*Actually, it was precisely the professor who could have had it — and even, as I think about it now — most certainly did.
**“He is!”—the ecstatic text on a license plate of a certain American automobile noted in an essay by Stanisław Barańczak. I like this phrase, and I use it rather frequently in various forms and with various intents.
***The first position is analogous to Aristotelian prote philosophia, first philosophy. Of course, it is possible to gain practice in the understanding and occupation of the first position without knowledge of Aristotle, but then the taste of corporal relations will be less substantial.
My First Suicide
This year I am celebrating the fortieth anniversary of my first suicide attempt. By my count, I have been attempting to kill myself for exactly four hundred seventy-nine months, and, on account of various bits of misfortune, I haven’t been having any luck. I was twelve years old when, for the first time, the black thoughts teeming in me took shape, to the extent that I attempted to jump off the sixth floor. It happened at night. My folks were sleeping in the other room, and the main problem was not the jump itself, but getting out onto the balcony so silently that they wouldn’t wake up. Especially Mother, since my old man always slept the unwaking sleep of the dead.
Mother slept incredibly lightly. Every slight vibration of air woke her. I don’t think she ever got used to the sounds of the city, even though we lived on an unusually quiet street; in fact, in the period I am talking about — in other words, during the sixties of the twentieth century — it was downright dead. Compared with what we have now, there wasn’t any traffic to speak of. Especially in Krakow. Especially on Syrokomla Street. Especially at night. Which was all the worse, since it seemed to me that, in the absolute silence, you could even hear when I lifted my bed cover. The main acoustic obstacle to going out onto the balcony was the drapes, which were hanging from metal curtain rods. At the least touch, the tin hooks to which they were attached made a crunching noise, like the tracks of an accelerating tank.
The idea of killing myself always came at night. At two or three in the morning, someone would sit at the side of my couch and try to convince me. In the thickening air there were more and more insects. The indistinctly pronounced arguments were irrefutable. I knew that one of these times their amorphous but inexorable logic would shove me out onto the balcony, and then off the balcony. It excited me. I knew I could do it. I was suicidally gifted. I was crazy about jumping to the cement from the sixth floor. I had a talent for suicide. But you have to work on your talents. Reproofs of instruction are the way of life.
As King Solomon says: “Reproofs of instruction are the way of life!” As King Solomon says: “Reproofs of instruction are the way of life!” As King Solomon says: “Reproofs of instruction are the way of life!” My old man shouted these words of wisdom so many times a day, and with such solemn dignity, that finally, if he did not become King Solomon in the strict sense, he certainly traded places with him for a bit. Full of majesty and dread, the shadow of the biblical monarch would attack his accounts book, and the thunderous voice would roar upon the heights. Reproofs of instruction are the way of life! This time he didn’t have to tell me twice. I was preparing myself intensely for the final match. Just like, if I may say so, a debutant preparing for the Olympics. Practically every day, when no one was at home, I doggedly practiced the silent opening of the drapes. And also the curtains, an otherwise easier matter. The hooks from which the curtains hung practically didn’t grate at all. After numerous attempts, I had worked out the following technique: you had to place a chair at the balcony window, stand on it, reach out your hand, and, once you had grasped either the hook itself or the drape at the point closest to the hook, you carefully manipulated it and moved it aside, very slowly — this is how it could be done in absolute silence. I was rather tall, even as a teenager, and standing on a stool I could easily reach the ceiling. The drapes parted more quietly each time. Reproofs of instruction were the way of my suicide.
I regret that first attempt to this day. There was no point in wasting time training for the silent opening of the drapes. I should just have gone out, simply, normally — since they were open during the day, and since my folks weren’t at home — onto the balcony and jumped. There was always plenty of free time between when I came home from school and when Mother returned from work. Even on Thursdays, when I had seven classes, there was always at least an hour. I was a contemplative child, and from my early days I knew that I wouldn’t be able to do it in a sudden, lightning-fast impulse, that I would not be able to leap over the balustrade in one bound before someone managed to hold me back. Sure, I wanted to kill myself, and to do it with dispatch, but I also wanted to be present for the act.
I knew from the teachings of Pastor Kalinowski what the other world would be like. But I hadn’t the faintest clue what the passage, what the passage itself from this world to that, might look like. When I asked Pastor Kalinowski about the path (and also about the time and speed) from earth to heaven, or to hell, he lied his way out with theological hermeticisms. I knew that I wouldn’t get clear and simple answers, but there must have been minor approximations, or some sort of (even the most distant) analogies.
Is it indiscernible, like the moment of falling asleep? Incomprehensible, like the flight of Sputnik? Breathtaking, like downhill skiing? Painful, like an inner-ear infection? Could it be that painful? Impossible. I had a high pain threshold. Practically nothing ever hurt. Nothing ever — with the exception of my inner ear. When I was five or six years old, my (inner) ear hurt so horribly that, after that time, at least for a year, because of the trauma and fear of it, I never even uttered the word “ear.” Even today, I remember Doctor Granada muttering over my head “inner ear, inner ear.” Even today, whenever I hear “inner ear,” I experience phantom pains, and even today I doubt that anything — even suicide — could cause more pain. Was that what I wanted to test back then? Was it because I had withstood every sort of pain, and I wanted to try out the pain of falling from the sixth floor? Very likely. At that time, I didn’t yet know Kirillov’s famous dictum about the pain that deters people from suicide. I read Demons for the first time in the lyceum, in other words at least three or four years after my first suicide. I was then, and I still am now, a great admirer of that book, but it had no influence whatsoever upon my various subsequent suicide attempts. Dostoevsky’s hero, and perhaps all literary heros in general, make a great fuss over their suicides — I don’t fuss. I just want to have peace and quiet.