Meaning in the Madness?

It doesn’t seem likely that the window of public interest will stay open much longer for the mass suicide down in Rancho Santa Fe. From the start, a curious emotional lethargy has enveloped the case. Yes, it was extraordinary, frightful, pathetic. Yes, it was newsworthy, interesting.

Still, its power to captivate--and to convey higher meaning--was stunted. This was not Jonestown, with poison squirted down the throats of crying children, with bodies writhing in the dirt of some heart-of-darkness jungle encampment. This was not Waco, which made a battleground of the line between state and church: The American flag flapping in the Texas wind, as the tanks punched through the walls and the flames consumed the Branch Dividians where they hid.

What happened in the rented mansion on Colina Norte was almost banal by comparison. It was a tidy departure, carried out by apparently consenting adults. They left behind computerized epistles and even video documentaries to explain their behavior, erasing almost all angles of mystery. They even cleaned up after themselves, taking the suffocation bags out with the garbage, until there was no one left to perform the chore.

So what great epiphanies can be culled from those 39 corpses? Where is the moral to the story? The “lessons,” such as they are, seem fairly obvious:

Yes, people go crazy and sometimes, not often, in bunches.

Yes, most people are lonely, forever looking for a way to escape the quiet desperation.

Yes, sometimes lonely people join cults.

Or maybe they go shopping, or take to the bottle, or lose themselves in work. Or find Jesus. Or Buddha.

And yes, one scoffer’s cult is another believer’s religion. Almost all forms of religious faith have one foot planted in the earth, while the other stretches toward a realm beyond. These strangers in Rancho Santa Fe did not invent the idea that leaving one’s temporal existence--shedding the human container, they called it--was a step toward heaven.

*

God said to Abraham, Kill me a son

Abe said, God, you must be putting me on.

--Bob Dylan, “Highway 61 Revisited.”

*

Yes, it’s sad when people die. Every man is some mother’s son, every woman some father’s daughter. These 39 were no different. All, at some level, will be missed by someone. This universal sadness of death is never lessened by the fact that nobody escapes it. For all the misery in the world, most people remain chary about pursuing the uncertain alternative.

“I have always believed,” the writer William Saroyan said from his deathbed, “that an exception would be made in my case. Now what?”

Now what?

That is the question raised by death every time, across the ages. In this matter, the question simply was multiplied by a factor of 39. These people did not invent suicide, were not the first to force the issue. It’s possible some were more eager to launch than others. In a couple wrenching moments on those otherwise surreal exits tapes, a woman’s voice catches and trembles, a man’s knees involuntarily twitch. For adults, they seemed an awful lot like children--little lost lambs, bound for laughter.

“Maybe they are crazy, for all I know,” one woman acknowledged. “But I don’t have any choice but to go for it, because I have been on this planet for 31 years and there’s nothing here for me.”

*

All the lonely people, where do they all come from?

All the lonely people, where do they all belong?

*

Yes, many of the Heaven’s Gate members were intelligent, the product of solid families. But cults rarely recruit indigent incompetents. There’s no profit in it. That they were skilled with computers also has been seen as significant somehow. Well, this was no virtual Jonestown. The Internet does not make people go crazy. It just gives crazy people a forum.

More than anything, the spacey ramblings published on the Heaven’s Gate web pages resemble the crackpot letters that pour into newspaper city desks everywhere. Typically, these missives are printed in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS, and warn of many wild things. Nobody takes them seriously; they wind up tacked to a common bulletin board, for the amusement of all.

And what of the Hale-Bopp comet, the talk of a spaceship lurking in its tail? This one was not invented by the Heaven’s Gate people, either. It’s been the talk of New Age bookstores and late, late night radio for months. It is the stuff of comic books--entertaining, but meaningless. On Friday, an astronomer who discovered Hale-Bopp called a press conference to address the comet angle.

“For all its beauty, its magnificence, its splendor,” said Alan Hale, “all it is is a dirty snowball that’s orbiting the sun. Nothing more.”

Nothing more.

It seems the proper exit line.

Don’t look for too much meaning in madness.