Help Yourself

'Horsesmouth.co.uk' is a social network for informal mentoring. It has a panel of over 15,000 people in the UK, offering safe amd free services to mentees in three areas: Life, Work and Learning. where - "everyone can give and gain. You can search for a mentor, be a mentor, or simply browse the inspirational profiles and stories on the site."
- Horsesmouth – Online Coaching and Mentoring Network

For people worried about their own state or mind or that of someone they know, a bit more information can be found at the following site to help in deciding if some further help is warranted: Am I normal? Hearing voices or feeling paranoid?

For example, here is part of the FAQ section:

What do you mean by psychosis?

We use the word ‘psychosis’ or ‘psychotic symptoms’ to describe experiences that are seen as unusual or odd by most people. These include hearing voices, seeing things, extremely odd ideas and paranoia. One thing to remember is that most peope recover from psychosis and live a normal life.


What is it like to hear voices?

Hearing voices or noises that other people can’t hear is actually quite common. For example lots of people hear voices or noises when they are falling asleep or waking up.

These voices are very real and can be loud or quiet, it can be one person’s voice or lots of people. Some people recognise their voices whereas others don’t. Sometimes the things that people hear can appear to come through the walls, from the radio or TV or even from ghosts.

Voices can say all kinds of things, sometimes these can be quite supportive or funny. If they don’t upset you in any way or get in the way of your life, there is no reason to consider them a problem. Unfortunately, some people hear voices that are pretty upsetting.

They can sometimes say threatening or abusive things or tell you to do things that you don’t want to do. Voices can last from minutes to hours, can happen daily or very infrequently. It seems that stress has a part to play: when people are stressed out they are more likely to hear voices.


What do you mean by “odd ideas”?

We all get odd thoughts and ideas from time to time that others mightn’t agree with, such as believing other people are out to get us, having a thought about harming someone close to us or doing something similarly bad.

Just because we have a thought about something doesn’t mean that thought is a fact or that we want to act on it. We all get bizarre thoughts that flash through our mind from time to time, but most of the time we ignore these and pay little attention to them.

Sometimes however, we can’t dismiss an idea or thought, we think about it all the time and find it distressing. When these beliefs are something beyond what people believe normally, such as the belief that our actions might be controlled by an implant, or the idea that people on the television or radio might be sending us personal messages, then we often call these psychotic beliefs or ‘delusions’.

In reality it’s difficult to work out what the cut off is between a ‘normal’ belief and a ‘delusional’ belief as there is no clear divide. Usually how much you believe something, how much it seems based on reality, the level of distress and how much you think about it are used to decide whether there’s a problem or not.


Examples of some common psychotic beliefs (delusions)

• Thoughts are being interfered with, this may include having thoughts put into your head or taken away.
• That other people know what you’re thinking.
• That people are out to get you (paranoia).
• Personal messages are being sent via the television, radio or through newspapers or magazines.
• That you are the centre of a conspiracy.
• People are constantly watching you and might be recording what you do or say.
• That you have an implant in your head or body.
• That people are not who they say they are (such as your parents, who are actually imposters)
• That you are someone special e.g. Jesus, the Anti-Christ, a celebrity (or related to one), have unrecognised brilliance, special powers or gifts etc.


Will I get better?

That’s a difficult question, because these experiences vary from one person to the next and there’s no way of knowing how it will work out for different people. What we do know is that one person in every five who has psychotic type experiences will have them for a short time and then will never have them again.

Others may have lots of episodes at different times throughout their lives. Overall, we know that a good number of folks who have these experiences (around 50%) will have a good outcome in the long term and will no longer be bothered by them and will be able to get on with their lives.


Are my problems inherited?

In the past it was felt that psychosis was an illness that was passed down through your family. These days thinking has changed and research has shown that genes can’t explain everything but play a part.

Other factors in a person’s life experience are more important. These factors can include bullying, physical, sexual and emotional abuse, where you were brought up (we know that psychosis is much more likely when a person is born and raised in a city). To find out more about this see the section on “Why is this happening to me”....

Other DSM-V Issues

John M. Grohol summarises the proposed changes in the new edition, limited by the ability to train mental health staff:
Update: DSM-V Major Changes | World of Psychology

Nestor Lopez-Duran discusses the importance of finally acknowledging 'functional impairment' in children: DSM-V: Dimensions, categories, and the issue of impairment - Child Psychology Research Blog
Also in this article, a vision of how diagnoses could be provisional rather than absolute is considered:

...So for almost 30 years our field has followed a categorical diagnostic classification system. But the problem is that such a system is actually not well supported by the science in at least in two key issues: 1) Research has consistently shown that there is significant fluidity between diagnostic categories. That is, the line between depression and anxiety, for example, is more of an imaginary line than an actual wall. So clinical phenomena (depression, anxiety, phobias, delusions, compulsions, etc) occur on integrated dimensions that are not as easily separated as the DSM-IV categorical system suggests. And 2) Research is also consistent in showing that the degree of severity of each symptom and each overall condition also fall on a continuum or dimension. Unlike the assumption of the categorical system, we don’t really have an “all or nothing” situation, a “you have it or you don’t”. Instead, the story is much more complex. Therefore, as clinical phenomena occur in a continuum, clinical decisions should also occur in a continuum. Thus, a dimensional view of these clinical conditions may facilitate research on how different thresholds may lead to more effective clinical decisions (for example, at what level of depression is hospitalization the best option, or at what level does SSRI is recommended?)...

Vaughan Bell questions the usefulness of sticking on any kind of diagnostic label at all on people: Mind Hacks: The brand new book of human troubles

Shyness is nice, but...

No one could accuse the American Psychiatric Association of missing a strain of sourness in the country, or of failing to capitalize on its diagnostic potential. Having floated "Apathy Disorder" as a trial balloon, to see if it might garner enough support for inclusion in the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the world's diagnostic bible of mental illnesses, the organization has generated untold amounts of publicity and incredulity this week by debating at its convention whether bitterness should become a bona fide mental disorder.

Bitterness is "so common and so deeply destructive," writes Shari Roan at the Los Angeles Times, "that some psychiatrists are urging it be identified as a mental illness under the name post-traumatic embitterment disorder." "The disorder is modeled after post-traumatic stress disorder," she continues, "because it too is a response to a trauma that endures. People with PTSD are left fearful and anxious. Embittered people are left seething for revenge"...

...In its discussion of post-traumatic embitterment disorder, the APA may have correctly gauged the mood of the country, but as usual it has ignored or shunted aside most of the explanatory context, to pathologize the individual in all of her or his frustrated grievance...

...Part of the incredulity the APA discussion has generated in the media and blogosphere is doubtless because bitterness strikes the person feeling it as a justified response to a social ill or personal wrong. It may be an exaggerated, distorted perception to which, Linden wisely notes, "revenge is not a treatment." But just one of the many reasons for alarm here is the thought of the DSM, of all documents, trying with a few vague, open-ended criteria to legislate what is reasonable bitterness and what is not. (If you knew that "fear of eating alone in restaurants" and "avoidance of public restrooms" were both official symptoms of social anxiety disorder, among the most widely diagnosed of mental illnesses in the United States, you'd share my concern.)

These days, when many people approaching retirement open their 401(k) statements, they doubtless feel a bad twinge of "angry plus helpless." How about making that frantic concern and impotent rage? Do we really want the DSM telling us that those feelings—including over the need to postpone retirement by up to a decade—could soon be a symptom of "post-traumatic embitterness disorder"? Wouldn't that be comparable to rubbing salt in an already large wound?

Christopher Lane, the Pearce Miller Research Professor of Literature at Northwestern University, is the author most recently of Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness.

- Bitterness: The Next Mental Disorder? | Psychology Today

Health Treatment Evidence - the Cochrane Library

The Cochrane Library contains high-quality, independent evidence to inform healthcare decision-making. It claims to include reliable evidence from Cochrane and other systematic reviews, clinical trials, and more. Cochrane reviews bring you the combined results of the world’s best medical research studies, and are recognised as the gold standard in evidence-based health care:
Wiley InterScience: Reference Work: The Cochrane Library 2009, Issue 3

and,
The Cochrane Collaboration

Plastic Brains

On September 13, 1848 Gage was a 25 year old foreman of a blasting crew preparing a railroad bed outside Cavendish, Vermont. He used his 3 foot 7 inches, 13 1/4 pound iron rod to tamp gunpowder and sand into a hole in the rock. On this day something went horribly wrong. The rod striking the stone caused a spark and the resulting explosion sent the rod flying up and through his left cheek and out the top of his head. To the amazement of everyone he was not killed and lived for more than eleven years. However it was reported that his personality was notably and negatively affected, and he became one of the first subjects of neuroscientific speculation. A recent discovery of a photograph of him in daguerreotype format, has helped clarify some of the uncertainty about the severity of the incident's effects -
Meet Phineas Gage

Case studies on other brains collected, and observations, can be found at the Brain Observatory - The Brain Observatory - University of California, San Diego

Mrs Lazarus by Carol Ann Duffy

Carol Ann Duffy is currently Poet Laureate of England. Her Poem Mrs Lazarus Mrs Lazarus by Carol Ann Duffy is wicked!

Mrs Lazarus

I had grieved. I had wept for a night and a day
over my loss, ripped the cloth I was married in
from my breasts, howled, shrieked, clawed
at the burial stones until my hands bled, retched
his name over and over again, dead, dead.

Gone home. Gutted the place. Slept in a single cot,
widow, one empty glove, white femur
in the dust, half. Stuffed dark suits
into black bags, shuffled in a dead man's shoes,
noosed the double knot of a tie around my bare neck,

gaunt nun in the mirror, touching herself. I learnt
the Stations of Bereavement, the icon of my face
in each bleak frame; but all those months
he was going away from me, dwindling
to the shrunk size of a snapshot, going,

going. Till his name was no longer a certain spell
for his face. The last hair on his head
floated out from a book. His scent went from the house.
The will was read. See, he was vanishing
to the small zero held by the gold of my ring.

Then he was gone. Then he was legend, language;
my arm on the arm of the schoolteacher-the shock
of a man's strength under the sleeve of his coat-
along the hedgerows. But I was faithful
for as long as it took. Until he was memory.

So I could stand that evening in the field
in a shawl of fine air, healed, able
to watch the edge of the moon occur to the sky
and a hare thump from a hedge; then notice
the village men running towards me, shouting,

behind them the women and children, barking dogs,
and I knew. I knew by the sly light
on the blacksmith's face, the shrill eyes
of the barmaid, the sudden hands bearing me
into the hot tang of the crowd parting before me.

He lived. I saw the horror on his face.
I heard his mother's crazy song. I breathed
his stench; my bridegroom in his rotting shroud,
moist and dishevelled from the grave's slack chew,
croaking his cuckold name, disinherited, out of his time.

- Carol Ann Duffy

One analysis of its meaning is at:
Mrs Lazarus

Some Silliness

Twelve Insidious Modern Delusions - Fred Halliday

"The world is full of conformism masquerading as profundity, says Fred Halliday, who explodes twelve global falsehoods."

"In identifying error, two great models at either end of modern times exist. The first is part thirty-nine of Francis Bacon's Novum Organon (1620), with its four categories of idol: those of the cave (of individual men), the tribe (human nature), the marketplace (intercourse of men with each other) and the theatre (philosophical dogma). The second is Francis Wheen's How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions (2004).

Some errors are products of the unchallenged, the routine, the conventional. Some are new, products of fashion, of novelty, even of globalisation. Everyone has his or her own selection, born of profession, personality, place. The list could be a long one but, like Christ and his disciples, twelve seems a comfortable figure, at once extensive and compact. Here, for 2007, is one suggested list, in ascending order:

Number twelve: Human behaviour can be predicted

In the name of a supposedly "scientific" criterion of knowledge, scholars are berated for not predicting the end of the cold war, the rise of Islam, 9/11 and much else besides. Yet many natural sciences – seismology, evolutionary biology - cannot predict with accuracy either. Human affairs themselves, even leaving aside the matter of human intention and will, allow of too many variables for such calculation. We will never be able to predict with certainty the outcome of a sports contest, the incidence of revolutions, the duration of passion or how long an individual will live.

Number eleven: The world is speeding up

This, a favourite trope of globalisation theorists, confuses acceleration in some areas, such as the transmission of knowledge, with the fact that large areas of human life continue to demand the same time as before: to conceive and bear a child, to learn a language, to grow up, to digest a meal, to enjoy a joke, to read a poem. It takes the same time to fly from London to New York as it did forty years ago, ditto to boil an egg or publish a book. Some activities – such as or driving around major western cities, getting through an airport, or dying - may take much longer..."

Fred Halliday is professor of international relations at the LSE, and visiting professor at the Barcelona Institute of International Studies (IBEI). His books include Islam and the Myth of Confrontation (IB Tauris, 2003) and 100 Myths About the Middle East (Saqi, 2005).

Fred Halliday's "global politics" column on openDemocracy surveys the national histories, geopolitical currents, and dominant ideas across the world.

This article was first published in January 2007 and is available in full here -
A 2007 warning: the world's twelve worst ideas | open Democracy News Analysis

Gurrumal Sings

Live acoustic Gurrumul Yunupingu solo. Blind since birth Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, or Gudjuk as he is also called, is from the Gumatj nation, his mother from the Galpu nation both First Nations peoples from North East Arnhemland. Very rare footage of Djarimirri about the rainbow Serpent. Second performance ever at Darwin Festival 2006. Very beautiful.



YouTube - Djarimirri - Gurrumul Yunupingu

Arundhati Roy Wields Pen on Global Politics

Tim Adams, The Guardian/Observer spoke to former Booker prize winner Arundhati Roy this past July about using writing as a weapon to tackle inequality:

"Roy has two voices. The first, dramatically personal and playful, was the one in which she wrote her extraordinary debut novel, The God of Small Things, a semi-autobiographical account of growing up in rural Kerala. The second voice is flatter and angrier, more urban and distrustful of the quirks of the individual. She describes it as "writing from the heart of the crowd". It is this voice that she has used exclusively in the 12 years since her novel was published, in four collections of non-fiction - the latest of which, Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy, was published last week.

Roy, now 47, describes the difference between the two voices as the difference between "dancing and walking". It is a long while since Roy's writing has danced. She says she pedestrianised her imagination not out of choice, not at all, but because there seemed nothing else to do. "If I could," she says, "I would love to spend all my time writing fiction. With the non-fiction I wrote one book that I wanted to write and three more that I didn't."

This compulsion - towards reporting and polemic - Roy blames in part on the success of The God of Small Things. She wrote her novel for four and a half years entirely in secret; even her husband, the film-maker Pradip Krishen, did not know of its existence until it was finished. And she wrote it for herself. She had written a couple of film scripts before that and had come to despise the collaborative creative process. The book was an exercise in downshifting. She imagined when it was published that it would sell "maybe 500 copies in Delhi." In fact, it sold 6m copies worldwide and won her the Booker Prize...

... Her book begins with a question: "Is there life after democracy?" and goes on to count the ways that successive Indian governments and businessmen have waged a repressive war on the poor and on minorities, and have pursued devastating environmental destruction for economic and political gain.

She has just returned from the Chhattisgarh region, which is "being targeted by corporates for its wealth of iron ore. In the name of fighting Maoist rebels, hundreds of villages have been forcibly evacuated and almost 40,000 people moved into police camps." It is, she says, heartbreaking to see what is going on, "the levels of violence, the levels of dispossession; if that was happening in Iran or some other country that didn't have a free market and a democracy it would have been on the front pages every day. Because it is India it does not rate a mention."

In her stride, she goes on to describe the "building of a hundred dams in the high Himalayas. When you see what is being done it is like it is being done to your own body." In 2002 Roy was briefly imprisoned for her protests against the Narmada dam project. When she talks of these things now - and of the horror of the ongoing war in Kashmir - it is with a rawness and a weariness that makes you half-expect her to scream with anger.

"Time is running out," she says, "rivers are running dry. But you cannot fight against dams. It doesn't involve just people; it involves a whole eco system and cropping patterns. But you cannot have an armed struggle against a rising river."

While the Indian miracle takes place, she says, the country is host to more than a third of the world's undernourished children. Only her compatriots could have celebrated the victory of Slumdog Millionaire on Oscar night. "The fact that the film - not even an Indian film - won these prizes sent people into orbit. But it is an odd movie for a country to be proud of. What were we celebrating? Child poverty? If it wasn't so tragic it would be comical."

When I ask her where she places her hope, Roy shrugs. She is tiny in stature, but her disillusion can fill a room. She has no faith in conventional politics to change anything. Obama "might be a symbol," she concedes, but nothing "about the relation of American capitalism with the rest of the world will alter ... To answer your question, it's not about my hope, it's about my DNA. There are people who are comfortable with power and people who are distinctly uncomfortable and made to question it"'...

Complete interview at -
Tim Adams speaks to former Booker prize winner Arundhati Roy about global politics | Books | The Observer

The Eyes to See: The Poetic and Prophetic Vision of Thomas Merton.

..."Jesus was very wise to keep the children near. "Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." (Matthew 18:3)

How do we recover this way of seeing? How can we learn to let go of artifice and embrace innocence? There is a saying in the Talmud: "You don’t see things as they are, you see things as you are." (Capps, p.17) To see things differently , one must be differently. A change in consciousness leads to a change in perception. Inner work is the key. "The first step in the interior life...is unlearning our wrong ways of seeing, tasting, feeling, and so forth, and [acquiring] a few of the right ones. The `right’ way of seeing involves in part `the ability to respond to reality, to see the value and beauty of ordinary things.’" (Del Prete, p.66) Here, there are links between poetic and contemplative consciousness. "To be holy is a question of appreciating where one is in life and learning to foster the vital connections that are already operative." (Padovano, p.83) In order to foster the connections, one must be able to see them, feel them, experience them. This is where the poet can help us. The poet is not a professional wordsmith so much as one who sees the world obliquely, and eccentrically (that is "off-center", the center being the culturally defined reality). "By poetry, I do not mean rhyme, rhythm, or meter, but language that moves like Bob Gibson’s fastball, that jumps at the right moment, that breaks open old worlds with surprise, abrasion, and pace... It is the steady, surprising proposal that the real world in which God invites us to live is not the one made available by the rulers of this age." (Brueggemann, p.3)

There is irony in the fact that the word poet is from the Greek "to make," for the reality they "make" their way toward, and to which they invite us, is not "made" but given. It is a finding of our way back to an original reality, a by-passing of the humanly constructed world-as-is, to a given world of being, of paradise, of innocence, of no-thing. In the words of another poet: "And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." (T.S.Eliot, "Little Gidding")

The great paradox in the call of the poet/prophet to be "makers of new possibilities," is that the call includes becoming "un-makers" as well- un-makers of old patterns and layers that keep new possibilities in check. This is the prophetic challenge of the poet/prophet. "To prophesy is not to predict, but to seize upon reality in its moment of highest expectation and tension toward the new. This tension is discovered not in hypnotic elation but in the light of everyday experience." (Raids, p.159) The possibility exists everyday, and in each moment, to perceive our ordinary lives as an extraordinary gift of possibility and mutuality. If but the "doors of our perception were cleansed" we might well see infinity in a grain of sand.

And, the paradox continues because the new possibilities are not so new, but emerge from the original ground of our God-given interconnectedness. As Merton puts it: "That which is oldest is most new... What is really new is what was there all the time. The really new is that which at every moment, springs freshly into new existence." (McDonnell,p.74) The extraordinary possibility is living connected to this old/new God-given reality. It is to see through the transparency of the foreground to the "hidden ground of love." And, it is finally, a living out with compassion and love the indescribable reality of our interconnectedness in the "hidden wholeness."

See the full article and links to further sites on Merton -
The Eyes to See: The Poetic and Prophetic Vision of Thomas Merton.

Violence and blindness in social reform

James R Mensch writes on opendemocracy blog on 7/08/2009:
"Public space is created by the collective authority of its participants, and that requires an understanding of their lives and projects. The press and the Internet, as far as they do not embody that understanding, will create a blind, broken and violent public space...

...Only rarely does life imitate art in the starkness and directness of its message. When that message is a tragic one the effect becomes indelible. Such was the impact on Peru of the events of Uchuraccay, a small village located in its central highlands. Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission called it "an emblematic referent of the violence and pain in the collective memory of the country" (TRC, 121). [i] In the twenty-year turmoil that engulfed Peru at the end of the last century, 69,280 violent deaths were recorded. What makes Uchuraccay emblematic of this carnage is not just its own destruction; it is the web of misunderstandings that entangled the participants...

... As the accounts of the final year of Uchuraccay make apparent, the question of who was a terrorist became paramount. In the internecine struggle that engulfed the region, the participants struck blindly at each other. Natives accused natives of being Shining Path supporters and were themselves accused of being such by the army and paramilitary groups. Even the terrorists in their incursions were unsure of who their opponents were. The journalists, who were mistakenly killed for being terrorists, blindly chose a guide who was himself suspected of being a terrorist. They were also blind to the nature of the Shining Path movement...

...This web of misunderstandings, this inability to recognize friend or foe, can only be classified as a general public blindness. How are we to understand its relation to the destructive violence that consumed Uchuraccay? To answer this question, I must shift my focus from the historical to the philosophical. I have to examine the visibility and, hence, the light of the public space we share in our social and political relations. Aristotle defined light as the actualization of the visible. Allowing things to appear, its absence makes us blind. The question of public blindness is actually that of the light that makes things publicly visible...

...Insofar as disclosure involves both the objects disclosed and the agents who disclose, public visibility has essentially two sets of conditions. We have to be able to grasp the purposes and, hence, the meanings of the objects that occupy the public realm. This requires a sense of the projects that disclose them. We also have to apprehend the agents who disclose themselves through such projects. This requires that the agent keep to the purpose of his project. This does not just allow him to complete it, but gives him an identity over time. When the purpose is collectively arrived at through negotiation this identity has a political dimension that extends to all those bound by the negotiated settlement...

... Public blindness occurs when these conditions cannot be fulfilled. Experiencing it is rather like entering a totally foreign culture where the practical and symbolic meanings of its objects are not at all apparent. This involves a blindness to the purposes of its agents...

...In the confined spaces of the ancient democracies, public actors met face to face, where they argued for their positions before the voting public. As Hannah Arendt writes, for the ancients, "the life of a free man needed the presence of others. Freedom itself needed, therefore, a place where people could come together-the agora, the market-place, or the polis, the political space proper" (OR, 31). Only there could the voting public hear the arguments for the contending positions. In our modern mass democracies, this space has been provided by the press and, more recently, by the internet. The mere presence of the press, however, is insufficient to provide the light for this space. Without the conditions for disclosure, the press is as blind as any of the participants. Such blindness points to the absence of authority. It is a function of the lack of shared disclosure based on voluntary agreement. According to Amnesty International, this was the state of Peru at the beginning of the insurgency. The soil from which it grew was the "chronic social exclusion and racial, ethnic and gender discrimination" that characterized Peru. Along with the Report, it finds that the "negative stereotypes" attributed to the natives "were ... used by all the actors in the internal conflict, both State officials and armed opposition groups, to justify the violence" against them.[viii] In fact, none of the participants grasped the others. All were caught in a web of misunderstanding.

The only way to break free from this is to engage in shared disclosure. To do this, one must break down the exclusions, both social and economic, that prevent people from participating in public action. The stereotypes that divide society and prevent its agents from recognizing each other must also be dismantled. Beyond this, the work of remembering is required. Every project has its roots in the past. It projects it forward to fashion its goals. When, for example, I intend to build a house, I rely on my accumulated experience not just for the knowledge of the means of how to reach my goal. The goal itself is informed by such experience. Given that projects are the ways we disclose, shared disclosure requires a sharing of our experience. The first work of healing a divided society is, thus, the restoration of a common memory, a shared history whose events all can agree on. The painstaking labors of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission have accomplished this for Peru. Only time will tell if this first step will bear fruit, that is, whether its inhabitants will act out of this restored memory to heal Peru's social and racial divisions. The goal of such work is nothing less than generating the public visibility that is the antidote to the tragedy that engulfed this country. To engage in it is to give Oedipus back his eyes. It is to make whole the journalists whose blind corpses were emblematic of the events of Uchuraccay.

The full article is at -
Violence and blindness: the case of Uchuraccay | open Democracy News Analysis

The Dedalus Book of Literary Suicides:Dead Letters

Writers have been killing themselves for centuries. From Petronius in ancient Rome to the 20th Century Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima, writers, more than any other kind of artist, have taken their own lives in an extraordinary number of ways. With bullets, poison, drugs and swords, poets, playwrights, novelists and philosophers have sent themselves off into the big sleep. Others, one step shy of that last exit, have made great literature about the urge to self-destruction.

Although much has been written about the link between writing and suicide, no single explanation covers all the cases. Metaphysical beliefs, political ideals, aesthetic theory, and sheer narcissism have been some of the triggers for the plunge into annihilation.

For the first time, Gary Lachman investigates the many links between self-death and the written word, bringing together an unusual gallery of literary greats including Goethe, Hermann Hesse, Dostoyevsky, Andre Breton, Thomas Chatterton, Walter Benjamin, Arthur Koestler, Witkacy, Mayakovsky and a host of other fatal characters.

More information and mini-reviews at:
Dedalus Books Catalogue - The Dedalus Book of Literary Suicides:Dead Letters

Klaus Nomi - Death

Death is a song from Klaus Nomi's second album, Simple Man which is a remake of the aria Dido's Lament from the Opera Dido and Æneas by Henry Purcell.
YouTube - Klaus Nomi - Death - Dido's Lament

lyrics:

Recitative

- Thy hand, Belinda, darkness shades me,
On thy bosom let me rest,
More I would, but Death invades me;
Death is now a welcome guest.

Aria

When I am laid, am laid in earth,
May my wrongs create
No trouble, no trouble in thy breast;
Remember me, remember me, but ah! forget my fate.
Remember me, but ah!
forget my fate, -

The Man Who Sold the World

David Bowie and Klaus Nomi


David Bowie and Klaus Nomi Video by میرا نام Lov3Evol ہے - MySpace Video

- We passed upon the stair, we spoke of was and when
Although I wasn't there, he said I was his friend
Which came as some surprise I spoke into his eyes
I thought you died alone, a long long time ago

Oh no, not me
I never lost control
You're face to face
With The Man Who Sold The World

I laughed and shook his hand, and made my way back home
I searched for form and land, for years and years I roamed

I gazed a gazely stare at all the millions here
We must have died alone, a long long time ago

Who knows? not me
We never lost control
You're face to face
With the Man who Sold the World -

Oscar Wilde: The Decay of Lying

This essay, written in 1889 by Oscar Wilde, was originally published in 1891 in Intentions.

Oscar Wilde's The Decay of Lying

An excerpt from the concluding paragraphs:

CYRIL
Then we must entirely cultivate it at once. But in order to avoid making any error I want you to tell me briefly the doctrines of the new æsthetics.

VIVIAN
Briefly, then, they are these. Art never expresses anything but itself. It has an independent life, just as Thought has, and develops purely on its own lines. It is not necessarily realistic in an age of realism, nor spiritual in an age of faith. So far from being the creation of its time, it is usually in direct opposition to it, and the only history that it preserves for us is the history of its own progress. Sometimes it returns upon its footsteps, and revives some antique form, as happened in the archaistic movement of late Greek Art, and in the pre-Raphaelite movement of our own day. At other times it entirely anticipates its age, and produces in one century work that it takes another century to understand, to appreciate and to enjoy. In no case does it reproduce its age. To pass from the art of a time to the time itself is the great mistake that all historians commit. The second doctrine is this. All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals. Life and Nature may sometimes be used as part of Art's rough material, but before they are of any real service to art they must be translated into artistic conventions. The moment Art surrenders its imaginative medium it surrenders everything. As a method Realism is a complete failure, and the two things that every artist should avoid are modernity of form and modernity of subject-matter. To us, who live in the nineteenth century, any century is a suitable subject for art except our own. The only beautiful things are the things that do not concern us. It is, to have the pleasure of quoting myself, exactly because Hecuba is nothing to us that her sorrows are so suitable a motive for a tragedy. Besides, it is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned. M. Zola sits down to give us a picture of the Second Empire. Who cares for the Second Empire now? It is out of date. Life goes faster than Realism, but Romanticism is always in front of Life.

The third doctrine is that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life. This results not merely from Life's imitative instinct, but from the fact that the self-conscious aim of Life is to find expression, and that Art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realise that energy. It is a theory that has never been put forward before, but it is extremely fruitful, and throws an entirely new light upon the history of Art.

It follows, as a corollary from this, that external Nature also imitates Art. The only effects that she can show us are effects that we have already seen through poetry, or in paintings. This is the secret of Nature's charm, as well as the explanation of Nature's weakness.

The final revelation is that Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art. But of this I think I have spoken at sufficient length. And now let us go out on the terrace, where `droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost,' while the evening star `washes the dusk with silver.' At twilight nature becomes a wonderfully suggestive effect, and is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets. Come! We have talked long enough.

END

"If it's not love, then it's the bomb that'll bring us together"

Ask by Morrissey live in Tel Aviv, Israel, 29 July 2008 (I was there!)



Shyness is nice and
Shyness can stop you
From doing all the things in life
You'd like to

Shyness is nice and
Shyness can stop you
From doing all the things in life
You'd like to

So, if there's something you'd like to try
If there's something you'd like to try
Ask me I wont say no, how could I?

Coyness is nice, and
Coyness can stop you
From saying all the things in
Life you'd like to

So, if there's something you'd like to try
If there's something you'd like to try
Ask me I wont say no, how could I?

Spending warm Summer days indoors
Writing frightening verse
To a buck-toothed girl in Luxembourg

Ask me, ask me, ask me
Ask me, ask me, ask me

Because if it's not Love
Then it's the bomb, the bomb, the bomb,
the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb
That will bring us together

Nature is a language - can't you read ?
Nature is a language - can't you read ?

So, ask me, ask me, ask me,
Ask me, ask me, ask me

Because if it's not Love
Then it's the bomb, the bomb, the bomb,
the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb
That will bring us together

If it's not Love
Then it's the bomb
Then it's the bomb
That will bring us together

So, ask me, ask me, ask me,
Ask me, ask me, ask me
Oh, la...

"We Must Love One Another or Die"

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939
by W.H. Auden

{Auden: A poet for our times
by Christopher Hitchens}

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
'I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,'
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

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Thoughts on Voluntary Death

A Ballade of Suicide - a poem by G.K.Chesterton

The gallows in my garden, people say,
Is new and neat and adequately tall;
I tie the noose on in a knowing way
As one that knots his necktie for a ball;
But just as all the neighbours on the wall
Are drawing a long breath to shout "Hurray!"
The strangest whim has seized me. . . After all
I think I will not hang myself to-day.

To-morrow is the time I get my pay
My uncle's sword is hanging in the hall
I see a little cloud all pink and grey
Perhaps the rector's mother will NOT call
I fancy that I heard from Mr. Gall
That mushrooms could be cooked another way
I never read the works of Juvenal
I think I will not hang myself to-day.

The world will have another washing-day;
The decadents decay; the pedants pall;
And H.G. Wells has found that children play,
And Bernard Shaw discovered that they squall;
Rationalists are growing rational
And through thick woods one finds a stream astray,
So secret that the very sky seems small
I think I will not hang myself to-day.

ENVOI

Prince, I can hear the trumpet of Germinal,
The tumbrils toiling up the terrible way;
Even to-day your royal head may fall
I think I will not hang myself to-day.


ON SUICIDE - Arthur Schopenhauer