I Can't Go On, I Will Go On

Between the radical swagger of Amiri Baraka and the existentialist gyrations of Albert Camus, one finds, if one looks deep enough, useful parsings of the imponderable mystery of death...especially death by suicide.

And why should death by suicide be an interesting subject?

Simple: On the evidence of all the glories of life as is, suicide presents itself as the most heroic choice of our age.

To hear Camus tell it, it is that which you take up, gloriously, on the bright morning when you ran out of reasons for going on; the act that heralds the day when "you can't go on".

Baraka's complication puts it slightly differently: Suicide is great and worthwhile, and all the smart ones of our generation must consider it, at some point. Of course, with the catch: One must write a twenty-volume suicide note first. You know, something to explain to those who must of necessity poke rigor mortis for its secrets. A twenty-volume note, and then a preface too.

Moral? It is not really about dying. We have died before. We die everyday. We may be already dead, even.

It is the consciousness of the reality of death, and our consciousness as active participants in the process that makes makes discourses about death and suicide potentially redemptive. Even revolutionary.

To Beckett's words, and my title, now:

The palpable atmosphere of despair that rules so large has the habit of making most of us give in too soon, convinced that we can do nothing, must do nothing.

But the human will can and must transcend. We can transform the death cry that threatens to atrophy the will if we , like Amiri, can see that even the inevitability of suicide is nothing nothing but a golden opportunity to write one, ten, twenty, even a hundred volumes of what we want life to be.

In the darkest night, life needs affirmers to re-assert itself. And we can choose to be those affirmative action-eers.

Or simply go silently into the dark night without so much as a whimper.

Like Soyinka's man of the dark jails who died. In silence. Because he kept quiet. In the face of tyranny.

We can go on.

We must go on.

We will go on.