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By
Linda Adams
Dead Rebel Of The Week
~ Death of the Anguished Soul ~
Vincent Van Gogh. July 29, 1890. Artist. Father of Expressionistic style. Shot himself in the chest.
Ernest Hemingway. July 2, 1961. Nobel Prize winning author. Self-inflicted shotgun blast.
Adolf Hitler. April 30, 1945. Leader of the Third Reich. Some say the Anti-Christ. Gunshot wound to the head.
Wendy O. Williams. April 7, 1998. Hardcore performance rebel and musician. Another suicide gunshot fatality.
Aside from the whole suicide by gunshot phenomena, what do these four people have in common?
Pussies. All of them.
Yes, I just called Adolf Hitler a pussy. He created a world full of turmoil, death and destruction and, in the end, was too chickenshit to face the music. Pussy.
But, I hear you yelling at me, Van Gogh, Hemingway and Wendy O were all clinically depressed people with tumultuous histories of alcohol and drug abuse! You don’t understand! Yep. That’s what you’re saying alright.
Wah. Wah. Wah. Cry me a tsunami.
Depression and substance abuse are tough hands to be dealt, and I acknowledge that there are many people who simply don’t have the tools to wade upstream at all, but for the majority of people there does come a time when you need to be willing to help yourself. To snap out of it. To take responsibility for your own emotions. Your own actions. Your own life. Look yourself in the eye and face the music that you’ve spent your whole life making with passion.
The four people listed above were each, in their own ways, rebels in life. Each struggled with their exceptionality - differences that set them against the norm of society - the norm of life as it was defined in their worlds. They painted, wrote, or made music and theatrics in order to express themselves in life - a painful process of creation. Except Hitler. He just said, the hell with it, and tried to create his own society – for better or for worse. Essentially, these rebels, and oh so many others like them, left their mark on us all – good or bad. They’re long gone but we continue to explore, revel, argue and experience their experiences.
Then they killed themselves.
None of these rebels could either handle their differences any longer or were willing to be accountable for their actions. By committing suicide - and therefore surrendering to the inability to carry through until the end that spirit of rebellion they lived their whole lives to promote and immortalize - they mocked the very title of “rebel” that we, the uppity societal naysayer, have given them. They mocked themselves. They mocked us. “Oh, I have suffered, I have struggled, I have blasted my stance onto the world. Now, I’m just going to leave. I’m done now. Mom, can I leave the table and go watch TV?”
Pussies.
If you’ve read some of my other articles you should have caught on by now that I am big, big, BIG on taking responsibility for your own life, your own actions, your own joys, and your own pain and misery. So it should be no surprise to hear that I do not advocate giving up and checking out. You’ve chosen to be here (we’re talking incarnation here, people) and you’ve chosen to learn your lessons and meet challenges in this life. Now deal with it. Death isn’t the customer service counter at Wal-Mart; you don’t go home and decide you don’t want life anymore and take it back to the store for a refund. It simply doesn’t work that way.
OK, so maybe you don’t buy into this whole “circle of life” universal life/death viewpoint. If you’re Christian - especially if you’re Catholic - you’ll go straight to Hell for offing yourself. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200. I don’t know much about Hinduism and the Muslim faith in this respect, but I can’t imagine that life would be any less sacred there. You Buddhists out there are probably agreeing with me by now, and think I’m cool as honeybees in springtime. If you’re agnostic, then you already sense there’s something bigger than yourself out there… Think about what I’m saying. And, if you’re an atheist, you believe that life just stops when we die so I assume that you agree with me that suicide is a pussy’s way out, since it’s kind of senseless to spend your one and only lifetime fighting to be or know yourself, only to put a sudden end to your own existence. WTF?
In shamanic traditions, the concept of death doesn’t necessarily mean physical death. Stick with me here… On the one hand, generally, when the physical body dies, the soul continues. It’s a circle. Round and round and round we go in the Circle of Life. You all saw The Lion King, right? Remember that song? OK, thus, physical death, and birth, is merely a doorway into a different room of the house known as the evolution of the soul. On the other hand, during life - and I fully believe this as I’ve experienced it - one can experience “death” while living. Those tough challenges that make us hang on by our fingernails, the same ones that force us to sort out our own beliefs so that we have something aside from empty air to cling to, can build and build. Finally, you hit rock bottom. Can you make it back up? Can you dig down within yourself, find that teeny tiny spark of yourself that is still screaming “I’m HERE! I’m strong! I’m alive!”, and let it pull yourself back up to the surface? Ride the wave for as long as it takes to get through that challenge? Can you survive whatever you’re facing and rise back up, able to look the world - and yourself - in the eye with confidence? Can you go through with this initiation experience? This rite of passage? This is the “death” of shamanistic belief. The challenges in life that we meet with vigilance, and don’t give in to, serve as teachers and catalysts to make us stronger and bigger. Living death makes us open our eyes to see more of the world around us, the world we live in and the world we live as a part of. The soul evolves. In this lifetime, we become people with less garbage to carry. We change. We grow.
And that, my friends, is why I call Vincent Van Gogh, Ernest Hemingway, Adolf Hitler, Wendy O. Williams, and others like them, pussies. Their deaths gained them nothing - not even the peace they sought. As I read biographies of these people in preparation for writing this article, I was amazed at the amount of effort, will, independence, and flat out oomph! It must have taken each and every one of them to live their lives and become the legends we credit them with being. Yet, each, for their own personal reasons, chose to cut their time of challenge and learning short; in the end they were unable to dig down and pull up that flame of Self to get them through and to come to some type of resolution in this lifetime. In life the angst and pain of themselves overshadowed their burning spirit of rebellion. In death they were not rebels. They were desperate. Physical death didn’t bring the end for these living rebels. It merely prolonged the agony. Until the next lifetime. Until the next rebellious spirit.
