Self-killing : the ultimate act of self-harming ?

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7 June

The word suicide itself defies us : if we know the word homicide, we are still stumped without a knowledge of Latin that sui means the particular, the self.

But the word gets heard - and used - often enough for us to know the meaning, without needing to know that it is an act of self-killing, and it even appeared, when Céline Deon took a career-break (for motherhood ?), in a French headline sa suicide incroyable (I quote from memory). The word, just now referring to 'career suicide', is with us in such manifestations as 'financial suicide' and 'intellectual suicide', and, if I am honest, it has become a little too cheap for my liking, a glib notion when what is embodied is that of choosing to end one's life.


And there we come against the taboos, the misconceptions, the prejudice.

We all know about 'suicides' (as, equally cheaply, those who carried through that choice are sometimes unfeelingly called) not being buried 'in consecrated ground', and so we have a lasting sense of the shame and crime that ecclesiastical law deemed this act to be. We will know also of the shame and penalty of bastardy, of 'being born out of wedlock', and the stigma is quite similar in origin, the shame of the state of affairs, but different in how the twentieth century came to view illegitimacy and suicide :

Legislation enacted by the UK Parliament in 1925 repealed the consequences of being born to parents who happened not to be married, and, in my view, the prevalence of people living together in the last thirty years suggests that little or no societal disapproval attaches to being unmarried parents (as against a young single mother, it must be said). The inability to inherit in certain situations had been swept away by the reforming legislation, and, with it, the negative and hampering limitations of being illegitimate, a notion also done away with. (All that survives are the feeble jokes about doubting my parenthood when the speaker has been called a bastard, etc.)

With suicide, we had to wait until only fifty-two years ago for Parliament to pass the Suicide Act 1961, and thereby decriminalize someone trying and failing to kill him- or herself : before then, because the act was a criminal offence, someone known to be a survivor of the attempt was open to prosecution.


I know only when the two changes that I refer to, not (for want of having researched the matter) what the policy and other considerations were that led to the disparity in timing : more than 35 years to correct the injustice of being open to prosecution for wanting to end one's life, as against remedying the things that a person born to an unmarried couple was prohibited from doing.

In both cases, the history of the law's disapproval of illegitimacy and of suicide lay in Christian theology, with a Biblical notion of birthright (and of the primacy of the legitimate first male child), and a belief that suicide was the unforgiveable sin of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. Yet (as I have said), why decriminalizing suicide was less of a priority is not known to me : by analogy, I can say only that, under the law prior to the Mental Health Act 1983, being an unmarried mother made one liable to be detained under the predecessor Act, which is an almost incredible time for repealing such a policy.

Looking back to Greek mythology, whatever we think of Oedipus, it is clear enough in Sophocles' The Theban Plays that there is a taboo against suicide. There were also The Fates, whose Greek name (Moirai) means 'the apportioners', from which we partly get the idea of an allotted span on Earth, maybe three score years and ten : the strand representing each human life was spun by Clotho, measured out by Lachesis, and cut to length by Atropos.

You have your allotted span, and you don't seek to defy the Gods by prematurely shortening it, because there are penalties, if you do. Christian doctrine that this unforgiveable sin was that of suicide involved similar notions that God determines the length of one's life.


All of this history feeds in to the attitudes towards - the words used to describe - suicide now, and many object to the words 'commit[ted] suicide' on the basis that 'to commit' suggests a criminal offence. Whether that usage is a real hang-over from the days before the 1961 Act, I do not know, but it is not unlikely.

All in all, the public is so confused by the messages about suicide, assisted suicide, whether the former is a crime, or whether either is an act of courage or of cowardice (no neutral view here), that is no wonder that those who feel death to be the only way out are hurt and hindered sometimes by them : amongst which, they have the fear of being thrown into Dante's Inferno, of the stigma that will attach, and of being perceived as having acted selfishly.


To be continued


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Let the little children... : A write-up of Poor Kids (2011) and an Arts Picturehouse Q&A

This is a review of Poor Kids (2011) [Made for t.v. ?]

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15 October

This is a review of Poor Kids (2011) [Made for t.v. ?]

I had not seen Poor Kids on t.v. Around 100 of us watched, felt, feared. Sad that the Q&A host at @CamPicturehouse didn't ask a filmic Q...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 15, 2013

Not every statistic in this film – there are numerous quoted, many of them quite shocking – is stencilled onto a wall for us to read (the writing is literally on the wall), but those that are actually appeared to be, to judge from a long, angled shot, which leaves two children playing beneath it :

How take in that one in six children in poor families have thought of suicide, for example, or the effects on asthma and other conditions, or on mortality, of living in poor housing ?

We took it in more easily through the eyes, and prematurely wise words*, of Paige, living in a horribly damp apartment that, rightly, we see demolished, condemning the high-rise solution, and, as Paige tells us, the dust carried as far as Argos. We see how she has trimmed the blind, affected by mould, and hear from her how humiliating it is, even though she keeps clothes away from the window, to be told that she smells of it. She is a sensitive girl, adapted to these hard ways of living, and we can see her joy when her mother is given a property half-an-hour away, out of the Gorbals. Seeing her playing in the snow in their garden gives us hope.

The most shocking thing is how these children have to take on financial constraints. One subject, who had eczema on her legs (until repeated applications of cream cured her), chillingly told us, in a throw-away remark, how she had picked her legs until they bled as a way of feeling a sense of release. Self-harm is little understood in society, least of all that there are various, very different reasons, why people harm themselves, not all related to harming in itself – some, who feel numb, do it to feel something, whereas someone else might, through feeling in control (even only of what he or she is doing to her body), balance the sense that everything else is beyond their power.

Sam’s sister Kaylie (?) also told us, I think, that she had attempted suicide, and had suicidal thoughts. Although Sam was the subject in her family (in Leicester), we could see through Sam and her (Sam had to wear his sister’s blouse as a shirt (and her blazer) for school, and that was hardly going to go unnoticed) how they sought to support and understand the pressures on their out-of-work father, including the fact that Child Benefit for her had wrongly been stopped, and he was having to survive until the mistake got remedied. We saw him produce meals for them to eat that looked very nice, but which he said that cost almost for ingredients.

Empty fridges, children going without lunch, or having to be put onto free school meals, and meters for electricity or even t.v. – these things were the stuff of the lives that these children (and their parents) had allowed us to look into. And, as film-maker Jezza Neumann was at pains to point out in the Q&A, this film, had been made for t.v. two years ago, and yet people were still watching it – not a world that suddenly came into existence with The Coalition, but carrying over from the Brown years, and those of Blair before.

We were told that, not surprisingly after the screening, Sam had some two hundred donations of school uniform (and a vicar donated to set up a second-hand uniform facility), Page (I think that it was Page) an offer of riding lessons (she had wanted to try), and numerous other kindnesses from people whom the film had touched. Neumann’s take was that, when areas become those where the poor live, and no one is in any better position than anyone else to help a neighbour, that kindness cannot operate so easily as it might have done, when someone lost a job, and those near them could tide them over.

The film is extremely well made, and Neumann told us how those who had seen it in the States, prior to making the US version, had been through it almost frame by frame, before reporting that they had been unable to see how he had prompted these words from the featured children - he said that the only way to make such a film is to be honest, and that he had known, with Page’s mother, that people would query her apparently manicured nails, whereas she had cut them from Coke cans and superglued them on.

The snobbery between cinema and t.v. films apart, this film conveys its message effectively, economically, and with an emotional force.

We are still where we were, and worse, with Poor Kids (2011)...https://t.co/atiycAeQtahttps://t.co/8IomNOagED

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 8, 2019

End-notes

* We hear children, in this film, troubled with adult concerns, such as debt, how their presents can be afforded


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Assisted suicide : Writer's Rest meets Unofficial Cambridge Film Festival

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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21 November

Brain-controlled robot interface. Look at something, robot knows what you want. tinyurl.com/clznfxk
— Lindsay Edmunds (@EdmundsLE) November 20, 2012

@edmundsle I'll take a peek later - but I'm guessing : is it like speech recognition, in that the robot only gets any good through training?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 20, 2012

@theagentapsley IT is an EEG controlled interface, which is brain waves. HOW it happens I do not know.
— Lindsay Edmunds (@EdmundsLE) November 20, 2012

@edmundsle Suicide by proxy: I associate a thought with a knife lunged at me. If I later cannot do this myself... © Belston Night Works 2012
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 20, 2012

@theagentapsley Now that is a wild idea. Thoughts have always been powerful, advances in AI are on way to making them concretely powerful.
— Lindsay Edmunds (@EdmundsLE) November 20, 2012

@edmundsle Yes, wild (and kind of repellent, unsure why), but I hope that you liked it: to me obviouswhich is why X's mind doesn't map Y's
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 20, 2012

Short story now Work in Progress (no Exagmination or Incamination involved)...


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Popular postings this week (no, not 'trending')

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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12 September

This is just a list of page-views (with hyperlinks and kinky boots), OK?

5th = All on one day (13)

4th = Wilfredo gyrates in his Y-fronts - expanded view (20)

3rd = Kristin shows her comedic flair (26)

2nd = The patterns of Samsara (26)

1st = How do you weigh 16,000 animals? Has AOL® done a Freudian? (48)


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