I learned that just beneath the surface there’s another world, and still different worlds as you dig deeper. I knew it as a kid, but I couldn’t find the proof. It was just a kind of feeling. There is goodness in blue skies and flowers, but another force—a wild pain and decay—also accompanies everything.
- David Lynch
For precisely as long as I can remember, I have wished to die.1 I have spent my life endlessly preoccupied by my own desire to end my life. I am not so interested in understanding the medical reasons for such a desire, I am unaware of any sort of precondition that has caused me to feel this way.2 Most often I think that the way I feel is a perfectly normal way to feel, given the state of the world. It can be nearly too much to bear, the weight of the world is heavy. For much of my life, I simply have had little interest in this life.
As a fifteen year old, stuck in what I felt was a dead end city and dead end life, I often wandered around the streets at night—seeking purpose. A Jane Frances quote bouncing around in my head, is there world enough for me? I don’t suppose this feeling is unique, especially not for those of us who feel different; shut out from a sense of community or companionship growing up. I felt that my own desires were strange and perverted and I yearned for something different. I would fantasize about my life if I could be someone else, if I had different circumstances, if I was born to another family. As I have gotten older, these fantasies have become harder to articulate. It’s not that I want to die in the concrete, it’s something more abstract.
The last few years, I have realized that perhaps I didn’t want to die but to live differently. I’ve become intrigued by the utility of such an affliction, I’ve often wondered if what I have long felt burdened by was actually a gift from God, or the universe itself. Could it be that I was blessed with a preternatural ability to exist with one foot out the door? Is there something here, something that could become fruitful for both myself and those around me? I have lived my life driven almost mad with the desire to understand—myself, the world around me, the unanswerable questions of life.
In my ceaseless search to find meaning, what I’ve come to know is that the questions matter more than the answers. What if things could be different? What if we could demand more? What if we could create something better, something just, something safer and kinder and more beautiful? Answers are meaningless here, answers are concrete and finite. Answers do not beget more answers, only endings. The questions are the beginnings, the questions cause little rifts, the questions allow for the creation of something new.
In her article, “Suicidal Tendencies: Notes toward a Queer Narratology,” Dana Seitler writes of the suicide plot as an (un)narrative device. As she posits, “the suicide plot stages not only a departure from the world but also a departure from narrative: not just weary resignation, but also aesthetic intervention.” She focuses specifically on suicide plots in which “the risk of one’s undoing does not function as a moral fiat on bad behavior or indicate a need to make sense of one’s existing life world as much as it performs a fantastic desire to live in a different one.” Seitler focuses her analysis on a few particular stories of suicide, but in this essay I will focus namely on her study of Paul’s Case by Willa Cather as well as Ridley Scott’s 1991 film, Thelma and Louise. For Seitler, the character’s “retreat into suicidal fantasy is not limiting but productive: it inscribes an alternative space for living by formulating suicide as a counteraesthetic narrative form.” I would argue the same for those of us plagued by chronic suicidal ideation, that these visions provide us a desperately needed reprieve from the life we currently live. By imagining one's own death, we are able to imagine something different, perhaps better. I think that this suicidal tendency can be reframed and understood not as an attempt to die, but as a bid to live richer, fuller lives. Chronic suicidal ideation—or as I prefer to call it, imagination—might not actually be a leaning towards death, but a leaning away from a life we are not satisfied with. Seitler writes, “in this regard, we might be able to slightly rewrite Joan Didion’s insight that ‘we tell ourselves stories in order to live’ to say ‘we tell ourselves stories about killing ourselves in order to live another way.’”
Paul's Case, first published in 1905, follows protagonist Paul—a young man from Pittsburgh—as he reckons with the monotony of his middle-class existence. Paul, a lover of art and the symphony, finds himself discontent with life as he experiences it. Discontent—perhaps the most universal experience of youth. As we age, there is some pressure towards a blanket acceptance of our material conditions and away from disdain—alternatively put, away from the demand for more, away from hope. As a society, we often remark about the utility of the child’s imagination, a spark that slowly fades as we age. Paul’s Case, in this reading, effectively functions as a protest against such loss of fabulation. Seitler writes of Paul: “losing oneself to pleasure and to theatrical fantasy is life according to Paul, where ‘he grew more vivacious and animated, and the color came into his cheeks and lips.’ When he dies a diva’s death, might we describe him…as ‘a veritable queen of romance’? Certainly, among all the genres and literary modes he moves through as the story unfolds, Paul’s diva fabulations are the ones that sustain him.” Although Paul is moving towards death, his imagination is alive and well.
Marx often wrote about consciousness raising and the idea of need; I want to write about imagination raising and better articulation of our needs. Author Agnes Heller wrote about radical needs in her book, The Theory of Need in Marx, specifying that radical needs are those unable to be realized under capitalism. She writes that the inability to fulfill needs under capitalism and the prioritization of the economic system threatens to “destroy the species, maybe in a holocaust, maybe person by person, psychologically as much as physically.” I wonder what could happen if we were to stake a claim to imagination; a new form of imagination, divorced from the grips of capital. It seems clear that the capitalist (un)logic has seeped its way into every corner of our lives, including our imaginations. Instead of dreaming up new ways of being in the world, we kill ourselves. Instead of finding joy in the fantasy, we dissociate from our bodies. Daydreaming is not exactly a fruitful career path, nor does it inspire conformity. Daydreaming makes way for visions of the impossible, it allows us to see into the future and to change what lies ahead. Seitler writes that this sort of imagining is “a particularly queer form of resistance to the constraining narratives of life itself, one in which death is not a sense-making mechanism that works to organize and bundle a narrative’s pleasures but an aesthetic model of political possibility that functions as an intervention into existing understandings of the plots that square off the patterns for living.” To imagine is to intervene into the future. This sort of intervention has the potential to disrupt capital and to call for a better, more beautiful way of structuring our lives and communities.
Max Haiven details the concept of radical imagination in his book, Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power: Capitalism, Creativity and the Commons, explaining that, “it is what provides the idea that things could be different, and that we could live life otherwise.” It is important to note that this act of imagining involves connection with others and a shared commitment to solidarity. Haiven writes that, “the radical imagination is a matter of acting otherwise, together.” I believe that this connection is crucial in turning suicidal imagination away from the act of suicide itself and towards the pursuit of a life well lived. Radical imagination then, is the missing link between suicide as an act of annihilation and suicide as a site of resistance, one in which suicidal imagination works in concert with the greater imaginings of a community. As suicidal imagination may cause one to turn in on themselves, further isolating us from one another, radical imagination works to allow these unspeakable fantasies to become common ground. This is not to say that radical imagination is simply burdening others around you with your darkest thoughts, nor is it an exercise in meaningless idealism. Instead, Haiven writes that, “radical thinking and imagination stand apart because, rather than accepting the world as it is, they always keep in mind all the other ways the world could be. This isn’t just a matter of imagining endless fanciful utopias—it is a matter of imagining different tomorrows based on the ‘what ifs’ of today.” What might this radical imagination look like in practice? Haiven writes:
The radical imagination is not something one has as an individual; it is a collective process. And it materializes in alternative forms of reproduction, both subtle and dramatic. When two workers share their frustrations on a break, they not only confirm one another’s imagination of their workplace as a horrible place, they also, for a moment at least, create a space for the radical imagination and, at the same time, a space of alternative social reproduction. Hopefully, these small spaces of possibility can cohere with others into a union, a party or a movement. But even though most forms of ‘resistance’ (like taking an extra two minutes on a smoke break) are no match for capitalist power (like Walmart), they matter because they remind us that the radical imagination is alive and at work, even in the most oppressive and alienating circumstances.
For those of you who know me outside of the internet, I imagine it is sort of strange to read what I write about community. I have a strong tendency to alienate myself from others, largely due to my inability to feel present, most often too preoccupied with this suicidal imagining. In order to turn this fantasy away from the destructive and towards the creative, one must employ the radical imagination. This sort of collective imaginary is an exercise in social reproduction and I believe that if enough of us had access to the same radical visions, we could begin to reproduce a social order that prioritizes care, alternative ways of living, and shared responsibility of both the world and one another.
In Paul's Case, Cather nods towards this powerful imagination, writing that Paul, “needed only the spark, the indescribable thrill that made his imagination master of his senses, and he could make plots and pictures enough of his own.” Through opera, Paul is able to imagine himself transported somewhere different. Seitler writes that,
Paul reimagines life in its queerest forms, which is to say as something in conflict with the aggressive heterocapitalist prescriptions for materially and culturally rewarded modes of existence that otherwise surround him. The flowers are more lovely, more alluring, because they bloom unnaturally. His devotion to an aesthetic of the unnatural can be read as another insistence of imagining other ways of being; the flower’s specifically artificial beauty insists on an alternative way of imagining, even defining, the beautiful. Embracing the unnatural life in this way provides Paul a means of staying in the world, one that includes an understanding of one’s possible nonrelation to it, which is to say that, theater, and opera in particular, provides Paul with the means to be in the world by way of being out of it.
What Paul is pushing back against is a sociosymbolic order that does not allow his way of experiencing the world. Paul is alienated and isolated, unable to find the language to communicate his imagination. What I find particularly interesting about Paul’s Case is his inability to properly express his vision of the life he yearns for. I would argue that most people dealing with chronic suicidal ideation struggle with the ability to define exactly what is missing. This amorphous, abstract idea that life is not what it is supposed to be is where the radical imagination becomes all the more important. Through shared acts of imagination, I believe we could start pinning down these feelings more concretely and begin to make the changes necessary to live well in the world. Importantly, Seitler writes:
I am not speaking of actual acts of suicide; rather, my interest is in tracking a persistent cultural fantasy of unbecoming that Paul’s narrative act suggests—a lesson in the pleasures of renunciation and surrender that may be worth our attention. Paul’s is a case from which we learn something about the fantasy of undoing, a fantasy that provides a way to confront one’s precarity, that acts as a tactic of survival, refusing externally laid limits and impositions of pain. As such, it is a narrative that refuses to close.
It is clear that this fantasy of unbecoming is identifiably anti-capitalist, as Paul’s suicide is protesting a way of life that adheres to isolation and strict individualism. As such, Paul’s suicide is both a refusal to participate in capitalism and a rally against his unmet needs. Haiven notes the ways in which radical imagination exposes what has been taken from us, writing: “from out of these critical insights a picture begins to emerge: the perversion, mutation and distortion of our hopes and dreams is not only one of the greatest crimes of capitalist exploitation, it is essential to the system’s functioning.” I agree with Haiven’s assertion that understanding what has been outlawed under capitalism is the first step towards imagining something different. I often return to Slavoj Žižek’s concept of the ‘event,’ which refers to a moment in time that ruptures our current sociosymbolic order and allows for a new way of reproducing societal norms. I think that suicide could fit this definition of event, but it does not allow for the fantasy to come to fruition. I wonder if we could create events of the same magnitude through joint radical imagining instead. In speaking out loud our suicidal thoughts, could we learn how to better articulate our unmet needs? Our unspoken wants?
I want to be extremely clear, I don’t believe that suicide can be interpreted as anything but a tragedy. What I want to shift away from though, is the notion that suicidal imagination always means a drive towards death. When Paul throws himself in front of the train—for a split second—he is truly fulfilled, separated finally from the demands of capitalist conformity. Seitler notes that, “Paul’s suicide shifts us away from reading his death as a form of ideological, moral, and narrative closure and relocates our focus to the narrative, as well as social, structures of life and living that his suicide attempts to move him beyond. His suicide marks not the end of a life but that which he has never been allowed to become in life, an undoing and unbecoming of what he already was not.” Death affords Paul what life could not, a way of belonging to somewhere.
Later in her essay, Seitler notes that, “loss and surrender are, at these various moments, rendered as an aesthetic pleasure and an exercise of one’s capacity for leave-taking, an orchestration of dissolution, an ardent feeling of self-abandonment that fuels Paul’s fantasy not of dying but of becoming (becoming queer, becoming art, becoming anything but here).” What I find most interesting about what Seitler writes here is the phrase becoming anything but here. Not anywhere, but anything. This suicidal imagination exists beyond temporal and geographical locations in time and space, the idea of becoming something different is not even necessarily tied to this plane of existence. This is a much bigger, much more radical idea. To become anything but here, to imagine oneself—as Cather puts it—“dropped back into the immense design of things.” In this way, I believe the intersection between chronic suicidal ideation and radical imagination allows us to stretch the boundaries of our sociosymbolic order, potentially giving way to something beyond our wildest dreams. Haiven explains that when radical imagination is understood as embodied and relational, as well transversal, we are able to “bridge our imaginations and create common imaginaries of the way the world might be.”3
As for Thelma and Louise, a film depicting what Seitler terms a “feminist suicide,” we can understand that our two main characters kill themselves in an attempt at continuation, not termination. Seitler writes of the final scene, their car suspended high above the Grand Canyon; “they hesitate at that edge, after which there is only a deep dive and then empty space. There is nowhere left spatially, narratively, or politically to go. Their act of shared annihilation, then, is not about expanding a prevailing social or narrative form or even about destroying it. It is an intense narrative suspension of the existing narratives for ‘life.’” With a certain kind of life looming above them, and another kind of life looming below, we are left to imagine all the possibilities in the interim. In the final scene, the women exchange words; I’m not giving up. Let’s keep going then. I think this is what the radical imagination is, a refusal to give up and a commitment to keep going. In the moments before they launch themselves off the cliff—they kiss, hold hands—we see the physical manifestation of their commitment to each other and their desperate attempt at more life. Seitler writes, “In Paul’s jump and Thelma and Louise’s vehicular plunge, something of great value has gone out of the world. But the resolution to this (narrative) problem is not to accommodate themselves to that world but to imagine a different world.” To make it explicitly clear,
The suicide plots in each perform a fantastic desire to live a different life or to live in a different world, to relocate desire at the limits of a narrative’s end. The acts of self-annihilation in each can thus be read as practices of resistance to the constraining narratives of life, practices in which death provides a model of political and personal possibility. If these narratives most readily seem to forward a critique of the (hetero and sexist) norms for life, they also offer a compelling argument about the use of death. Flight, nonclosure, suspension: all become forms of disobedient action that enable an interruption of the various narrative frames trying to wrench us into existence, into a way of being that is and is not us. The suicide plot as a queer narratological technique affords an action in the face of an even greater obliteration, and it disrupts standard readings of death as providing a full sense of closure.
When I think about my own suicide attempts—twice as a teen—I will always remember the moment of calm that came as I drifted away into the darkness. Like in Paul’s Case, I desired to be “dropped back into the immense design of things.” Like in Thelma and Louise, I was suspended in time and place, neither here nor there, an in-between. I became “anything but here,” if even for just a moment before I was discovered.
To be honest with you, I’ve been struggling lately. To quote Kafka, “I could have built the Pyramids with the effort it takes me to cling on to life and reason.” This past year has felt like a deep, dark pit that I’ve found myself at the bottom of. Last year, on my birthday, Taylor Swift released a new album.4 One of the tracks, titled I Hate It Here, speaks to the idea of imagination as a tool of staying in the world. One verse in particular sticks out to me—makes me cry every time I listen. She sings: I hate it here so I will go to/ lunar valleys in my mind/ when they found a better planet/ only the gentle survived/ I dreamed about it in the dark/ the night I felt like I might die. Swift’s lyricism here, in my opinion, is in direct conversation with Haiven’s work on the radical imagination. Haiven writes of the beauty of the radical imagination, “the imagination weaves together the common and the uncommon. The imagination is both a private terrain and a shared landscape, or, more accurately, multiple shared landscapes which we experience in different ways with different people.” I believe this is what Swift is getting at as well, when they found a better planet—when we have collectively conceived of something better—only the gentle survived—only those with the ability to imagine together were able to access it. She hates it here, so she fantasizes about lunar valleys, something beyond our current conceptual capabilities; something that stretches the limits of our thinking. I think that Swift correctly identified a feeling that most of us have experienced at least once in our lives, and I feel that she included a remedy as well. It is our imperative to imagine.
The other day, leaning against the doorframe of my colleagues office, I found myself asking—earnestly and sincerely—how do I live? How do I keep going? The answer, he told me, is quite simple. We’re friends, we are in relation with one another. I’m glad to be alive because I am your friend. Is that it? Could our relationships with one another be enough to sustain us? This moment I experienced alongside a friend is a tangible example of the radical imagination at play. Together, we conceived of something different—a life in which our relationships with our loved ones are the central focus of our lives. Haiven says as much of the radical imagination, stating that “the imagination is both beautiful and dangerous. It is beautiful because it exists at the seam or overlap between the individual and society, between the way we are each unique and the way we are bound together.” The overlap between what I imagine and what you imagine, maybe that is where life happens. Haiven concludes that, “overcoming fatalism, futility and cynicism, then, is not simply a matter of ‘thinking differently’…instead, the radical imagination and the ability to dream of and build towards different social horizons, beyond the fog of capitalist unreason, depends on doing differently, on creating alternatives spaces, times and modes of reproducing ourselves, our communities and our world.”
As for the conclusion of this essay, there isn’t one. As Seitler reimagines the suicide plot as an attempt at restructuring what life might look like, she notes that, “closure can come in the form of nonclosure; it can function as an irresolute and ongoing temporality beyond the boundaries.” Here, I have no closure to offer, no conclusion. What I am trying to do, simply put, is convince myself to live. Perhaps what I have written here has convinced you to live, too. Instead of turning inward upon myself, this essay is an attempt to be in conversation with the “anything but here.” This morning, I was talking to my friend Jen. I told her I was worried about how dark things have become for me lately, scared that I was burdening my friends with too much sadness. She texted back, none of us want you to go through that kind of pain or fear, but if you must go through it, we’re right there with you. So that’s it then, that's where things begin. That’s where the chronic suicidal ideation turns radical imagination, the beginning of dreaming up something better. We’re right there with you. Which is to say, we imagine things could be different too, and we will imagine it together.
If you need help with suicidal thoughts, the suicide hotline is 9-8-8 (in Canada).
I’m being slightly facetious, I’ve been diagnosed with a million things but none of them have felt correct to me, yet.
Haiven’s book explores the ways in which race, gender, class, etc. greatly inform our ability to imagine together. Although I do not explicitly explore those intersections within this essay, I would highly recommend reading his book for more information.
Yes, she is a climate criminal. But I still love this song.
Here’s to imagining a new one together 🖤 (I don’t remember saying that but I believe you that I did)