all my plans for suicide are ridiculous
I can never remember the heart’s location
too cheap to crash the car
too queasy to slash a wrist
once jumped off a bridge
almost scared myself to death
then spent two foggy weeks
waiting for new glasses
of course I really want to live
continuing my lifelong search
for the world’s greatest unknown cheap restaurant
and a poem full of ordinary words
about simple things
in the inconsolable rhythms of the heart
—“The Heart’s Location,” from The Night Train & the Golden Bird, by Peter Meinke (U. of Pittsburgh Press, 1977)
My first book of poetry began with a poem, “The Night Train,” about suicides committed on trains. It’s a skinny book, and though as you know I’m a pleasantly cheerful person, it included a heavy amount of dark poems. When asked about this, I generally answer, “Because I wrote most of them after midnight.”
Back then, Jeanne and I had four small children. She was dealing with them through long Minnesota winters (1961-66); our president, John F. Kennedy, was assassinated; the Vietnam War was escalating; and I was teaching Freshman English full-time and studying for my Ph. D. When we think we’re busy these days, and a bit politically discouraged, we sometimes look back on those years and shake our heads. Oddly enough, we were very happy.
Sitting there writing (and smoking and sipping Jim Beam — this was before Healthy Habits sprouted) in the dark and quiet house, I knew I was surrounded by a loving, and often hilarious, family. I wasn’t at all suicidal, but the subject would come up in my writing. Who doesn’t think about it somewhere along the line?
Of course I was reading John Keats (“for many a time/I have been half in love with easeful Death”), Robert Frost (“With a lantern that wouldn’t burn/In too frail a buggy we drove/Behind too heavy a horse/Through a pitch-dark limitless grove”) and other darkling poets; but the subject came up because I was also attracted to the writing of Albert Camus, the Nobel Prize-winning French writer who’d been killed in 1960 in a car accident.
Camus theorized that the only serious philosophical question is that of suicide. His view of life was summed up by the myth of Sisyphus, who pushed his boulder up a mountain only to have it roll back when he reached the top (the cheerier American version has Charlie Brown endlessly setting up his football, which Lucy then snatches away). In the end, Camus seemed to repudiate suicide by simply accepting the absurdity of life. Well, why not? This was fascinating stuff to a struggling young writer.
These ideas came rolling back to me while reading recent reports of great increases in American suicides, first among the military (alarming but understandable); then of white males (headline: “White, Middle-age Suicide in America Skyrockets”); and, finally, the rise of America’s mortality rate in general, pushed by our own Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse — Depression, Drugs, Alzheimer’s, and Suicide.
Depression is the mother of despair, and for a country as rich as ours, it’s a sin that we haven’t fought it harder. Donald Trump has fattened on it. For the bulk of these battling depression, it isn’t money or race, exactly, but a lack of hope and progress, coupled with the natural desire to be doing something useful. (This is the retirement home problem: people mulling about, not uncomfortable, but directionless.)
Even at our poorest, Jeanne and I felt we were going somewhere, headed in the “right” direction, though we had no idea what that was. And, while the search never ends, we did find at least one of the world’s “great unknown cheap restaurants,” a workers’ café in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, serving the laborers from the city and the Suchard Factory, plus neighbors like us. A five-minute walk from our house on Quai Suchard, an affordable hour there with thoughtful waiters, terrific food, a liberal use of garlic and wine, and all felt right with our expanding world.
This article appears in Sep 29 – Oct 7, 2016.