On Self Immolation

Aaron Bushnell, death & the beginning

tw: suicide

From the incredible Hala Alyan’s IG

“Maybe such a story seems unbelievable

for your analytical mind.

Yet for us, the people who hatched from eggs,

all things are just legends,

including fresh blood.”

Phan Nhiên Hạo

Over a decade ago, I had a boyfriend who had the image of the Vietnamese Monk Thích Quảng Đức swirling in a cloud of flames, an act of self-immolation, tattooed on his left bicep. It was such a haunting image for me because it represented total commitment; the absolution of fire, the finality of death. As someone close to suicide, and thus dying my whole life, not only due to my mother’s failed attempts at trying to kill herself, but also both my sister and I twice in my early teens, but because death was constantly on her mind (her own and ours) as she was always close to self-combusting — and as a result, I was, too. Perhaps this gave me a reverence for the act of dying, I think I knew there was something deeply sacred in the ceremony of it all. Like the pyres in India that hold the immensity of the dead bodies that will soon be cremated, engulfed in flames, I’ve also long had an obsession with fire, and watching things burn. Not for the devastation or the destruction it brings, but what it represents: the ephemerality of life, the cadence and beauty of something so terrifying, final, and all-consuming. Like death itself.

Đức was protesting the mistreatment and hostility that Buddhists were facing in South Vietnam, even though they were the majority, because the Roman Catholic Church was the largest landowner in Vietnam at the time, and tensions were escalating, so much so Đức felt moved to act. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? The urgency of self-immolation. On June 11th, 1963, holding onto a string of prayer beads, Đức spoke the words “Nam mô A Di Đà Phật” (“Homage to Amitābha Buddha”), struck a match, and placed it against his fuel-soaked robe (a fellow monk had doused him loyally) and he erupted, immediately, in fire.

The image, as a result of its proximity (permanently seared onto a lover’s body), had left an indelible mark on my mind. From time to time, I have found myself lost in the lines of those flames. Of the engulfing of the fire, like a wave, like leaves catching wind and creating a flurry. To remain composed, upright, burning alive, the smoke breaking all passages to breath, all signs of life, all-consuming, the fire incinerating intestine to lung, etch to etch, carving ash to ash, the body lilting.

One of my friends, the astrologer Alice Sparkly Kat, recently wrote on their Instagram, “I asked my partner why fire represents both love and cruelty. They told me that fire is like the human heart. When the heart holds onto something, it turns cruel. The heart needs fire to empty it out. Only an empty and open heart can receive love.”

To me, that means, a body that can be ravaged by fire, as an act of protest, is one of the biggest acts of love a person can make.