D E - S U I C I D E
<Part 2> of Three: DE-SUICIDE
full moon midnight of November 30, 2020
<Part 1>: The Junction <Part 3>: C’est la crisis
Dear Diary,
Another full-moon midnight.
SUICIDE <Part 1> took us on a journey back to Camus’s junction of Suicide or Recovery. We were in desperate need of some junction design. The path there was neither straight, forward, nor linear—it felt like six-dimensional time travel on the board game of Snakes & Ladders.
Suicide is emotional.
Thanks to the Suicide DMU (Darkness Management Unit), we learned how to listen to the voices around us, rather than the voices inside our heads. When our destructions are also linked to forms of extractivist practices, we find ourselves at the edge of ecocide.
Emotions animate our bodies in the presence of past traumas and future impossibilities. This moon presents the opportunity to DE-SUICIDE. The ability to re-turn away from the junction and instead look for the fungi and weeds proliferating in the background.
For this Moon’s workshop, we toy with the board game as a model for time travel. The die is our version of Barad’s concept of diffraction; its six faces apportion the binary of Camus’s junction into a six-way-split departure. The ups and downs of the ladder and ropes are Sisyphus's repetitive destiny and our instruments of time travel. DE-SUICIDE is a journey and a trip. In DE-SUICIDE, we reflect on personal tripping and utilize time travel to see past troubled pasts, imaginary futures, and a whatever ability to be in the moment. Escapism and nostalgia can get us only so far. The present moment presents the opportunity to take this personally, make ourselves vulnerable to the idea that this is not about us. It’s the limitation of our imagination that trapped us in this myopic version of a junkyard. On a linear timeline you only get one Sadness Management Glitch (SMG), and then it’s game over.
A die, a ladder, and a rope walk into a bar...
The abundant chairs in Eugène Ionesco’s absurd one-act play, “The Chairs'' (1952), are placeholders for the characters who did not show up. As ghosts, they are placeholders for society’s functions and personal relationships. The chairs—both in their multitude and in their absence of corporeal representation—contrast the places we hold, and the voids we occupy in reality. Following the couple’s public suicide spectacle at the end of the play, Ionesco’s anticipated message is delivered by a deaf Orator. Ionesco’s casting of the Orator delivers the emptiness of his message all too simply through silence, absence, and void. Human commitment to materialism, its white noise of production, and its tactile sense of satisfaction got us to this junction. How many different silences or other voices do we need to learn to listen to now?
Our junction is the junkyard.
A ghost town of troubled stories.
Ionesco’s silence is not empty.
We are left with the junk.
Junktion.
At this Junktion contamination is inevitable, mushrooms transform substances, and weeds like dandelions rapidly spread their medicinal qualities throughout new environments. At an incomprehensible scale, they are a community of healers waiting to spread.
I am not afraid. This is not a fear-based practice. DE-SUICIDE is issued by a desire for healing and not by a linear concern for predictable pasts or futures. In the landfill of trauma, fictional tales meet actuarial, mushrooms transform toxic events into antioxidant flowers. I see the Junktion as a site with multiple options, if we just listen and tune into the nuances. We could select a different choice, go down a different path, maybe Sisyphus can be happy. With each move, we view the human as another node within the network and learn to live alongside difference. In order to do this, we remove ourselves from the center.
To DE-SUICIDE is to become with, rather than following our settler-colonial histories to claim ownership of resources, people, and land. DE-SUICIDE is local, manifested through repetition of singular gestures which are performed until it leaks into the abyss of soil. It removes the option to own, to master, to control, and allows the emergence of other relationships, or, at the very least, it brings to the fore the relationships that may have existed before the master's hand took hold.
Have we hit rope bottom?
A Chair Repair Shop in a ghost town is the uselessness of the human effort and its absence.
Are we desperate enough to consider the absurd?
Is intraspecies kinship an absurd concept?
What is truly absurd is human exceptionalism.
The idea of decentering the human comes before the kind in kinship. It challenges us to give agency and voice to a forest, an ocean, an algorithm; to view them as physically and spiritually equal. We continue the struggle for equality within our own species—intraspecies kinship may be a good concept to fast-forward into.
Now, to time.
Re-turn to the program.
Another throw of the die.
Past forward to The Chairs.
The Orator’s onstage solitude before an audience of empty chairs was not issued by his silence, but rather by their stillness. They were not able to capture the depth of emotion in his movements, the signs of his language, and the nuances of his message. This junktion is a junktion of stillness. Paralyzed in front of traumas of our own doing, the white noise of production limits our ability to perceive voices where we hadn’t before. Non-action is silencing our ability to express and to listen to the voices which entangle us with our possible pasts and potential futures. They are the voices vibrating from the fungi and the weeds, they are the delicate gestures we read in the bodies within the assemblage of earth-born creatures, humans included—they have always been present; we just didn’t know what to listen for.
The Orator is not a silent body, but a voice looking for an audience that is capable of receiving the news. In SUICIDE <Part 3>, on the next Full-Moon-Midnight of January 28, 2021—in partnership with JOAN Los Angeles and PS122 Gallery—maybe we will have an Orator. Maybe we will be able to listen to what they have to share.
Until then we need to go back to DMU, and to the Trauma Center Upkeep (TCU).
The work ain't gonna kill itself.
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
Available 24 hours.
800-273-8255
DE-SUICIDE credits:
Written and created by Deville Cohen
Guest Dramaturge: Patricia Margarita Hernandez
Co-copy editor: Ian Cofre
Dancers: Tushrik Fredericks, Laura K. Nicoll, Margaux Marielle-Trehoüart
Workshop hosted by JOAN Los Angeles