Moved to mortification

Today: Sam Thielman, a reporter, critic, essayist, and editor, and graphic novel columnist for the New York Times.

Issue No. 172

The Fires of Creation
Sam Thielman

The Fires of Creation

by Sam Thielman

The earliest story of self-immolation that I know is in Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, in which Heracles enlists his son, Hyllus, to help him build the pyre upon which he prefers to die rather than let the blood of the venomous Hydra consume him. It is the only way he will find relief. “[B]e the healer of my illness and sole physician of my agony,” he begs Hyllus. 

In Ovid’s retelling of the story for his Metamorphoses, Hercules is burned half away, leaving only his immortal part. 

Meanwhile, all that the flames could ravage had been disposed of
by Vulcan. Hercules’ body no longer survived in a form 
which others could recognize. Every feature he owed to his mother
had gone, and he only preserved the marks of his father Jupiter.

Metamorphoses Book 9, 262-265

The poetry of Sophocles and Ovid is as close to immortality as an earthbound thing can be, in both cases investing the themes of self-immolation and defiance with appropriate solemnity and gravity, as in a religious text—just as Thích Quảng Đức made sure his last words were carefully transcribed and distributed before his death: “Before closing my eyes and moving towards the vision of the Buddha, I respectfully plead to President Ngô Đình Diệm to take a mind of compassion towards the people of the nation and implement religious equality to maintain the strength of the homeland eternally. I call the venerables, reverends, members of the sangha and the lay Buddhists to organize in solidarity to make sacrifices to protect Buddhism.” 

Đức was the Vietnamese Mahayana monk who set himself on fire in the middle of a busy Saigon street on 11 June, 1963 in protest of the persecution of the country’s Buddhist majority by U.S.-backed Roman Catholic ruler Ngô Đình Diệm. Many people have killed themselves in this way since then, in the declared service of causes both just and unjust, but of them, Đức’s image—captured in two perfect, unbearable black-and-white photos by Malcolm Browne—has remained perhaps the most indelible.