How are the physical and mental pain connected? Can one literally die of heartbreak or any other devastating loss? How does it all work?

- Nabokov on Freud.

Love – Alone Again Or (mp3)

Bryan MacLean – Alone Again Or (mp3)

Yeah, said it’s all right
I won’t forget
All the times I’ve waited patiently for you
And you’ll do just what you choose to do
And I will be alone again tonight my dear

Yeah, I heard a funny thing
Somebody said to me
You know that I could be in love with almost everyone
I think that people are
The greatest fun
And I will be alone again tonight my dear

(…or Pinky and the Brain or Mulder and Scully or pre-divorce Sonny and Cher or Beavis and Butthead or or pre-Keene Act Rorschach and Nite Owl II* or pre-breakup/post-reunion Simon and Garfunkel or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde**)

*apparently Rorschach and Nite Owl II slash fictions exist in this world, to which I say, in the words of film-version Nite Owl II, “NOOOOOOOO!”

**awful 90s comedy home video that tainted my childhood innocence

- (Ladies and gentlemen, Miss) Grace Jones.

I thought of getting out of bed, opening the door to the balcony, and jumping off.

Worried, afraid, terrified, yet intrigued, I wanted to do it, but I didn’t want to do it. I could hear a click as I turned the key. I could feel the cold balcony railing with my hands. I could smell the faint scent of the grass below. I opened my eyes to find myself in the comfort of my bed, having been deceived by my senses. I stared at the door. Should I get out? Should I pull out the keys and swallow them?

It was not the first time this urge came to me. Once in a while it comes, with varying intensities. Sometimes it passes by, casually, like any other thought. Sometimes it stays for hours, haunting me, taunting me.

The urge to jump from high places, like many seemingly strange pathological behavior, is not uncommon. The French call it l’appel du vide, literally ‘the call of the void’. What a fascinating phrase, and how fitting! A seduction to emptiness, to nothingness, that I find so hard to resist. A temptation I try to resist in many similarly harmful situations.

I have often wondered about these destructive urges. Why do they come so often, in so many different forms? I don’t want to die, not yet, not of my own accord. I don’t feel suicidal. I don’t want to be harmed. Are they products of sheer curiosity? Simple ‘what if’ questions? But I don’t want answers, I don’t want to feel the consequences. Are they some kind of cathartic fantasy? But I don’t imagine myself feeling any relief or release. Why, then, do I fear the temptation of self-destruction?

I once pondered about Thanatos, the ‘death drive’ in Freudian thought. Is there really a primitive urge to harm oneself, to destroy, to take a step closer to death? If so, in order to survive, should one protect oneself not only against external forces but also against one’s own innate self-destructive nature?

Poe once wrote about what he named ‘the imp of the perverse’. The impulse to do the complete opposite of what is ‘right’, the temptation to do things one should not do. The desire, when standing upon the brink of a precipice, overcome with fear, to plunge and fall. “And this fall,” he wrote, “this rushing annihilation – for the very reason that it involves that one most ghastly and loathsome of all the most ghastly and loathsome images of death and suffering which have ever presented themselves to our imagination – for this very cause do we now the most vividly desire it.”

It would probably be easier and wiser to think of these urges as light symptoms of obsessive compulsive or some sort of anxiety disorder that may or may not be harmful. Accept them, dismiss them, or face them, with external help if necessary.

Sometimes I wonder though, might I give in? When the imp of the perverse on my side whispers in my ear, luring me, seducing me, might I answer the call of the void? Or would the void, the emptiness, the nothingness, remain a seductive, untouched mystery?

But I would cry out and make a fuss until I got what I wanted.
I remember well how my mother asked me why I couldn’t be a nice boy like Wilfred; but I would think to myself that Wilfred, for being so nice and quiet, often stay hungry. So early in life, I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise.”

- The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley
Bought this book secondhand for only Rp 10.000 (cheapskate, I am) around two weeks ago. So far, it’s been a real page-turner, rising on top of all those unfinished books in my reading list.

So that’s what the less assertive get?
A mythical monster with multiple heads to hate?

It is futile to fear death, to even think about fearing death,
for when it comes, no mind will exist to think nor fear.

And yet, I tremble.