possibility of suicide therefore a reason for suicide? That’s a conundrum. Given a sufficiently anxious sensibility, it might be. But our proclivity for mistakes is not a reason for not living. What I’m saying here is that suicide is a choice, a free act. Whether a mistake or not, whether it succeeds or not, it authenticates the freedom of the intelligent being who chooses it. It is a powerful indicator of our relevance to ourselves as human beings. We can and do choose whether to live or to die. Granted, the Mickey Mouse psychologists who are trying to legislate morality on this question and others--e.g., in the public schools--decline such a view of suicide and in general try to exclude as much dangerous human freedom as possible, but these people, these technologists of behavior, are anathema to me, just as my own freedom--to choose and to do other things--is crucially important to me. This does not mean I am in favor of what the papers call "teenage suicide," incidentally. Young people must be taught to think. Whenever they are inculcated with such Rotarianized precepts as "respect for life" and the "American way," from sea to shining sea, etc., their capacity for thought is diminished proportionately and in most cases irrevocably. This is not exactly relevant here, but it’s important nevertheless.

At least in small ways, however, connection is still possible. Since my recovery my good luck has continued. In fact some nearly unbelievably lucky things have happened. One result is that the house I had bought a few months before my suicide, an alien, cold, unfriendly place at the time, has now become a real home. Another is that I am planning to be married soon to a beautiful and loving woman. My life has changed completely, in other words, and in ways I literally could not have believed possible at the time of my suicide and that anyone would have thought extremely unlikely. Moreover I have been welcomed back to my university on a semiretired basis and apparently am teaching as well as ever. As we say, I’m lucky to be alive. But the most important result of my new luck is that I am enabled to perform acts of virtue once more. I have moved out of the isolation and alienation of my former life and back into the world, which is where acts of virtue occur. Because of this I am a better writer, whatever the artistic quality of my work from now on may be. Writing is first of all a way of being in the world, a functioning nub of relatedness. Hence my happiness, that frothy feeling, is now with me almost all the time. Bad luck and unhappiness are what I remember from the time before, as they are what I see continually around me in the smaller and larger worlds. Like anyone else, I pay attention to the news. Nor am I foolish enough to think that bad luck and unhappiness may not return to me. I’ve reached the time of life when one’s friends begin shuffling away, usually in pain and humiliation, and saying good-bye is a sorrow I find simply overwhelming; yet it is not incompatible with my happiness. I do what I can, everything I can, so that other people may have good luck and may know it when they do, and in this I’m an average decent sort of a guy. Not that it amounts to much; a few friends, a few students, a few strangers--one cannot hope to reach more. The many kinds of impotence, like the many mistakes, are a part of life. But I am happy even so, happy with my luck and my knowledge of it, with my virtue and the good I can do if I am strong enough.