Jung's Demon

The Last Chapter

THE SUICIDE

“As above, so below, as within, so without, as the universe, so the soul.”

Hermes Trismegistus

Oslo, December 25, 2018

Yo! Whassup ma-fuckers?

Nay, I can’t really pull off some kooky slang and hold you spellbound by virtuoso writing at the very moment of my impending demise. All I could’ve done was to offer you an unaltered, uncompromising, raw story of the madness within and the mayhem it had caused without.

“Beauty will save the world,” wrote Dostoevsky, so listen to the master and come closer, lean over, take a glance at how beautiful it is. Feel how perfect, how mighty it is. I am, of course, talking about a 9mm Luger, and a Speer Gold Dot bonded core bullet I’m loading my 9mm Luger pistol with. Once I fire it, it will bore my brain almost instantly as it swooshes at 1,210 feet per second with a whopping muzzle energy of 374 foot/pound. More importantly, once its job is done, it will have brought me solace. Comfort has always been eluding me; I’ve known no respite from loneliness, pain and myself. I tried many a remedy known to men: I used to drink myself to oblivion every single day, sometimes for months at a time without being sober for a single moment. Thirsty for life, I drank madness instead. I spent unseemly fortunes in whorehouses on every continent but Africa, in front of which I humbly kneel in reverence. Addicted to phony moaning, once the silence enveloped me and the putrid smell of two now separated bodies still puffing started to suffocate me, I was always left empty, lusting for more booze, more whores and even louder moanings, and yes, even more stench. “Bravely mate, much many big seas I sailed. A stranger to me, no hooker is,” I emailed once to a captain friend in Moscow. Such a nice chuckle we shared. Gladys, his big-boobed blonde wife, had no clue that he was whoring in the Russian capital for weeks at the time.

A street fighter I’d never been, but many times I had provoked a vicious brawl. I remember that December night in Salvador da Bahia in Brazil where I smashed bottles and tables alike in the Senhorita Mafalda, a Pelourinho’s small joint. As a reward for my behavior, I’d gotten severely beaten by local ruffians. I almost died that night. Only the pain of every bone that felt crushed eased the pain of living with madness and loneliness. When I laughed and yelled at the thugs, thanking them profusely for thrashing me, “Muito obrigado,” they left me alone, fleeing with: “Ele é maluco”—he’s crazy, they mumbled. Of course I was crazy, you sick ass putos. Praise all the saints of your dirty, overrated city that I wanted you to beat me and not to stick a gun at your eager, hungry asses and pull a trigger.

Paradoxically, those were good times compared to what had been looming on the horizon. I was crazy and lonely, and I lived in pain I was unable to comprehend, but I never, unless in drunken stupor, felt like I was losing my mind. That came later.

I traveled like a restless madman, unable to stop even when the siren’s song lured me into oblivion. As I ceaselessly traveled, I was hoping to sooner or later arrive to a life of my own. It never happened. I had no life, so I sunk deep into the throes of depression, into funk as deep as the darkest emptiness of space. On the paradisiacal Tahiti’s island of Mo’orea, no less, I was the most depressed man that freakishly cheerful island has ever seen. I was living on the edge, pushing it really hard. It should not come as a surprise that I was a prime candidate for a stay in a mental institution anyway. There must be a cosmic joke being played on me, I think as I sit in the Gaustad sykehus psychiatric hospital in which I’m going to end it once and for all before the night is out.

Abelard and Héloïse

As fate would have it, at the very time on the verge of a pitch-black sorrow, as I lived desolate and destitute in Tijuana, I encountered love. It was the most unexpected moment. Our love was, or so I thought, conceived rather immaculately in The Glance, the first glimpse I exchanged with Charlotte. It was a glance of deep understanding, as we’ve seen each other in a manner God never wanted us to see another human being—a naked soul, glorious in all its fears, magnificent in all its beauty, impalpable and everywhere at the same time. I suspect physicists played hide-and-seek with us mortals when they called the unknown substance that permeates our universe, those mysterious 85%, a dark matter. Just because you can’t see it, does not mean it’s dark, geniuses. I dare to dream that some sort of universal love is that elusive dark matter.

I don’t give a hoot about how stupid or schmaltzy that sounds. After all, isn’t love equally elusive, equally invisible as neutrinos? That does not stop either from overwhelming us. About sixty-five billion neutrinos are passing through just one square centimeter of each area on Earth and none were visible. It’s the same if one thinks about love. Show me a man who says that he understands love and I’ll show you a liar. Even hard-core scientific genius Richard Feynman sent a love letter to his dead wife Arlene a full year after she had died.

Charlotte was the first and last thing on my mind every day; I floated around the ugliest shithole on Earth, nevertheless happy, immersed in sweet feelings. As I loved, I felt loved. Alas, I had no clue what would happen next, as I was reveling in my newly found happiness, oblivious to the ominous signs written all over that proverbial cursed wall of my demise.

The salvation I longed for and hoped to have gotten was instead my damnation.

Life is a Dialogue

Yes, the love grappled me unexpectedly with all its might. When I met her on the Malecón de Playas de Tijuana, México, I finally saw the light, unaware that it blinded me from the start.

She immediately started to suffocate the dialogue of life. Only her own ways mattered. She had muzzled the dialogue from the beginning, imposing her will in the most cunning way as she hid behind her stated weaknesses (or illnesses) that ruled our times together. So she had silenced me and, by doing it, she took my breath, my life away. While we were both endlessly babbling like logorrheic Howler monkeys about our “relationship” and her numerous “inabilities” to be a part of it in a way she claimed that I wanted, I started to lose myself. I felt an overwhelming urge to help her get out of her rigid cage that suffocated love.

Lamia

I had no idea that she was a monster that fed upon the living. Like Lamia, the child-eating monster who morphed into a seductress only to kill and eat the flesh of their lovers, Charlotte was the soul-eating hydra. She was subtle and perfidious. Unlike other cock teasing bitches, she wasn’t satisfied only by taking your flesh—she was a nymphomaniac of the soul, she feasted upon the pain she had been inflicting on others. She played the game of endless teasing while enjoying her role of a blameless victim.

In the end it was clear: she thrust a dagger into my heart. She casted a black pall over my soul. Once she had eaten up my soul and spat it out, leaving me devastated, I tried to understand why that had happened to me. It was clear to me, even when I was brokenhearted and maddeningly hurt, that it wasn’t just her or her behavior that had created so much pain in me. I did not blame her even when I hated her with every fiber of my being. I needed answers, or the pain would be too much to bear. I was aware, no matter how vaguely, that she got her claws into my being because of its intrinsic weaknesses. Pain and loneliness were, throughout my life, manifestation of those weaknesses. In fact, I never saw myself as a weak person. After all, I survived many a painful loss, the war at home, homelessness in New York, prior broken heart episodes, and a life of loneliness, and yet I was open to life and love when I met her. I did not think a weakling could survive all of that and keep pulling himself together year after year, continent after continent, decade after decade. The only way out from Charlotte’s induced hell was to try to understand myself. As Franz Kafka (or was it Albert Camus? Too late for me to google it now) once wrote, “stronger than comfort would be a realization: you too have a weapon.” I used C.G. Jung and various alchemical writings as a tool on the journey of self-discovery. I started to write my chronicles—a totally different kind of chronicles than these—as a weapon to help me exorcise the evil spirits. Instead, like the early Christians seeking God in the desert only to find demons, I became the prey of my own inner fiends.

And then, I myself became a demoniac presence in the lives of the others I obliterated with a ferocious, savage intensity.

Suicide is Painless

Some might claim that I’m a coward for killing myself instead of facing “justice,” that mythical fairytale near everyone sanctimoniously babbles about all the time, so I feel compelled to briefly comment on such a thought. What “justice” exists within confines of those barking mad societies all over the world? Societies, as much as the countries and the humanity as a whole, have been ruled by degenerate psychopaths since forever. The world has been mercilessly caught in the war-mongering clutches of sickos whose evil deeds dwarf my own crimes by multitudes of millions.

I’m not trying to exonerate myself from my heinous crimes just because the human habitat is a fucked up sadistic nightmare. I would gladly allow the families of the women I killed in a maddening rage to stone me to death should they desire to do so or to dismember my body by wrenching my limbs. My hatred would’ve finally met its match—the hatred of the families who had been deprived of their daughters and sisters—a match made for hell and would’ve finally liberated me from myself.

Every Man Dies Alone

Alas, I have to do it on my own. Hans Fallada’s¹ book said it best.

Norway is closer to a civilized country than any other society on Earth. Gaustad sykehus is no ghastly Broadmoor criminal lunatic asylum but rather a pleasant, clean and filled-with-light hospital. Moreover, Dr. Sønstebø, a forensic psychiatrist in charge of my case is a tall, incomparably gorgeous, immensely intelligent cutie whose luminescent ultramarine eyes remind me of the Geirangerfjord and its deep blue waters. Ah, how much I lust for her during long, lonely nights here. However there was an obstacle, a lingering monster behind my lust. I was thinking about the global tyrant, the glorious U.S. of A. that might, as a footnote of the evil empire’s voluminous opus of terror and dread, want to see me extradited so it could deploy its famous “justice” on me. Leslie was, after all, an American.

By killing myself, I will deny any pretense of “justice” the vile system would like to usurp by trying me. Fuck them!

The End

It’s here! It’s already burning the skin of my right temple, the bullet, at its 267˚C exit temperature.

This is so strange…this odd pulsating moment. Why am I not dead yet? Is this my last heartbeat? No, that would be too corny. But it feels so weird. What is the bullet waiting for? Is it giving me a last chance to reconsider? Does it want me to change my mind? Does it ask me if I want to go back? I also ask myself: do I want to change my mind at this last moment of life? But really, do I want to live, to face my life, my love, my hatred again? To go back to México, to be with Charlotte like I was once with her during that fatal summer? The day we met was the day of Atl, governed by Xiuhtecuhtli, God of Fire. Do I want to try yet again now, right now when it’s finally over?

No way in hell. The devil would be much better company than she ever was.

Whoosh!!

What is that?

The space around me suddenly spreads out for miles. For millions of miles. There’s nothing in my vicinity I could reach. I can’t see the horizon. Finally, I’m alone in the very center of the universe that’s abandoning me. Where are the “exquisite instruments of the mystical troupe to bid me farewell,” Constantine², where?

You missed the train to nowhere? Again.

Even the time, this last instant of my life, is stretching like the space before it. Endlessly, it seeks to embrace eternity. Albert Einstein was right. Screw that spooky action at a distance, it’s scary now and here. Could Yma Sumac’s voice escape a black hole flying on her five octaves? Gopher Mambo to greet Stephen Hawking as he dwells floating on the event horizon, for the duration of one single B2 note? Forever. Why do we always talk about time and so seldom about infinity?

La Llorona

Why do I hear La Llorona by Chavela Vargas now? And why her? She has drowned her children. I had none. I always loved Frida Kahlo, that’s why, I guess. Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps. I listened to a Lila Downs concert once. On that day when I saw her concert with Jackie E. in New York, Lila Downs’s nipples got hard as soon as she switched singing from English to Spanish, Quizas, Quizas, Quizas. Dear Jackie, she’s the most gorgeous, by far the most brilliant woman I ever met but, somehow, she can’t find her way into the books of men that loved her, barring her own, unless she’s a footnote.

I saw Frida Kahlo in real life only once. She was standing next to the Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Central, a painting by Diego Rivera on a mural in México City. She was holding a Tao Yin Yang pendant in her left hand. She was dancing to Waltz No. 2 by Dmitri Shostakovich. She was the only one Diego loved on that painting. He looked at her. She looked back at me. Others were just extras, swimming by like the catfish in the pond.

I am thirsty now. That’s absurd.

I would love to have one last sip (esetleg two if György S. decides to pop in, but he’s from a completely different world called Magyarország) of El Perdido Tequila Gold. The best comes from Arandas in Jalisco. I miss the taste of its agave-y flavor. Funny, I was never too fond of tequila. El Perdido Gold is from the place where the agave kisses the heavens, not so far from Guadalajara, where I once spend a night kissing Soledad. Soledad stands for “loneliness.” She had those fiercely beautiful ojos tapatios—dark and alluring eyes like the night under the crescent moon, not unlikely those of Ximena Navarrete whom I never saw. When on acid, Soledad painted Frida Kahlo’s hallucinogenic portraits. Poor Soledad… if only I had learned to dance tango in time. Was that a chord of Julio Sosa’s El Último Café just now that reminded me of a wasted life as it tangles on without me? Alas, I am not that lucky to hear el Varon del Tango with my sweet Sophie for the last time. Where are you now, mon chéri, I wonder? Sosa crashed his DKW in Buenos Aires and killed himself. He was thirty-eight.

Chavela Vargas, who lived to ninety-three, sings again:

Really, why do I hear Chavela Vargas singing La Llorona again? Do I also cry for the children I might have had with Charlotte before she devoured their images and erased them from my mind, only to have them replaced by hatred?

Hatred is to Love What Devil is to God

Finally, it’s here, the bullet. In less than a millisecond, rather in a 1/100,000^th of a second, it will be all over. The bullet effortlessly pierces through my head. The heat is surprisingly pleasant. My brain is ruptured with a creaky sound of my shattered skull that tolled the end. What bliss. It’s done.

I’m sent off.

Adiós muchachos.

The Flashback

So it’s true, life flashes before your eyes at its last infinitesimal moment indeed. Flashbacks that follow are that flash.