A Season of Suicide

The gates are closed, the domestic servants (only the women) are not permitted to come into the campus. They find their cramped homes impossible, their husbands cannot manage without their booze, words fail the collective misery of being transplanted from the fields into the alley ways of airless dwellings in large cities.  A suicide before it becomes a statistic is a death, unforetold, unseen. The woman hangs herself as she did yesterday because the outing  to work was from the cramped one room, where the density of the heat is unbearable, the squalor of surrounding are indescribable. A statistic of one is unheard unless one is a celebrity.

Yet, death makes no distinctions, it comes uninvited. The noon hour as Emile Durkheim noticed, and as  Octavio Paz writes  in the The Labyrinth of Solitude,  embraces the fascination with suicide,  it is a moment of cultural fatigue, of a giving in to a collective loss (pg 94). The statistics of suicides begin to mount, and the society reels with the pettiness of its emotions. Should we feel deeply about the excess of wealth and the alienation that arises from being declassed and alone? Should we grieve for the unknown domestic worker, a large buxom  woman who has left a grieving family, and those whom she worked for who depended on her, but only met her once a month outside the gate to pay her salary in recent time? 

We remain transfixed by the brutalaiies of the State, and its  pontius Pilate hand washing proclivities, when they communicate that the numbers are too many, and who should they feed? The goal of a post industrial society is management and efficiency. The short cuts it takes are many. The scientific elite which had the ability to provide measuring tools now proclaims those exercises do  not allow it to proclaim how food should be distributed.

Covid 19 is an excuse to organize and discriminate. We are the chosen, we are those who have access to the means of survival, and the monopoly over caution. This makes us placed in a better situation to understand that when the danger becomes banalised over an untold quantam of time, people will be set forth to labour and face the danger. How can we protect ourselves from our emotions, and our tenacity in believing that if our genes got us this far (200,000 years) then extinction now faces us. Meanwhile, the working class is segmentalised and terrorized. If one is a woman, one may not enter. If one is a man, one may come to work. This then puts domestic labour at the lowest grid in the hierarchy. The ability of the middle class to carry out its daily duties without the help of their domestic help has proved beyond doubt that they  as migrannts are transferable to fields or factories, or wherever the government next needs them. This leaves us with the question as to how the terms of the continuity of the species depends on the choices made by an oligarchy living on mushrooms and fruit and vegetables harnessed through the coterie of industrial farmers who double as merchants of communication and mines.

The peasantry is not so hard to get rid of as the government has found. They only have to be starved and interned in camps. The numbers are an indication of how many there are, ekeing out a living in the cities. The government faces the dilemma of pushing the escalation phase by a couple of months, but one day we will have to face it. The shortages that face us 18 months from now when the food stocks diminish will create immense panic. The loneliness of the alienated intellectual will not help us understand what we know from a formulaic language of war. The future is here, the next planet is thousands of light years away. The striations of caste, class, race and gender have become more visible with the passage of the months. We presume that we will survive it, but that’s a presumption that’s based not on prophecies of doom, but on the ability of humans to see each day that comes to them as a bonus.

The intensity of suffering as the concentric circles of death come closer and closer brings to us an idea of our own mortality. We shake it off, we become detached, we see it as normal that we must suffer or die. For  young people, this is harder to do, because the world they have known so briefly has been hedonistic and pleasurable. Everything is now gone into a tunnel. Desire has been lambasted, resources have whittled, standing in queues and hoping to be heard over the crackle of understaffed government landlines has become the present reality. Here, then is how the world will look for the next two years, till Covid 19 spends itself. We are but vectors of a new vocabulary of disease, whose origins are in the sparring of nations, which might end up destroying themselves quicker in a careless animosity of mutual contempt and hatred. There is no cause for anxiety except to recognize our unique vulnerabilities and deal with them as best as we can.