Mitchell Heisman: A Review of an Obituary

Suicide Note by Mitchell Heisman

Self-published, 2010

1,905 pages

I don’t know how this stuff finds its way to me, but such is the Internet. For those who haven’t read the story, a week or so ago this 35-year-old bookstore worker with a psychology degree named Mitchell Heisman shot himself on the steps of Harvard’s Memorial Church. It was Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement. Which meant it was crowded – lots of students, lots of old people. But it wasn’t so much what he did that makes Heisman unique, or even interesting – it’s what he left behind.

Five hours after his death, 400 people – Mitchell’s friends, family, coworkers – received an email containing a link to http://www.suicidenote.info/. The site contains a PDF file titled, you guessed it, Suicide Note, Mitchell Heisman’s 1,900-page treatise on his own self-imposed extinction.

Yes, this crazy asshole really wrote a 1,900-page suicide note.

As a student of literature (morbid nerd), I was actually fascinated when I first read about this epic work. Many writers have been driven to suicide, but I’d never heard of one who’d completed something of this magnitude with the end goal being suicide. Heisman didn’t work very often because he had been living off an inheritance from his father, I thought to myself, which must have meant that this clearly well-read guy had had plenty of time to create an attention-grabbing and thought-provoking, if seriously delusional book.

I was wrong. 

Skimming through the nine-page table of contents initially gave me hope. In it, Heisman promises to tackle a vast array of complex, far-reaching and (for me) prescient topics – transhumanism, nihilism, the relationship between the rise of Nazism and the Battle of Hastings in 1066, “The seditious genius of the spiritual penis of Jesus” – en route to some kind of radical, pause-worthy justification for his suicide. However, after having floundered through the prologue and the first section, (An Experiment in Nihilism), and having barely reached the halfway point of the second section (God is Technology), I was well into skim-mode. 

It’s not that the ideas aren’t interesting, it’s the way he presents them. The prose, at best, is a vaguely coherent slush-pile of academic jargon and references. At its worst, it is the incomprehensible psycho-babble of a pseudo scholar with a penchant for big words that signify nothing. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve enjoyed plowing my way through some heavy academic texts, but having to deal with gems like – “If the hereditary or genetic inclinations of humans are looked upon the bases of a political-sociobiological ‘system’, then God represents the ability to ‘joots’ or ‘jump’ out of the ‘system’, i.e. the Egyptian political-sociobiological pyramid-hierarchy system” – on a sentence-by-sentence basis is way too much for me to deal with, no matter how fascinated I am by the author’s death.

Sorry Mitchell. 

Even the note’s conclusion, the place where I thought I’d finally get that “Ah ha! So that’s why he did it!” moment, was vague, unsatisfying, what amounts to a sort of cop out. In the most direct portion of this segment, Heisman gives his real reason for blowing his brain-matter on the steps of a church in front of children:

“But wait a minute. Why am I doing this? Ah, yes, now I remember the punchline: I’ll try anything once!”

Obviously this statement is meant to be sardonic. It’s a tone that pops up periodically throughout “Suicide Note” – “What good suicide note would be complete without a bibliography?” – a dry humor that, instead of providing a degree of levity, only serves to remind us of just how mentally twisted and lonely this guy must have been.

Naturally, “Suicide Note” has attracted a good deal of chatter on Internet comment boards. As expected, the responses range from the sympathetic: “We all bear our own crosses. May he find love and healing in Paradise” to the angry: “Can’t [you] kill yourself in the woods or something so people are not traumatized by your moronic behavior and thank all for him just killing himself” to the mocking: “At least he went out with a bang!!!”. One particular comment of the funny-because-it’s-true variety caught my eye:

DOUBLE_CHINNED_PUPPETEER (09/25/2010 8:29 PM): Heisman was very foolish as no one will read his long note. He should have posted a video on YouTube instead!

The book may be the longest suicide note ever written, but it’s far from the best. In our visual-crazy, ADD digital world, Hesiman would have reached, I’d guess, a whole lot more people if he had condensed his manifesto into a Youtube video, or a series of them. No one is going to read 1,900 pages of anything today, let alone a garbled plea for death written by someone whose greatest accomplishment was apparently not leaving his room for inordinate periods of time. In his prologue, Heisman predicts that, for whatever reason, his manifesto will be “repressed,” perhaps by the coalition of evil, scaly old men who control the Internet. More likely, it will be forgotten. Mitchell Heisman will be a moderately popular Google search for a couple weeks until he, and the brain-matter stains he left on the church steps quickly fade into digital and actual obscurity. 

(I poured my existential guts out for 1,900 pages, shot myself, and all I got was this lousy Wikipedia page???)

I guess the reason I’m spending this much time on Suicide Note is that even as a writer, I still possess enough empathy to believe that someone who’s spent years of his sad life spewing his deepest, most honest analysis of himself and the world as he knew it should at least be acknowledged. And, as a writer, I can relate to Heisman in that I understand self-imposed isolation, of spending hours and days locked in your room, hell-bent on discovering something less than tangible. But I also know that books, philosophy, and the lonesome (and ultimately impossible) search for truth and self-actualization aren’t what make life worth living – It’s the smell of woodsmoke and the flutter of yellow leaves on the first crisp day of fall. It’s a shitty bottle of bourbon shared among friends who know all the words to the Phish song playing in the background, a song that conjures its own memories of past glory. It’s the tiny soft fingers of a beautiful girl at 8am, rubbing away the hangover gremlins coaxing you toward another skin-filled embrace. The hushed magnitude of a moonlit snowscape. Porn. Whatever.

The saddest part of this whole story is that had Mitchell Heisman taken a couple minutes to escape his books and the nightmare visions that swarmed his head, he might have found joy in one of the things I just mentioned, or five billion others like it. He might have understood (through experience, and not some arbitrary human creation like nihilism) the basic principle of existence, not just for humans but for every organism trying to eke its way along on the planet: That life is good.