In other words, would I have to suppress the poignancy and the irony to convince myself?

Then I thought about this a bit more and it actually turned into a question with a wider scope of application.
Could this be seen as a dividing line between fundamentalism and commitment that is not fundamentalism? The presence or absence of the sense of poignancy and irony?
If in the act of fighting a war, of defending a religion or a set of beliefs I could appreciate the poignancy of the endeavor, it would not be a fundamentalist stance.
And if that poignancy wasn’t there, if it was suppressed, it would be fundamentalist.

Does this make sense?

It sounds right to say that the heart must be linked to the gate of speech, voice, or song. It is the gate of the blues perhaps, the raw outflow of that what is undigestable by itself, unless shared. In Dutch we have a saying which translates as “carrying one’s heart on the tongue” which pertains to people who refrain from filtering their speech for want of political correctness. They will say it, as it is! Or, more accurately, as they perceive it, which isn’t usually the same thing. Whereas an urge for honesty may be commendable, an unimpeded flow of opinionated bile is nothing less than nauseating. The difference between the two, I would wager, is the measure of culture. Or sophisitication. Or art…isn’t it the privilige of the most elevated of singers to sing it AS IT IS? Isn’t it this understanding, which, so often brinking on destruction, which is so highly revered in the history of pop-culture? Singing it as it is, but burning for it a breathtaking rate… Is every rock star a bodhisattva? I hope not, although I have a weak spot for Meatloaf.
What a relief to envision the Buddha as a blues singer, crooning and wailing, coaxing and cajoling us to join in the chorus praising the infinite purity of the phenomenal world!
Open the gates…

‘Asking is the devotion of thought’ sounds like the endless self-imposed agony the Buddha personally and the whole Vajrayana tradition warns against: making conceptuality one’s cognitive tool in realms beyond its capability. Not that this is obliged to be frustrating. In emptiness, clarity and confidence are the extinction of asking. This is the plateau from which mountains of visionary experience begin to rise up. Theistical culture, however, asserts that authentic visionary experience has its source outside the universe. There is no analogy to Buddhism, a natural transition from philosophy to envisionment. Hereby hangs the uneasy story of the intellect in western culture.

The other ‘pole of heroism’ is a mirror image. Doggedly demanding ’somehow on’ suppresses the urge to pause, to relax, to think, to ask. The two acts of ‘Waiting for Godot’ were once famously reviewed (by Vivian Mercier) as ‘nothing happens, twice.’ Beckett’s two protagonists spend a long time mooching about under a tree, but without any conclusion about nothingness akin to the Buddha’s. In the last lines of the play they finally decide to go; but they do not move. The curtain could rise again after it has fallen at the end of ‘Waiting for Godot’, and the two tramps would still be there, waiting for some deus ex machina like they were at the beginning.

Emptiness leads to compassionate activity. But a temporarily exhausted non-conceptual state can only give birth to apathy – or theism. When it gets its energy back there is a second act, and then the curtain keeps rising again and again on the same stuck scene, the whole theatrical run of samsara.

Emptiness is one-pointed and open in all directions. One cannot be ‘torn’ in emptiness. It is, as you say, both mighty and refined. In the face of oscillating dualism, the cluelessness you mention is itself the greatest clue how to proceed beyond the suspicion of being stuck. Cluelessness, as often in the training of the Mahasiddhas, is intelligent. Buddhism seems to be the only tradition which finds inspiration in such an unlikely, overlooked, neglected phase of human experience.

You are right, waking up after killing yourself could be painful. The state of mind with which we wake up after death is strongly influenced by the previous state of mind. All religions recognise this, and hence emphasise e.g. deathbed confession and repentance. Vajrayana teachings say that in the bardo between lives we remember our previous lives the way we remember yesterday. ‘Yesterday… hmm… what was I doing yesterday?’ The memory is quickly forgotten because it has become too vague, disjointed and meaningless. It is just like the compacted residue of several different dreams of the night before. That is why it is hard to grasp or reconstruct, or to find an authentic basis for moving on from the place we now find ourselves, unless we used to have strong motivation to spend every day cultivating awareness – i.e through practicing.

If one were to wake up with a hellishly miserable frame of mind and no way of understanding where that came from any more, that would seriously prejudice one’s chances of a successful passage through the bardo of visions.

Waking up has always been an analogy for realisation, which is why the Buddha described himself as ‘the one who has woken up’ (which is what bodhi implies). A characteristic of awakened mind is recognising that, if this is wakefulness, all that other lifetime was spent in a state which was not awake; other people all around are living like that right now and the impulse is to go right ahead and wake them up, explain to them what they’re missing. This was how the Buddha talked to his former meditation companions when he met up with them after leaving the site of the bodhi tree, and one by one they woke up in the light of his explanations.

Yours would make a fine teaching story one day. Meanwhile it is a fine story of how someone came to see the value – and the sense – in being a practitioner.

Lechayim!