Unreal City: reflections of a suicide

1. Suicide and Synchronicity

Last Sunday the 13th of October marked the 13th anniversary of my brother Toby’s death by suicide on London Bridge. Today marks the anniversary of the day I was informed that a witness had seen him jump, after a week of police searches and false leads. I started writing a series of short pieces, of which this is Part One, in around 2019 or 2020. Naturally, a content warning for sensitive material applies. - Luke

Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

TS Eliot

I: Suicide and Synchronicity

It took me over ten years to start writing this, and even then I have had to go back to the beginning more than once to actually figure out how the hell to even start. What thread does one choose out of the frenzied tangle of a suicide? Self-murder, like any other kind of murder, is a puzzle that confounds the expectations of civilian society, and throws our tidy notions of progress and reason to the ravenous dogs of circumstance.

The synchronicities that I have experienced in relationship to my brother's suicide lead me to believe that suicide, as an event, is an eruption of archetypal material into the physical world. These terms originate from Carl Jung's psychological observations, which I will briefly attempt to condense here, before going into broad reflections upon the theme of suicide that stem from my own experience.

In Jung's terms, an archetype is a constellation of psychic material that transcends individual psychology and emerges from what he termed the collective unconscious. When archetypal material emerges from the unconscious into the conscious mind, this archetypal material often manifests as physical phenomena that mirror the psychic phenomena; a famous example is a patient of Jung's whose session was interrupted, as she was describing a dream of a scarab beetle, by a scarab beetle of a similar type knocking against the window of the office. Jung termed this type of event synchronicity.

Both 'archetype' and 'synchronicity' are the objects of healthy debate amongst Jungian scholars as to what they mean precisely, but this is outside of the scope of this article. It is enough for now to say that this is the model I will be working with in my discussion.

My brother Toby jumped off London Bridge on the evening of October the 13th, 2011. At the age of 29, he had undergone a very rapid deterioration of his mental health, following an extremely tough period that included a protracted and unhealthy relationship with one ex-girlfriend, the tragic death of another ex-girlfriend, and a traumatic mystical experience brought on by smoking cannabis. In T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, one of Toby's favourite poems, 'Fear death by water' is seven lines away from 'A crowd flowed over London Bridge'.

Toby worked in the field of heritage, and one of his projects involved interviewing surviving Trucial Oman Scouts, a paramilitary group raised and trained by the British Army. One of these Scouts had a son who had committed suicide in the early 2000s. The date was October the 16th. The Scout's son was an anthropologist researching ayahuasca, and had experienced several traumatic experiences. Part of his research was funded by MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies), an organisation founded by Rick Doblin, whom many of my friends know.

At the time of Toby's death, my parents lived in Ewell, Surrey, the site of a Victorian mental hospital as well as of a stream that inspired the backdrop to John Everett Millais's painting Ophelia, depicting Ophelia's corpse floating down a river after her suicide. In 2012, almost exactly a year later, they moved to a house adjacent to some fields leading down to a river and a railway bridge in Westhumble, a village close to the famous Box Hill. They later discovered that the daughter of a woman they'd known from one of their support groups had hung herself from this very railway bridge, not long before.

Our parents have owned a cottage in Devon since 2005. Toby spent a lot of time there, as he studied in Exeter and Falmouth. A chef in a nearby restaurant committed suicide in January 2011, ten months before Toby. The following year (2012), a charity cycle ride to Turin took place in her memory. The date of departure was October the 13th.

Birds, traditionally considered as harbingers of death and images of the soul, were behaving strangely in the months leading up to Toby's death. A crow landed next to him in the garden in Ewell, which he considered to be an omen. A white owl was spotted in the daylight in Devon, which he also considered to be an omen. The events of our great-grandfather JB Priestley's Time-play Dangerous Corner (which involve a suicide) begin with the appearance of a white owl.¹

His funeral on the 23^rd of November 2011 was attended by a huge number of birds from a variety of different species. The fact that his grave often appears newly-stained by bird-shit does not indicate to me a lack of respect from our avian brethren; quite the opposite, in fact.

Toby, sometime in his early/mid 20s.

1. There is also the “Dream of Birds” recorded in Priestley’s Rain Upon Godshill.