The Diary of a Hanged Man

June 14

I have walked all this way to write you this letter. I am at the the café, though not the usual café. There is an obnoxious music that troubles my thoughts and rattles my words. I hope you will forgive me for my inadequate language, perhaps still further do I seek your forgiveness that I should demand that you blame it on these wretched sounds. I walked here with a great deal of energy, inspiration filling my organism from all sides. It was utterly delightful, I felt my head transformed into a lightbulb. Many whisperings, angelic or demonic I am unsure, for they seem to sound decidedly similar. Brother! I have discovered the source of all the pain! The headache! Oh, it is only so simple, too simple, such that it reaches to an incomparable complexity. I have only been full. Yes, brother, I have been full. I have been experiencing the organismic inadequacies of a full stomach. I have only felt the pangs of a disorienting gastric inertia, of a bloated gut, of an inspired soul. Oh! There is much to write! Nay, I am compelled to write. I have seen a crow today, brother, do you believe it? I gathered the indeterminate mass of feelings and discernments into a readable document. I will attach it to this letter. My ideas are becoming evil, atheist. I think the devil will visit me in my sleep soon, perhaps only to impart more ideas. Good bye, brother.

July 1

How are you, brother? I hope you are well. The devil has visited me last night, he told me this:

“Oh stars! Oh heavens! Oh bright, obedient soul! Oh repentant sinner, oh humble saint; For what resists the reward of God’s sustenance more obstinately than the arrogant doer of good? He whose good works have led him to perdition. I! Me! I have seduced him into a vile, satanic, exuberant, self-congratulatory disposition. Beware! The good works which destroy humility are far worse than an evil act which breaks the heart and causes a man’s eyes to water in self-repulsion, and causes the knees to grow weak, so that his head may find a resting place on the ever-grateful, never dissatisfied earth, and so that his tongue may find everlasting pleasure in one’s private confession to God. Why do I reveal this secret? This diamond? I am unsure. Behold! This evil is infinitely better than any good, for, indeed, God loves the broken hearted. Indeed, God loves the broken hearted”

July 2

Brother, I will not greet you in this letter. For no reason. I am trembling now. I bid you close your eyes and intuit the trembling of my confounded form! I am trembling all over. I have just discovered the determinedness of my existence! Yes, discovered it with mathematical precision! It was a moment long, a feeling heavier than a neutron star. I will attach my recollection to this letter. I will not bid you a farewell either.

July 7

Brother, I have just come from the grocer. I sat in a pleasant field on the way and decided there to eat an apple I had just got from the grocer. I ate all of them! The whole bag! Brother, I daresay there may have been ten or twelve apples filling the space of that fated bag. Brother, I don’t know what’s gotten a grip over me, but it is in exertions like these I am excitedly joyful and pleasant within the wandering voids of my aimless soul. I looked a complete madman to eat so many apples at once. It was precisely this fear of the appearance of madness that I fought with all my strength. The idea occurred to me suddenly. I am training myself in the art of obeying first and, consequently, my most irrational urgings. Perhaps they are the most sensible? Perhaps much thought is what drives a man to increasingly greater degrees of senseless irrationality. Ah, the inverse calculation! I will send you this document in a future letter. Confounded reason! Blasted logic! Logic has been my foremost tormentor all my life. I have taken years to learn to defend myself against this innermost pirate. Oh, he is a plunderer! Logic! Beware, for he might conquer and reappropriate all the fire and breath of your soul to his confounded, lifeless dominion. I have no work, I am living off of father’s gratitude. Ah! The shame! But to be a fateless worker is evermore shameful. I apologize for the shortness of this letter. I am writing a most worthless and meaningless little novel which is possessed of absolutely zero merit. I think to write such drivel is good for my morbid philosophical taste. It is perfectly absurd, I wrote it all in response to my first imaginings. I tell you, the writer must never write from his imagination. Work borne out of imagination is always rubbish. He must write from pain, pain borne from his insane determinedness and stubborn clinging onto his path. It must be borne from the thousand lashings delivered from the savage, merciless hands of principle. The unbearable nagging of a profound destiny bid one go running after it! He must write from the depths of those innumerable silent experiences he experiences most loudly and deafeningly in the quiet frozenness of his private bedroom. Yes! There, in the squared, dimensionless smallness of his bedroom is his heart positively lit ablaze by the incessant scratching of his magnanimous isolation. I show you now the trash of my imagining. I call it, ‘Sanji’. One should consider it a great evidence of a profound, sincere friendship when one is willingly shown the trash of another’s efforts. It is all from theory, imagination. I will attach it to this letter. Read it, I urge you. I am going to drink my fourth double-espresso of today. It is six in the afternoon. Good bye, brother.

July 10

Do you know what I am addicted to, brother? Sitting next to beautiful women. Yes, precisely that. I never look at them or speak to them, for I have this fatal idea – oh, damn my ideas! – this fatal idea that she will come to me! Yes! Oh, many days I sit at the café; everyday the idea recycling anew. That the woman – that woman! Yes, that woman will pry herself, of her own accord, into the bosom of my life! I think I am of a good face, no? I reckon the face is more grand in its allusiveness and hiddenness to that possessor of the face than I am able to imagine. I sit, day after day. I daresay my confounded delusion, the idea, has gotten me through a library of books! Oh, what is study, if not next to the idea! Yes, right. Woman is the idea. That woman. I am in love with an idea. I go home and make love to ideas, not flesh. I daresay flesh is better. I want her very bad. She is sitting next to me now. Do you know I feel the turbulent winds of mutual attraction smiting me about the breast? I think she is trying to get a hold of my attention. My, how my long loyalty to this fatal delusion has taught me the science of body language! From my periphery! But, brother, will she get up and leave? Will I end yet another aimless, moonlit night, making love to ideas? I am stubborn. She must come to me, else I will be single forever. I will write to you more on the success of today, if it happens. I am optimistic.

July 11th

I hold my breath sitting next to her. How much can a reflective man endure, sitting two-handspans from his idea? No, it hurts. But how it hurts so beautifully! To be dead is better, I say to myself. ‘Yes, to be dead is better’. To be the flunkey of an idea, an idea! Chased in every direction with a flogging whip by an idea! To be dead is assuredly better. How do I do the deed? Oh, to hell with foolish ambiguity! How do I end my life nobly? So that I can be assured God will not punish me? That is the only thing which keeps me clinging to the dry breast of life. I am sucking only an impoverished powder, there is no liquid milk. If only I could know with mathematical certainty that God would not punish me! How I would fling myself from the height of mortality, all while singing a delicate tune!

July 12th

To leave the thing when it is most seductive and attractive. The training of the sage soul To thrive on spiritual resistance, on the impossibility of invincible temptation.

July 13th

I am a comedian. I am perpetually jeering. Reality has made the fatal error of inciting me into an uncontrollable, silent, spiritual laughter. I am always laughing. Why is the suicide such a big deal? I contemplate the doing of it as I contemplate the foods I plan to eat for dinner. It is just as trivial. Perhaps more so, for in this action there is nothing other than the cessation of all trivialities. So, apart from its awesome grandness, in its consequential import, it is a yawn of a triviality. I am tempted into continuing the senseless procession of indistinct days and nights, only because the weakness of my resolve allows the delusion that ‘some new change is on the way’, to hound me incessantly. I don’t think God will send me to hell. I have asked many close friends to intercede on my behalf should I be standing in front of God, awaiting judgement.

July 14

I feel I have given up most mercilessly and irreversibly on those pursuits all defining in my goal, in my path. I feel as if I were naked, bare before the fullness of my reality as this man. What am I now? For what motive power could possibly sustain the fire of my existence if not the motive power of the plan, the goal? Is not man defined most fully by his plans? Is not the whole of his particularness a function of his projects? Of his yearning? Ah, and what is yearning! Brother, never ask me such an important question! There is nothing of a greater poisonous corruptedness, a greater spiritual malignancy, a quicker road to spiritual implosion, a more instantaneous counter- antidote than an important question! Oh, wouldn’t you leave me naked in my distraction? I wish nothing more than to be the commonest of common people, the pinnacle of commonality. Only the common man is happy, the rest are miserable, addicted to their misery.

July 19

Should one ever force himself to write? If one ever forces himself to write one should be certain that such writing is worthless and should be promptly discarded. I tell you now that there is ever a moment of inspiration, of compulsion, that pull a man into the threshold of his pen, such that the idea of ‘forced’ writing is at once turned into a perfect absurdity. The word of inspiration is better than a book of imagination. Imagination is the child of naïve ambition. No, undeserved ambition. Perhaps mixed just slightly with a haughty conceit. I am working hard to disintegrate my faculty of imagination. I sit under a cool waterfall, ice-cold, after eight in the evening, and let myself be pasteurized of all imagining. I will be pure lord, God! I will be pure!

July20

This insane sensitivity has come over me. I am in tune with every breath of God’s decree, everything has meaning. The way I am postured now reveals to me a million secrets of a submerged cosmos. Brother, should I tell you my description of hell? I daresay I am confident it is perfectly accurate. I think hell is merely a congregation of vain philosophers talking drivel and speculating for all eternity.

July 20

No one writes under my conditions! I feel I were caught between two walls driving towards each other with devilish momentum; but, alas, a rope – never mind the rope. I have been eating little, thinking less, and drinking much, and it seems my ideas are more intelligent than ever. Tea, I drink tea. Green tea, always room temperature. I feel it to be the fuel of my originality. When I feel myself to be low on original thought, I drink my tea. Coffee, too, but it is not functional. Coffee I drink only because I cannot imagine myself not drinking it.

July 20

I have this insane wealth of feeling. I am debilitatingly sensitive. I am receptive of every wind. That is, those winds which blow with impossible subtlety within the irreversible depths of my innermost being. I do not only feel these winds, I understand them. They impress upon me intellectually. I write now because the winds of suicide have begun tickling the circumference of my inner form once again. They come and go. Sometimes they are so powerful I hasten to capture them, and I tell myself, quite bleakly, ‘has my life really only been a preparation for a most wretched suicide? Everything I had ever experienced? Really?’

July 20

Oh, if not for man’s stupid anxiety! Oh, he would have everything! Does he not see how the bird leaves its nest hungry and comes back satiated? Do they not study the simple creatures of God’s kingdom? Do they not see how they are provided their full sustenance? Without the help of the slightest bit of anxiety or uncertainty? Oh, if only I could enter into this natural state! God, grant me the soul of the ant!

July 20

I am particularly fond of feeling I want to kill myself in moments of the greatest happiness and joy. I think that happiness aggravates my cynical disposition to its peak.

July 23rd

“That which is desired by reason, as a rule, is superior to that which is desired by the passions” A lie upon lies. How the rationalists have ruined us!

July 25th

Shall I tell you a secret concerning beauty? It is thus, in order: To be in a dire situation. To struggle against the desire for anxiety. To be calm. To eat little. To walk much. To drink much tea. To rely on God.

(The last point is a general rule. It is always first)

That is all.

July 26th

Have you ever gotten to a point in your life where your only possessions were books, loneliness, wanderings, aimless wanderings, café’s, chance encounters, extreme bliss, extreme despair, obsession with the idea of suicide, obsessions with the idea of becoming a god, and fleeting time? Have you, oh reader, even imagined such a fate for a man! A man who sleeps with no plans, and wakes up with no plans, and is often disappointed that he wakes up at all? Oh, such a life is necessarily unbearable. One needs the cooling mechanism of work and occupation! I am now in the heart of randomness, in the bosom of uncertainty. I am living off of prayer. I have nothing else. To miss a prayer is equivalent to missing a meal. If I do not cling onto God I will go mad. I know with certainty that madness is the only consequence.

July 26th

There are no greetings when one introduces the ‘solipsistic meditations’.

July 26th

I have been made with a human’s breast, an angel’s wings, and a devil’s brain. All my thoughts are evil. All my thoughts are suspicious, gloomy, supra rationalistic, sarcastic, jeering, abominably self-annihilatory, blasphemous, and, worst of all, philosophical. All my thoughts are born of a diabolical whispering. How many a time have I felt the hot breath of a disgustingly eloquent, much too reasoning fiend leaning upon the left side of my frame with whisperings of new ‘ideas’ and ‘plannings’? And are not all these plannings nothing but the literary manifestation of a ‘self-judgement unto death’? Oh, the cold rationality of a hot-blooded satan! I say, I am formed of angel wings! Often I fly up, soaring loudly and exuberantly, into a manifold joyful heaven. But-alas! My evil devil’s brain is weighty, oh, all too weighty! Immediately, after a teasing skyrocket upwards, I begin my discreet plunge into a dark abyss; one filled with-oh reader! Spare me! I tire of words, language, is that all I am good for? A dark abyss filled to the brim with the panting breath of a dreary cosmic nihilism; Alas, is not its respiratory frame none other than a masterpiece of logical formulas, of theories, of plannings, of the vilest aspect of human energies? It has come to my attention that divine decree will not spare me even a single droplet of lonesome suffering. So I will accept. Indeed, my mind is not like other minds. It is powerful, dark, ugly, beautiful, made of eight arms and thirty three ears. Forgive me, reader. I have reached the end of my powers. The document is no more.

July 27th

I am very glad to have recorded my crazy thoughts. They are often times my most intelligent.

July 27th

I want a woman, not very intelligent, but one who feels much. Intelligence is good, too, only often it gets in the way of feeling. I want to relate to her the depths of my innermost contemplations, so that she will understand me, not because she has read the books I have read, or similar books, or has been possessed of similar thoughts, but only because she is a woman of nature; so that, because she is close to nature, to her nature, she feels all that can be felt when it presents itself before her.