Trigger Warning: The essay discusses an experiential phenomenon existing parallel to, while not being convergent with, suicidal thoughts and self-harm. Descriptions of the same, as written in a personal and non-theoretical style (in an attempt to avoid the risk of obfuscation), might be disturbing to certain readers. The author believes that the subject requires discussion regardless, which might lead to better theorization and understanding of the phenomenon.
I was standing on the platform of a metro station a few days ago. From the right side, a gush of wind rushed in and I could hear and see the train entering the platform. It was a huge machine, fast and efficient, a miracle of modern technology. For a moment I wanted to jump right in front of it. I imagined jumping onto the tracks, falling, feeling the weight of the moving train crush my body, and then passing into oblivion, into total nothingness. But of course, what I did was wait for the train to stop, and its gates to open, and calmly stepped inside a coach following the norms of acceptable behaviour. This desire for sudden death was not unfamiliar to me. I feel that unexpected passing urge almost every time I see a train entering the platform I am in. I also often feel the desire to jump whenever I look down from my 10th-floor balcony. Working with a big sharp knife, I have sometimes felt the urge to stab myself with it. Then there are the momentary desires to end my life in more perverted ways, by suddenly and unreasonably ending the life of someone else around me. I am talking about the sudden urge to shoot a random person in the street with an imaginary gun, or that of driving the car into another car or a footpath with people, or the momentary desire to slap someone in front of me. Acting on any of these urges would change my life so radically for the worse that it would be the end of my life as it is.
It must be noted here that I am not suicidal. I am quite happy with my life as it is now and indeed, I have never been seriously suicidal in my life. I am also not a psychopath (I think!), and I don’t have any serious mental health issues (as far as I can tell!). The unexpected, sudden and momentary urges for death, direct or indirect, are quite common among people. Their association with death and violence, and their un-explicability and un-governmentality arguably makes them one of the least discussed human experiences, even in the circles of apparently all accepting, safe-space making, libertarian students and academics.
But human thought and language over time have thrown up a few terms here and there which allude to these urges or urges like them. One of them is ‘The Imp of the Perverse’, formulated by the famed author and master of the macabre- Edgar Allen Poe in his short story/essay by the same name (Poe 1850). The protagonist of his work discusses the sudden urge to jump off a precipice for no reason, and the compulsive desire to confess one’s crimes, knowing that both will lead to one’s death and destruction. Freud’s ‘Thanatos’ can also be used to understand these urges (Freud, 1899). These unexpected desires for one’s death then become the manifestations of ‘Thanatos’ or the death drive present in the depths of every human’s psyche. Then there is the poetic French term ‘l’appel du vide’, translated as the ‘call of the void’ which refers to these experiences (DeWaters 2020). French culture, always attentive to the intimate, as Hannah Arendt had pointed out, paid attention to this small disturbing element of personal thought too (Arendt 2018). Even modern science has taken a fleeting glance at this phenomenon. Two papers in the field of psychiatry have been published about these urges, terming them as ‘High Places Phenomenon (HPP)’ (Teisman et. al 2020; Jennifer et. al. 2012). They both argue that sudden desires like the one to jump off a cliff to one’s death are quite common among the general populace and have no demonstrable correlation with suicidal tendencies.
What are these desires then? Where do they come from? How do they affect us? And since they are common, what do they mean for human beings and existence? Strands of Sociology like phenomenological Sociology and Existential Sociology are now engaged in attempting to understand the structures of consciousness and they exist in a social universe, but are we ignoring subtle, transient and arguably disturbing elements of the human experience during our analysis? We can start answering these questions by tracing the possible reasons behind these common but ignored (maybe for the better) experiences. One of the research papers mentioned above speculates that these result from our misrecognition of safety signals (Jennifer et. al. 2012). When I stand close to a precipice, my brain is telling me to back off or else I will fall. But another part of my brain is misrecognizing these signals as the desire to fall. Freud would probably argue that these desires emerge from the Thanatos or death drive working inside all of us (Freud 1899). Just like humans have a drive to live, or libido, inside them which pushes them to eat, work, reproduce etc, there is also the drive to die inside all of them. This death drive, usually suppressed by the libido, sometimes peeks through, like at times when humans have uncontrollable flashbacks of traumatic experiences (as in PTSD) or have a sudden urge to kill themselves as in HPP. The message boards of websites like Reddit and Quora, where many people discussed this common uncanny experience, offered other explanations. One user speculated that the call of the void may be the soul inside us trying to get out of this cage called body. Others believed that this must be our brain trying to get a few drops of feel-good hormones by imagining adventurous situations. Thinking about my experiences in the era of innocence, i.e. before I had googled about them, I wondered if the boredom and comfort of modern middle-class urban life were the reason behind it. A few days ago, I saw a meme lamenting the fact that unless your nation is declared war, the modern world permits no way of an honourable death. One dies as a victim of an accident, unrespectable violence, sickness, or old age, and none of these warrants a good story that can live on. None of these deaths are meaningful enough. Maybe something inside wants to break the shackles of modernity and feel what real danger and physical pain feels like. These desires and urges are fantasies of radical perverted freedom. Unfortunately though, in this arena, the search for causation has to remain limited to speculation. The call of the void emerges from depths where empiricism fails.
But the quest for understanding goes far beyond a mere search for causation. One thing that seems to be quite clear about these desires for sudden death, is their momentary and weak nature. As the psychiatric papers on this phenomenon affirmed, they are very different from suicidal tendencies. A real physical attempt to die is generally preceded by much thought, deliberation, planning and conscious decision-making. These deliberations regarding killing oneself occur as a result of oppressive life circumstances. The ‘call of the void’ by contrast seems to come from nowhere. Any person in any life circumstance can feel the sudden urge to stab themselves or the person, maybe a beloved person, sitting right in front of them. More importantly perhaps, unlike the suicidal want to end one’s life, this call is faint and fleeting. This call can be easily ignored and hardly ever does anyone take up the knife to stab. Instead, as one goes about their life, as I step into the metro instead of jumping in front of it, the call silences itself. The void doesn’t seem too hungry to eat us. Indeed, one can argue that the experience of the phenomenon is life-affirming. Each time I feel the urge to end my life, I ignore it, I refuse it. The void calls, but I don’t answer. Instead, I live on. And clearly, it’s not just me. All the billions of us who feel this urge to die every day in various circumstances, disregard this urge and keep living. We refuse to jump off the precipice because we have to finish that cup of coffee in our hand, read that unfinished book, or just keep staring into the horizon. The existence of the call of the void exemplifies human beings’ attachment to life. I am saying attachment instead of choice because I am not sure how much real choosing we do in these circumstances. When one refuses to give in to the urge to drive into a speeding car from the opposite direction, I am not sure if one really ‘chooses’ to live on because one realises life is valuable. In my experience, one usually ignores the call of the void because it is easy to ignore amidst the cacophony of life. I don’t jump in front of the metro not necessarily because I decide that my life is valuable. The experience is too fleeting, the coming metro is too close, and I don’t get enough time to contemplate the value of my life. I keep standing on the platform because it is easier to keep standing than jump. It’s easier to keep looking at the people around, wait for the train to stop and its gates to open, and then quietly step inside it. There seems to be a strong resistance against giving in to these sudden urges. The resistance is non-discursive, not even properly conscious, and therefore, hardly a choice. It’s a sticky attachment to practising life the way it is being practised. I keep standing on the balcony because that’s what I always do. I kept using the knife to cut vegetables because that’s what I was doing anyway. The method of not giving in to the call of the void involves not thinking about it, and therefore not even venturing into the complicated process of making a choice. I wonder what this tells us about our existence at large. How many more things do we not do because of this sticky attachment to life as it is? How many other calls do we ignore because it is easier to ignore them? Our mass refusal to the call of the void reveals the human tendency to reproduce life and society as it is.
But the reflexive misunderstanding of these sudden desires as suicidal tendencies persists. An online search describing these urges throws up suicide prevention helplines. This is also probably why the experience of the call of the void is rarely talked about. Nobody wants to be seen as suicidal, especially if they are not suicidal. There is also another reason which arguably keeps the discourse regarding these sudden urges to die under the carpets. The realisation that a large number of people so regularly and ordinarily think about ending their lives, doing something violent to themselves and others, unsettles our established notions regarding self and others around us. We like to imagine ourselves as stable, life-affirming, desirous of pleasures, and adequately encultured into the norms of society. We in turn also imagine others to be (generally) valuing life, utilitarian, and having a stable cultured self. The acceptance that we and everyone around us might be receiving frequent calls from inside to jump to violent deaths disturbs these assumptions. It points to the annoying possibility that something inside us wants to break free of all regimes of disciplines working on us in the most radical way possible- by suddenly ending our lives. It also whispers the possibility that we have no idea what we or others are. Our selves are fractured, and the depths of ourselves are completely unmapped territory- probably unmappable, ungovernable territory. We also fear that someday the urge would be strong enough to make us act on it. We are scared of losing the sticky attachment to our practised lives- to be so radically free that we can act on fleeting urges like the call of the void. We fear the possibility of experiencing this ungovernable animalistic uncultured freedom.
The realisation of the popular existence of the call of the void also makes us realise the ordinariness of the desire to die. Although it is almost always ignored and rejected, a large number of people feel the urge to kill themselves in violent ways in their ordinary everyday lives. This fact must be remembered when we think about the everyday experience of being in the world and the role of death or the desire for death in it. For example, acknowledging the existence of the call of the void changes the way we understand places like metro and train stations, high balconies, bridges or any other place where calls from the void are common. The train station is bustling with people, it’s the epitome of intelligent engineering by the state, it reflects the mobile nature of modern lives, but it is also somewhere where a large number of people feel the urge to kill themselves violently, even if they are not dissatisfied with their lives in any way. It is a place with a large number of people vividly imagining their violent deaths. A high balcony might be beautiful, relaxing, and a place imbued with pleasant memories, but it is also somewhere one fleetingly desires to end their life. Similarly, when we analyse the experience of driving on a fast road, or that of cutting vegetables with a sharp knife, we must also include the experience of hearing the calls for harming the self and others around in our analysis. The call of the void is an ordinary part of human existence, and they have to be provided with their deserved space in scholarly analysis even if not in colloquial discourse.
Interestingly, I think the experience of these calls shapes our imagination and understanding of the embodied experience of dying. This is because these calls are one of the few things that force us to imagine the experience of the moments before death. When we feel the urge to jump off a precipice, fleetingly, we end up imagining how that jump will feel like to our body, the pushing off the ground with our feet, the feel of wind attacking our body as we pierce through the air towards the ground, and the hit of the earth with unimaginable force when we fall, crushing our bones, snatching our consciousness. The imagination is not deliberate, it starts almost like an automated response to the call of the void. While we ignore and forget the call, the imagined experience stays, shaping our understanding of dying.
The experience of the call might also be shaping our understanding of suicides. The mistaken idea that attempted suicides (successful or not) result from impulsive decision-making might be found to be originating from the assumption that the want to end one’s life that can lead to action in that direction, is the same as the ordinary experience of the call of the void. We ordinarily experience the sudden urge to die and we successfully and quite easily suppress those urges. Why then can’t people who act to kill themselves resist these urges? They must be weak, impulsive and unstable creatures. The prolonged pain, oppression, and struggle that precedes the act of killing oneself is thus erased from view. Bringing the call of the void into the fold of open discourse might help throw further light on it and clear some of these misunderstandings.
Lastly, it must be noted that we can’t be sure that absolutely none of the calls of the void are answered. What if a few jump with the urge to jump? I have heard of only one friend of a friend who jumped off a balcony for no apparent reason in her teenage years and broke a few bones. But there might be more, and it’s quite impossible to be sure. Dead men tell no tales and the live ones lie to themselves and others. An injured man who answered the call of the void and rammed his car into another one while driving might retrospectively interpret his actions to be a result of a mechanical failure, a light shining on his eye or just being distracted. A soldier taking cover, who lifted his head hearing the call and caught a bullet, would be known as a brave martyr who tried to fire back at the enemy without fearing death. Maybe a considerable number of the calls to the void are answered. We, and the people who answer them, just don’t recognize them as such. These possible answers to the call must still be differentiated from deliberate and planned suicides undertaken because of extremely oppressive life circumstances, however. The actions answering the calls would be closer to accidents than suicides.
References
Poe, Edgar Allen (1850). “The Imp of the Perverse” in PoeStories.com. Available at- https://poestories.com/read/imp. Accessed on 30 September 2024.
Freud, Sigmund (1997). The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated by A. A. Brill. Wordsworth Classics of World Literature. Herts, UK: Wordsworth Editions.
DeWaters Riley (2020). “L’appel Du Vide: The Call of the Void..Can’t You Hear It?” Medium.com. Available at – https://medium.com/persons/call-to-the-void-lappel-du-vide-140accbabef8. Accessed on 30 September 2024.
Arendt, Hannah (2018). The Human Condition. 2nd edition. University of Chicago Press.
Teisman, Tobia; Brailovskaia, Julia; et. al. (2020). High Place Phenomenon: Prevalence and Clinical Correlates in Two German Samples. BMC Psychiatry. Article number: 478. Available at- https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12888-020-02875-8. Accessed on 29 September 2024.
Jennifer L. Hames, Jessica D. Ribeiro, April R. Smith, Thomas E. Joiner (2012). “An Urge to Jump Affirms the Urge to Live: An Empirical Examination of the High Place Phenomenon”. Journal of Affective Disorders. 136(3). Available at –https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165032711006847#:~:text=A%20phenomenon%20that%20the%20lay,e.g.%2C%20bridge%2C%20building. Accessed on 30 September 2024.
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Sohom Roy is pursuing an MA in Sociology at South Asian University (SAU), New Delhi.