I've just found a genuinely very chilling article online about Malachi Ritscher, a jazz enthusiast from Chicago who took his own life at the beginning of this month by covering himself in petrol then setting fire to himself. They found his charred remains next to a a sign saying "Thou Shalt Not Kill", and it appears he did this as some sort of anti-war protest.
http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/feature/39663/Malachi_Ritscher_19542006Now, all this is quite unnerving enough, really. The article is actually very well written and goes into much more depth about the morality of the act, certainly much more in depth than a forum topic first post ever realistically could, but what disturbed me about it the most was how many people I knew who were exactly like Malachi. People who obsessively collect cultural artefacts (be they music, literature or live recordings). People who are shy but well-meaning, who know loads of people but have no real close friends . People who are friends to everyone, but don't really have any friends.
Then an excerpt from the article really shook me to the core:
(Forgive me for saying it, but if any of you reading this spend most of your time alone at computers, blogging and posting to message boards but not always doing the tough, tiring work of going out and forging messy human relationships with the people around you, this is something to remember: Try hard.)
A bit too close to home for many, perhaps? Don't get me wrong, I don't necessarily think I fall into this category (yet!), but there are moments when I've slipped dangerously close to it.
The act of self immolation is also terrifying - what kind of tolerance and willpower would you have to have to do it? Plenty of methods of suicide are gruesome enough - jumping under a train, for instance, is an agonising choice - but actually setting fire to one's self is slower than it might otherwise be, and completely and totally beyond my comprehension.
Thoughts, etc? I'm not too sure what aspect of this article we can take to discuss, the morality and personality of the man or the act itself, but I'm sure the conversation will take its own course.