About A Boy: Julie Burchill Raven’s Son, Jack Landesman, Kills Himself

The weight of tragedy is not power, it isn’t anger, it is like quicksand, true personal tragedy pulls you under, it is like you spend your time gasping for breath as though every thought you have has a problem coming out.

English journalist Julie Burchill (Raven’s) son, Jack Landesman killed himself last week, I know Julie a little and admire her much more. Burchill is a strong woman but how strong can you be? How strong is strong enough? Under this weight it is hard to quite fight back.What do you want the world to see? What do you feel? In a note on Facebook, Burchill wrote: “Look after the people you love, as I tried to and failed,”and I guess I understand though I can’t help but feel people are responsible for their own actions. She has claimed that her loss, like a virulent hangover of the heart, comes in spurts of intense pain.

I never met the man though the Herald Scotland summed him up as: “Jack Landesman studied at the Brighton Institute of Modern Music and played bass guitar in the Simon Lawrence band.” And his mother summed him up as:  “The apple of my eye, my Achilles heel”. Neither really expresses the man but gentleness is rare enough for that to be reason enough to mourn him.

I came very close to ending my own life on one occasion, I was 26 years old and had quite literally run out of ideas and figured I was sick of trying and was ready to give up and I had the pills ready, though when I found an idea, I changed my mind. But for Landesman, it seems to have been a depressive disposition, and those that most often actually ends in self-immolation have a disposition for depression. In “Ordinary People”, the suicidal son was feeling guilt over his brother’s death, but there is other things, a chemical imbalance, a sensitivity to the roughness of other people, that gives some people a disposition depressive in the extreme. Intense sadness, an unwillingness, an inability, to see through to the light of life.

I would guess it is like the way I sometimes feel when I wake up in the middle of the night, as though there is a void so close that I not only can touch it, but I must slip into it and if I can’t or don’t want to, it doesn’t matter because it will get me anywhere, anyhow.

This was Landesman’s second attempt at suicide, and Julie has said she wish Jack had managed it the first time and saved himself from so much sorrow. From everything I’ve read he was a sweet, shy kid, but very kind: this world doesn’t take kindly to the sweet and kind, it eats them up. So I guess, other than the rate of success, the difference between Jack and me is he is kind and more importantly he succeeded and also his reasons were like a sensitivity he couldn’t turn off. Anybody with half an ounce of soul sees life as a meaningless accident some of the time, then they find something else to hold on, to bring them along.

It is one thing to kill yourself because you are psychologically wounded, wounds can be healed or because you are down on your luck, luck can change.  But to kill yourself because you can find no joy in life, that is a terrifying thing, that is a life of constant pain. It is where physical and mental illness intertwine.

And I think it is an illness, I don’t think my thoughts were an illness, they were cowardice. But I think Jack’s may have been. Julie has written about her son’s death for the Sunday Times but I decided to write this before I read it because, this isn’t just about Jack, of course.

Some people kill themselves because they are sad and in pain and they don’t think it will ever ever change and they may well be right, it is a lost or crossed wire or something, maybe a spiritual difference, there is nothing but constant pain and now for those who remain, as Julie noted, the suicide loses their sadness but gives it to the survivors. The terrible waking nightmare, the disbelief that some things can happen,the unbearable lightness of being weighted down.The weight of sadness is a light in the soul you wish you could turn off.

Julie posted two poems:

The little boy lost in the lonely fen,
Led by the wandering light,
Began to cry, but God, ever nigh,
Appeared like his father, in white.
He kissed the child, and by the hand led,
And to his mother brought,
Who in sorrow pale, through the lonely dale,
The little boy weeping sought.

-William Blake

Do not call me, father, do not seek me,
Do not call me, do not wish me back.
We’re on a route uncharted,fire and blood erase our tracks.
On we fly, on wings of thunder, never more to sheath our swords.
All of us in battle fallen, not to be brought back by words.
Will there be a rendezvous? I know not.
I only know we still must fight.
We are sand grains in infinity, never to meet, never more see light.
Farewell then my son. Farewell then my conscience.
My youth and my solace my one and my only.
And let this farewell be the end of a story,
Of solitude vast and which none is more lonely.
In which you remain,barred forever and ever,
From light and from air,with your death pangs untold.
Untold and unsoothed, not to be resurrected.
Forever and ever, an 18 year old.
Farewell then,no trains ever come from those regions
Unscheduled or scheduled,no aeroplanes fly there.
Farewell then my son, for no miracles happen,
As in this world dreams do not come true.
I will dream of you still as a baby,
Treading the earth with little strong toes,
The earth where already so many lie buried.
This song to my son is come to its close.

-Pavel Antokolsky

I will add this, in sadness:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

A Robin Redbreast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage.
A dove house fill’d with doves and pigeons
Shudders Hell thro’ all its regions.
A Dog starv’d at his Master’s Gate
Predicts the ruin of the State.
A Horse misus’d upon the Road
Calls to Heaven for Human blood.
Each outcry of the hunted Hare
A fiber from the Brain does tear.

He who shall train the Horse to War
Shall never pass the Polar Bar.
The Beggar’s Dog and Widow’s Cat,
Feed them and thou wilt grow fat.
The Gnat that sings his Summer song
Poison gets from Slander’s tongue.
The poison of the Snake and Newt
Is the sweat of Envy’s Foot.

A truth that’s told with bad intent
Beats all the Lies you can invent.
It is right it should be so;
Man was made for Joy and Woe;
And when this we rightly know
Thro’ the World we safely go.

Every Night and every Morn
Some to Misery are Born.
Every Morn and every Night
Some are Born to sweet delight.
Some are Born to sweet delight,
Some are Born to Endless Night.

-William Blake