Literary Mystery: Suicide of famous art couple
There’s an interesting article in the LA Times on the suspected suicide-by-drowning of “rising art star” Jeremy Blake, who is thought to have wandered “into the ocean off New York’s Rockaway Beach — presumably to his death — a week after he discovered that his blogger-filmmaker girlfriend, Theresa Duncan, had taken her life in their East Village apartment.” The couple’s troubles apparently began in 2004, after they did an album cover for Beck, who is a Scientologist. Duncan and Blake became convinced that the Scientologists were stalking them, paranoia which seems to have led to Duncan’s suicide.
Of course, conspiracy theorists might say that a) Duncan really was being stalked and her death was not a suicide, and b)Blake didn’t commit suicide, but rather made himself disappear so that he wouldn’t meet with the same fate as his girlfriend. The more likely answer, of course, is that the couple truly was suffering from a terrible paranoia. Under her bio on her blog The Wit of the Staircase, Duncan posted these quotes from Gravity’s Rainbow:
“Paranoids are not paranoids (Proverb 5) because they’re paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.” 292“You hide, they seek.” 262
On July 10, the day of her apparent suicide, Duncan quoted Reynolds Price on her blog:
A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens–second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day’s events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths.”
Oddly, on July 8, just two days before her death, Duncan promised readers of her blog that she was “cooking up a new political essay” on Dick Cheney–doesn’t exactly sound like the words of someone who is about to off herself. But the post on July 9 was titled, “Goodnight, Children, We’re in the Arms of the Great Lover.”
I imagine this will go down as one of the famous mysteries of the art and literature world. Twenty years from now there will be folks claiming to have spotted Blake in a cafe in Budapest. Or maybe Blake himself will come forward in three or four years with a story about his greatest and most avant-garde work of art to date.
Posted in Ephemera, News & Politics
August 1st, 2007 at 7:01 pm
[…] Online conspiracy theorists quickly repeated Duncan’s accounts of being harassed by mysterious forces, including the Church of Scientology.Others saw a twinship with poet Sarah Hannah, herself a recent suicide, and still others saw parallels to an elaborate alternate reality game. Experts, some of whom had never met her, weighed in on everything from her mental state to her sexiness. […]
August 1st, 2007 at 7:10 pm
[…] Online conspiracy theorists quickly repeated Duncan’s accounts of being harassed by mysterious forces, including the Church of Scientology.Others saw a twinship with poet Sarah Hannah, herself a recent suicide, and still others saw parallels to an elaborate alternate reality game. Experts, some of whom had never met her, weighed in on everything from her mental state to her sexiness. […]
September 2nd, 2007 at 8:14 am
[…] “I imagine this will go down as one of the famous mysteries of the art and literature world. Twenty years from now there will be folks claiming to have spotted Blake in a cafe in Budapest. Or maybe Blake himself will come forward in three or four years with a story about his greatest and most avant-garde work of art to date.†— Novelist Michelle Richmond, July 25, 2007, on her San Serif blog. […]
September 2nd, 2007 at 10:00 am
[…] “I imagine this will go down as one of the famous mysteries of the art and literature world. Twenty years from now there will be folks claiming to have spotted Blake in a cafe in Budapest. Or maybe Blake himself will come forward in three or four years with a story about his greatest and most avant-garde work of art to date.†— Novelist Michelle Richmond, July 25, 2007, on her San Serif blog. […]
September 2nd, 2007 at 10:05 am
[…] “I imagine this will go down as one of the famous mysteries of the art and literature world. Twenty years from now there will be folks claiming to have spotted Blake in a cafe in Budapest. Or maybe Blake himself will come forward in three or four years with a story about his greatest and most avant-garde work of art to date.†— Novelist Michelle Richmond, July 25, 2007, on her San Serif blog. […]
November 9th, 2007 at 7:31 am
[…] What stresses made them react the way they did? […]
November 9th, 2007 at 7:32 am
[…] What stresses made them react the way they did? […]
January 6th, 2008 at 11:32 pm
Maybe there is not an acceptable answer to why people choose to commit suicide. I have read comments about these two people, judgmental comments:for instance that they killed themselves because they were f—– in the head just like every other suicide. Other people who commented stated that these people had everything-money, looks, and success-so why on earth would they do such a thing? Those comments are narrow-minded and foolish. Money, success, and looks do not guarantee happiness or make living easier. It only looks that way to people that do not have these things. Most of us do not have those things. People from all different lifestyles and classes commit suicide everyday. It does not mean they are crazy. We do not know others’ pain. Sometimes we dont know our own. It is sad when anyone commits suicide. Everyone wants an answer to death, any kind of death. Sometimes there just is’nt one. To simplify suicide in order to try to understand it and shake it off as mere craziness is wrong and it robs us of the intensity/pain that we all have when we are vulnerable. Maybe the idea of suicide scares us all because we ourselves have toyed with it when our lives were in shambles. It is not hard to get to that state if we are not careful because life weakens us at times. I choose to accept that these two talented people will live on in their works and there is no need to criticize them or romanticize their actions. There is no way to know the answers as they are probably many different reasons combined. We can choose to feel sadness about their deaths and stop being angry and shallow.
People are vulnerable and fallible. You want to understand something, try yourself.