The life or death question
You could guess from the crowd
converging on the Memorial Hall
and on a Saturday night, that
the speaker must be world-famed in his field,
making his first visit to the college.
A French scientist of renown –
cognitive theory or some such –
turned Buddhist monk these thirty, forty years,
he carried the blessing and the curse,
the burden of responsibility not only of his vocation
but his fame. The hall was packed.
Serene – ‘together’ has to be the word –
he spoke for an hour; enthusiastic applause;
then question time.
There’s always that tense silence before
the first question…how will
the hall respond tonight? Will it hold the level
of the speaker’s mind? …we knew all too well
those ‘first question’ students – the one
who had to wrap a compliment in
confectioner’s sugar, eliciting an inward groan –
as if the speaker were unaware of his own ability...
she’d marry rich, then live a life of patronising
complacency bestowing well-publicised charity…
or the one whose ‘clever’ question blatantly advertised
to whoever might be impressed, beyond herself,
that she was already on the speaker’s wavelength
before the lecture and before the rest of us…
she’d commit herself to a future academic life
of maintaining this self-superiority,
exhausting herself, losing friends and influencing few…
but no – tonight it was that wild and self-abusive student
who seldom attended any lecture except to challenge –
‘Can you give me one single reason
why I should go on living? ’..
You could have heard a cliché drop..
a pin; a paperclip; but loud, the universal thought –
how could the speaker know, this was the brilliant boy
of already three serious suicide attempts…
representative of the rite of passage greatly magnified,
sex, drugs, rocknroll, and whatever lay beyond…
‘No… I cannot…’
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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