MADNESS or the Madness of Being (a Writer) – Alexander Kattke

July 17, 2024

Reject the hypothetical.

Embrace the shadow.

I have reconciled with the depression. My depression is sourced from tainted memories and those memories create feelings of sadness, rage, and helplessness. What do those memories spell out to me? The memories tell me that I am an evil failure. The solution is to embody the depression. Let the emotions do what they demand and have them let loose and be in control of my state of being and become transformed into the doer of what that embodiment of hatred dictates. Surrender.
        Burn the bridge.
        Take no prisoners.
        I found my love of writing when I was fifteen and began reading the materials of Clive Barker and H.P. Lovecraft. Previously I had read Edgar Allan Poe and whatever horror fiction that would turn up but ultimately was so mediocre that I have forgotten nearly all of that era of influence. My desire was to create a perfect film representing pure imagery –referred to as Absolute Films- but due to various limitations, this was beyond my reach and I had instead settled upon my own kingdom of mediocrity in deciding on becoming a writer. I fell into the lofty idealization, imagining my future being posh and mildly opulent. Free of family and free of that influence. But reality crashed harder and harder as my brain kept expanding with not just knowledge and life experience but those harsh truths you don’t share. You hide those harsh truths out of convenience. You fail at hiding your disgust at the human condition via the proxy of characters and surrealist imagery but end up losing your mind and protecting the abused horse. And in so doing, it creates another delusion that may run parallel to your mania where you are the misunderstood genius. Yet, all of those mistakes are easily swept aside by the fact you were still growing as a human and you believed in the dream of being. You start neglecting the reality of this world, the world in which you read this writing at this very moment, and think how much better and profound it would all be if people embraced cultured literacy. You believe that there is a spark to be nurtured and you may unintentionally proselytize about the joy of writing and how you evolved. Beyond the commercial savagery of writing –which isn’t really writing, I would argue it’s language manipulation not at all different from a cliché bedtime story you enunciate to the sleepy child- it is an expulsion of an honest thought. Artaud referred to these thoughts as being pure and untainted. We (I) aspire for that as well and in the recess of our imagination we envision the work being discovered and appraised like all the dead great ones before us where we ignore their many flaws in our delusion of writing. Writing is niche. Writing is misunderstood. Writing promotes elitism and makes you despise not just the illiterate but the semi-literate whose command of English is but a phantom of the language itself. The writer knows this and mocks the plebeian by using esoteric words from dead languages. Writing is talking to yourself. Writing is disguised schizophrenia but a kind you share. Share in my madness. Writing is the in-between, an invisible stepping stone to not necessarily higher but more visible aspirations of artistic expression. The writer hopes to achieve greater things than writing. No one should want to be a writer for the intellect is the least stimulated part of the human condition. It is open to debate whether this is but the limits of human intellect or all part of social engineering by the usual suspects. Even now as I write this, I know a handful of people will make it this far and as they read these words they’ll wonder where their tribute and affection for them will be. As they trace these very words they prepare for that invective roar against the world itself; making these words no different than ones written by the infinitely more successful but still appealing to a literate but isolated niche. You have daytime fantasies infecting the most absurd and strange into mainstream prose which has only been successful in the manner of shitposting. 
        Shitposting is another manifestation of how writing can be weaponized. This is obvious and you think right now to propaganda and those devastating bibles and screeds. How many billions has the Communist Manifesto claimed? Right now I alienated several potential readers by going political but I do so only out of example because political writing is temporary at worst and only a matter of political record at best. But in committing this transgression you allow those negative traits to be nakedly visible –recalling Lovecraft and his thoughts on the creation of man. 
        Just one of endless examples. Many men have written books espousing their real self to the world under their real name. These men are fools just like myself, because you break that invisible rule imposed by society where you don’t overshare your personal life. No one wants to know how many times you masturbate and to what. That led to the genesis of Reddit. 
        It is foolish to be so visible and make your opinion so opulent & oppressive. Even if you reject taking a side it is still selected for you as referenced with Nietzsche and his regretful association –regrettable due to misunderstanding. Nietzsche’s error was thinking that he selected the wrong audience (he lamented that he wrote in German and wished he wrote in French) where his true error is assuming that everyone can understand even the simplest of language. Mankind is a struggling error –as beautiful as a sewing machine and umbrella on an operating table- and I am not racist because my hatred extends beyond race and into the human condition itself where I feel this shame as being part of the same species that will reject this out of their misunderstanding and reach for their speak-and-spell manifestations and wiki pages to simplify it further out of inconvenience due to time or their limited understanding of complex thought. This is all part of writing. You write knowing you will be misinterpreted. You write in rhyming order to express those horrible and repellent thoughts in new reclamations and orders of chaos. The greatest writers rhyme to hide the true nature of the crime behind the text.
        You stop. Walk away. Look at something else. Eat. Piss. Shit. Talk to someone. Stare dolefully at your pets for their attention. Wondering what is this confession in a book seesawing between condemnation & appraisal of suicide. My confession is that my suicide attempts have reinvigorated my mind and in doing so destroyed that last boundary between what I say and type. And in that self-baptism I thank my depression for showing me this sacred form of pain leading to a freedom previously unknown to me. For example: someone asks you for an opinion and you give an honest answer without nicety. That person stops speaking to you. That is currently where I am. 
        These are ideas you play with when you start writing and you really think that you can do something no one has ever seen before and resulting in messy failures, unread confessions, and glorified Choose Your Own Adventure abominations such as House of Leaves –truly, one of the most regrettable contributions to the craft of writing where I can proudly say that I can get my point across without the use of stick figure etchings recalling the primitive attempts of the caveman and demanding the reader re-read the page. You think you’re special and can rewrite all the rules but soon you realize the reality of it all –with endless examples of failed anarchist utopias. I stop and look over this text where I am reminded of when I was seventeen and shared a book in progress with my friend (who as of late has ignored me for reasons I do not fully know but presumably have to do with my latest suicide attempts) and he told me how much more interesting the text was when I was honest while communicating directly to the reader and no longer paying ode to my French literary pervert influences.
        But I continued to repress and wanted the idealization of a writer: that image hunched over your means of typing made romantic with a muse nearby and a doting pet in watch. Sadly, the true image of a writer is someone in the void searching for the means to climb out of it. The writer –even acclaimed geniuses past- is delusional in thinking there is escape or even real contentment I.E. I am now satisfied with what I have created because you’re not. You never are. It only ends when you die and shame on the charlatans who call themselves writers who sell their books as a means to escape for all who read it. Shame on me for once believing that as well. You don’t even understand what I’m writing right now, do you? I don’t apologize for that offense and games of sub and dom are not to my interest where I will write appeasing to your fetish not unless you pay me enough to retire. You reconcile with these limitations and begin to repeat yourself, writers often repeat themselves for monetary purposes and we all have that thought where you reach into those neglected catalogs thinking to yourself “Wow, a shame they kept writing. They should have ended right here. X marks the dot. A pity they missed that date of expiration.” Where you as the writer gorge on that sour milk because you are starving.
        Any moment now I expect my ultra-violent imagination to hijack this long thought and have an ultimate point to be made about the nature of being, the nature of creation, the hate you have manifest & nurtured, the hate you downplay for those favors, the hate as a creative outlet where you don’t need to be Sigmund Freud to guess at its origin. You think to yourself “He really hates people. He must have been raped. He must have been beaten. He must have been destitute. He must have been homeless & neglected.” I answer yes to all.
        Even now my brain courses in rage wanting to be set free. Let the madness flow. Let it dictate these words. It wants to hurt you the reader. That is my goal. Share my pain. Become transformed and warped by it. My words are a cleansing fire and this is a fountain I share. That is my confession that no one asked for. Sade was maybe the only true writer in that he was honest with his intentions and it would be his sweet joy to know the reader wept and killed themselves and killed others after reading. That is the true meaning of Sade that the scholar and artist and reader have greatly misunderstood: he does not care and wants to see you suffer because he was a pedophile rapist himself who successfully wrote as a form of revenge against society and his words were so sweet that he continues to manipulate you even now in creating an eternal idea of evil, and this is why Sade is referenced in Alpha & Omega terms. In modern context; Sade would endorse anything that behooves his ideology to destroy the mind and soul of the foolish who willfully consume that bitter fruit under the disguise of vice. If Sade’s voice had survived recording, rest assured that A.I. would have him sing duets with those other destroyers of society recalling the Reverend Jim Jones and Henry Kissinger.
        Believe you me, my evil is equal. If I so want you to die then I will gladly take your hand so we both fall. Share in my madness:
        Another apocalypse. Another for the pile. The untold many. Ignored and rewritten by the scholars of history. Which vision appeals to you, the beginning or ending of life itself? Do you trust my abilities as the anarchist historian or the seer possessed by insanity? Do you prefer one with references you won’t know to make the pain all the more bearable so you do not see those you love destroyed and deny that harsh truth that one day all men will be forgotten?
        From a split between Earth & Moon, a tear, an emerging hole, mimicking birth where the genitals formed, mimicking death where the first cut in autopsy is made, power, light, purity in destruction, flowery words to match its description, the horror of the unknown that simply is, such as life without motive, a virgin birth, the rape of the amnesiac, the death of witnesses and their language, here comes the great end and beginning, the godly force, the embodiment of pain, that which proceeds consciousness, before imagination could be imagined, before and after the first and last word, infinite, eternal, nothingness, violent anti-creation, the fire that takes and leaves a cleared land to be rebuilt, from that void it pulls in all directions not just galactic but throughout time itself. A void that reaches all the way toward the inception of human life on dirty waters and with the same hand extinguishes the last man made to see the dying sun. 
        Behold the familial reference. Behold the damnation of parenthood, childhood, the teenage years, first love, first death, first rape, first birth, first in all that inelegant destruction as the family is NOT the apex of human creation. The family is a side effect of willing new ideas, new imaginations, new and disturbing life & death processes where one day the genius scientist is born to master human cloning to bypass that great error of having a family.
        Family who read this now –or most likely have someone explaining this to you through the brain fog and mind plaque- now know that I’ve always hated you.
        Ah, but life crumbles just in the presence of the great void that reaches beyond life itself; extinguishing the fetus, making sperm blind and starve, feasting on the unripe eggs of birth and spitting out the offal like apple cores. But it reaches past that to make you suffer where the trillions of sentient life are tortured by near-infinite abortions where the void wills creation & destruction in the ruined and diseased womb till it collapses like the cave housing the doomsday cult awaiting the end so they may rejoice in a rebirth that never happens. Your rebirth may as well have become the dried up remains used to feed the pet fish. As man play acts as the warrior, pretending to be the knower of all, pretending to be peaceful and benign, pretending to be nice while being the spy with a garrote around society’s neck and dropping down with child-like enthusiasm on the world’s trampoline filled with endless decapitations. Man is cattle, man is pointless, man is no more, the void is the reflection without answer, and it does not steal your soul like the enchanted mirror but is merely proof that it was never there. 
        Pity it all away. Give the grieving and the dying that pity to feed from. Be the giving hand that overfeeds the malnourished Holocaust survivor where they unknowingly die. Be the evil in joy. 
        The void grows, mocking the life process and our frivolous attempt at maintaining order in which we call ‘society’ by making all achievement pointless, reminding us that friendship ends and love dies. The void takes that low-hanging fruit.
        Art is buried and destroyed. Formerly worshipped and annihilated by the primitive mind, because achievement is perception in the mind’s eye where the plebeian responds to the astronaut who rants holy proclamations from overseeing the entirety of Earth from space with a great big empty-headed “so what?” to their achievement. The writing of this text is treated the same as a page of coupons or junk mail to the recipient who simply does not care. Never you mind the game of money laundering and tax-evasion under the guise of art; even the purity of sacrifice is acclimated to the pitying and dying wretches of society.  
        There are no parts.
        There are no divinations.
        You cannot organize chaos.
        You can pick and choose your influence.
        But you cannot deny the Abraxian core of nature.
        You cannot celebrate the works of a pedophile but deny affiliation.
        But you can take up a cause and demand death to all unoriginal thought.
        The void reaches language itself. Creeping to the point of origin, slicing off the tongue of the first mammal who attempted speech, these very words are the failing hailstones from apocalyptic storms imprinting themselves on bodies and landscapes –pummeling them into new forms of being. Pummeling them further until nothing remains but the very atoms that dissipate into the great nothingness of being.
        Beyond petty imitations of the profundity –that which you give the name language- the void annihilates history where bodies without soul or mind are the quickest to burn in the sunder of the last moments of illumination from a vanquished sun, the meaningless vessel handled the same as the recycled scraps of cardboard that the street urchin hides in and the lowly worker recycles, return to the mountaintop of garbage where you were born. Next came the beautiful ones, the passable and the intellectual, those opposite ends of achievement to grow the body or mind or being fortunate enough to achieve both through the lottery of DNA or the fortuity of being born in the right place and time. Their extinction is evermore prolonged because it is done to living things that have consciousness; reflecting the irony of a crocodile being skinned alive for its meat and a dog being skinned alive for its fur where the  general public cares about one more than the other. The awakened man –so named because their pain is the most visible- is subjected to the agony of existential evisceration of mind and body. They are reminded over and over in gleeful mockery over their point of origin being nothing and their bodies are broken down and taken away from them, forcibly implanting the knowledge that when you die you must let go as though the enlightened guru had their hands replaced by the murderous surgeon. Henceforth, the awakened mammals who only worship the beautiful parts of being while ignoring the mask in which the monster hides that gracefully undoes their state of joy, all praise be to false gods and false hope, those that you worship may be the shadow within you and as you step up from bended knee to give that blighted figure the divine kiss they sever the purloined lips and hold them up to the sky against sun and moon and stars to give the galaxy a bloody smile and to finally give your monster a real face. I speak in metaphors to disguise expressions for fucker and lover. Those false hopes and temporary escapes. See the object of your affection subjected to prolonged surgery without anesthetic, behold the dark miracle of science found in vivisection where the void pulls forth from the offal the ultimate proof that you are nothing and will always be just that. From nothing is no more thought and no more language and no more imagination, the void proves the unfortunate truth that all men are not created equal. Not all men can understand this language or its meaning. The void returns mankind to a state prior to where thought first began and before the first spark. Be nothing and dead. Be dead and nothing.
        Finally, it is history itself containing all of mankind’s achievements that are taken. Buried and forgotten, even easier to control than life itself, because it is knowledge controlled by a handful of humans. Where it is so simple to remove and burn away, as simple as an assassin’s ambush or accepting the poisoned cup where all knowledge is erased and you begin again –repeated over and over with bloody coups and revolutions. 
        The void grows again, dissatisfied with devouring humanity and life and history, it reaches to the darkest cosmos to extinguish the first spark. And it is easily crushed. The invisible hand reaches forward, at first delicately palming the origin of our origin and strangling it in the imagined crib –housing what preceded thought itself- whispering to the dying light how it is better to not exist and embrace being the abortion. Removed. Gone. Drain the mind of thought, return to the corpse-like state of being, return to being the dirt, return to volcanic stone, return to lava, return to all base elements, return to a state beyond death itself but given the simplest definition: nothingness. 
        This is where I confess: I wish to never have been born. 
        Death of the idea of the idea. Nothing. Blankness. Returning back to the writer who enjoys having destroyed you, confessing to the confession, in awe of his own competence in reiterating the hypothetical that life is pointless. But there can still be meaning, that profound meaning in pain, given the name destruction is creation, there can still be respite in doing, finding the will to survive and spite what you hate and letting hate be the fuel for ascension to prove wrong what you know is right. Rewriting pain & violence into something greater, the flowery poem as written by the serial killer, the profound thought uttered by the politician and mass murderer; the logician, the philosopher, all men who tried and have shot at the sun.
        Wrap up clichés, steal the best ideas from the many reaching from Schopenhauer to Kierkegaard, from Artaud to Terry A. Davis, from the Reverend Jim Jones to Carl Panzram, from Nietzsche to Ted Kaczynski, from fascist and anti-fascist, stand in two circles of being imagining it to be the black hole with fangs and be envenomed by a disturbing evolution. 
        No more dawdling, circling the drain imagining it to be a black hole thrill ride indulging the dark imagination. The writer steals your attention back to the point of origin, with a teacher’s wand to call on the neglectful student, with the spree killer aiming their sights at the unassuming & nameless, and trades pain for pain before attending your own cremation. 
        The writer seethes and curses at not reaching this artificial number carved out of cast-iron lettering above the sky floating above their head to reach a word count of 5000. Originally it was to be 10000 but they wish to avoid repeating themselves and know the old motto of the entertainer to always leave them wanting more. Leading to more contemplation and contentment at being unfulfilled saying to others “Yes, I am happy. I am glad to have created this.” Knowing it has not but wishing it to happen, have faith, become blind, get lost in the fantasia of artistry and ignore the cynical machinations. Where you curse your existence and now refuse to rhyme, seeing yourself as the dancing ape at a circus before going mad and killing the trainer armed with a teacher’s wand. Embrace hate and savagery, more fuel, more spiteful entries, more disguises, more pointed opinion; if I could will the words on this page to be the nails driving through the cross I would at an instant but staring into the eyes of a dead god who wasn’t there I see myself and no more rhyme or reason. Curse all dying gods. Curse the atheist for knowing & accepting. Curse my species for participating in the great fraud that drags each and every one of us with it like a horse and carriage and should you die you become meat to feed the rest of the sufferers who remain ignorant of their own suffering. 
        Conclusion: pain is good. Depression is good if for nothing else than it makes you appreciate the things around you, it forces contemplation and deep thought but also dangerous thought; dangerous for it may lead to that age-old self-destruction but such is life with freedom of choice. At least for now, side note; value your privacy while you still can. The truly agonizing future Hell which awaits us is a world without pain or sacred expressions. You who read this now, maybe looking for answers or looking for the next disturbing stanza –entranced by my words like a vampire’s hypnotic stare- that is the unfortunate truth about depression, that it is dark evolution, it begins as wax cast from ghostly wick, then evolves to a chrysalis where you may die in that stillborn but self-created process. This is where the mind has those realizations and you know you are a failure climbing out of the pit –born eternally at the wrong place and time- reaching for a hand that may never appear wishing you were in an ocean to float but here comes the starving shark and apocalyptic tsunamis. Become the failure. Become the nothing. The mind evolves to a state where it is content with death and being forgotten. Have no conscious preserved. Burn my books and erase me. I accept it all and know that I have tried. And trying is all you can do, success is temporary, joy is fleeting, those you love and confide in will die just like you and your shrine to them is not eternal –you could scar the planet with their name but the planet will die anyway. The sun will be extinguished. The galaxy is no more. No more life and human achievement. Become erased. Put your hard drives in the microwave to ensure privacy. Sell your eggs to the highest bidder and always pull out to avoid conception. Take note of the serial killer and mass murderer and how their path ran parallel to your favorite nihilist philosopher. Slice the wrist and take the poison; survive and evolve, become stronger, become holy and unholier, embrace bitter knowledge like it is the divine fruit, watch the unending slaughter and make a painting in ode to it, become benign when facing the specter of death all around you, treat bodies as furniture; for what else is to be done when the light is extinguished and there is no more suffering for which to drill? Be warned of a future without suffering and your life is forcibly made to be temporarily eternal where the consciousness is contained in mainframes owned by Amazon and the billionaires that supersede Bezos and the trillionaires who supersede the next in line until it is the ouroboros and your infinite consciousness is gone once again when the galaxy blesses the Earth with a global EMP from solar flares. There can be no eternity even after death. Find peace in nothing. Murder the sun and bring peace to all. It no longer bothers me. Feed me to the wolves like Diogenes. Laugh and spit upon my “grand” material; call me a struggling William S. Burroughs, Lautreamont’s abortion, the remnants of Sade’s jizz rag, Peter Sotos-esque, whatever label relative to your life experience and your attempts to find order in chaos itself. To reiterate and make yourself clear. To double check and ensure there are no survivors.
        If depression is always there, then it’s a part of your mind, it’s something you accept; like flaws in a person, and when you accept the flaws in a person you can accept flaws in yourself. 
        Burn it all away. Burn my body in self-immolation. As my body burns so too does memory and achievement. Let it go and look past. Look in the mirror and practice your confessions. Murder the corrupter. Murder yourself. Plan and achieve and be happy at the failure. Take. Leave. Death. Salute the tank crushing the protest. Masturbate to self-suffering. Whatever you wonder and want to fulfill, play out that imagination and rehearse death in acceptance. To reiterate and redestroy, salt the Earth and dig far past the center and witness the pitiful and uneventful miracle of creation. Gaze upon the records of humanity and know it will be gone, volunteer it to the fire to keep warm for your temporary salvation; destroy and rebuild but remember taking influence even from those you hate and let hate be the fuel to overthrow the ignorant and slothful, trick them to line up for the family photo, burn their records and take note of Stalin’s perfection. Keep enemies close and closer, bear hug them to death and be with that final merciful reclamation. Murder the world and all its error. Be entertained by my madness. This text is my means to understand all of this but you are free to pull what you desire, make me into the evil monster singing damnation, make me the existential angel who recontextualizes your agonizing death, chop it up and reconfigure, I have no say once it exists in the world for the world will return to nothing. Can I be your monster if the monster never truly existed; to break it down further, if we accept flaws in humans and we accept our flaws then we must accept error and do not forsake the order of chaos in divine and reclaimed murder for that is equally acceptable.
        And that is my source of happiness in being content with nothing and applauding the sweet death. Depression is not mental decay. It is the unfortunate truth you accept and build past. Death of children. Death of pets. Death of my friends and loved ones. I kiss the bodies with a smile knowing that they are now nothing and soon I will be.