When you're unhinged, things make their way out of you that should be kept inside, and other things get in that ought to be shut out. The locks lose their powers. The guards go to sleep. The passwords fail.

Was this a betrayal, or was it an act of courage? Perhaps both. Neither one involves forethought: such things take place in an instant, in an eyeblink. This can only be because they have been rehearsed by us already, over and over, in silence and darkness; in such silence, such darkness, that we are ignorant of them ourselves. Blind but sure-footed, we step forward as if into a remembered dance.

The film [Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth] opens with an Albanian blood feud and goes on to delve into, for instance, prison systems, underpaid tomato pickers, the gulf oil spill. It's all woven together in a sensuous, oblique way that's not the same as the single-message kind of documentary we're used to, with an "answer" at the end. It's more like an exploration. Sort of like what you do with Birth of a Nation.

In the First World War, people would be receiving letters from loved ones who had been dead for weeks, and they would not know until that black-bordered telegram arrived. I remember, of course, when it was letters only, or the telephone, and you did not make expensive long-distance calls unless it was, "Come home to the funeral," or the like.

Stick a shovel into the ground almost anywhere and some horrible thing or other will come to light. Good for trade, we thrive on bones; without them there'd be no stories.

In the end, we'll all become stories.

A suicide is both a rebuke to the living and a puzzle that defies them to solve it. Like a poem, suicide is finished and refuses to answer questions as to its final cause.