D E - S U I C I D E

<Part 1> of Three: The Junction
full moon midnight of October 31, 2020

<Part 2>: DE-SUICIDE <Part 3>: C’est la crisis

Dear Diary,
Another full-moon midnight. 

Twenty-eight days ago the moon entered our notion of SUICIDE. This is a Three-Moon Notion. SUICIDE will conclude with a “Public Presentation” in partnership with Los Angeles-based non-profit JOAN on December 29, 2020.

Drawing on The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) written by French-Algerian writer Albert Camus, we toil over the illusion of a choice between suicide or recovery. This absurd hero struggles to give illusory meaning to his tedious existence and finds himself at a Junction. His choices are clear: Sisyphus will either die voluntarily or accept the disillusionment of life’s meaninglessness.

“Weariness comes at the end of the act of mechanical life, but at the same time it inaugurates the impulse of consciousness[....] At the end awakening comes, in time, the consequence: suicide or recovery.”

November 2020: we traversed BACKSTAGE to this SITE, which feels like a JUNCTION: an absurd splitting or conjugation of the evils of so many worsts yet to come.

Bound by repetition and weight, Sisyphus is looped into Camus’s paradox of recovery. For this notion, suicide is a refusal and an attempt to re-turn to The Junction. Its location. Its timeline.  

Entangled between the past and a present that has yet to happen, we can de-vote ourselves to a detour. Staying on this highway is suicide by default. 

We are all still somewhat here, 
reading or not reading these lines. 
Individually, at some point, or on a daily basis, 
whenever at that Junction, we seem to survive it.
One Junction at a time. 

But if Camus’s reflection was to be projected universally, one might argue that the Junction is behind us. The fact that we are still present means that we recovered. 
We took the blue pill.
Darkness management unit.
This fuckshow is the reality of recovery.

But maybe not? 
What if we actually did it?  
We went for the drama.
Sadness management glitch.
The paradox is that we are still here. 
Suicided. 

Well, 
if this is what did not not happen. 
I want to be able to de-suicide.

Danke Camus, Merci Sisyphus, Gracias 1942. 
Eighty years later, self-hate is not just another man's selfish ego trip. It can also be ecocide.
Turning back towards The Myth, I see now that it is human-centric. It’s the crisis of one man’s torment, one man's obsession with oneself. 

The fact remains, we find ourselves living through a time when the environment is violently responding to human-built modernist infrastructures. Selfish or not, we are complicit. The climate crisis demands we reconfigure and unlearn our relationship to ecology. Rather than fulfilling the need to extract, propagate and manage, it asks us to acknowledge its agency and live alongside each other. 

This is our Junction. 
To begin a recovery means to decentralize ourselves and reject our assumptions. 
We are at the end of the mechanical life.

Camus locates fiction at the imagination’s refusal to reason the concrete. 
Fiction necessitates the refusal. 
Now to time. 
Back to the program.

For those of us bound by the limitations of our imagination, Karen Barad’s understanding of “diffraction” provides a helpful fiction needed in our quest to de-suicide. It defies our Western conception of space and time, and presents the potential to re-visit the Junction of suicide or recovery. 

Barad states that quantum physics has demonstrated that, under certain conditions, particles can be not here or there, or they have the ability to be simply here and there. As such, this state of indeterminacy means one can exist across multiple time periods—yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Diffraction is not a singular event, it is repeated dimensionally across temporalities. 

De-suicide might sound absurd, as a gesture, as a word game, and as the timeline it suggests. But remember, if we choose recovery in Camus’s sense we also accepted to embody The Absurd. Within The Absurd, this paradox is just common (non)sense. 

In the next twenty-eight days, we will workshop our way towards de-suicide with diffraction in mind, seeking to draw a path back to the Junction. 
To maybe make different choices. 
And some Junction design.
To become or not to become.

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
Available 24 hours. 
800-273-8255

SUICIDE (The Junction) credits:
Written, created, and photoshopped by Deville Cohen
Guest Dramaturge: Patricia Margarita Hernandez
Co-copy editor: Ian Cofre
Hand and foot Models: Tushrik Fredericks, Laura K. Nicoll