With the gun in my hand, I sat down on the couch, considering where I should do it. For some reason, doing it on the couch didn’t appeal to me. I’d get blood on it; blood that would never come out. I decided to do it on the floor instead. Yes, I know; it was silly to care about the couch. But it was merely one final act of irrationality in an irrational life. In other words, a sure-fire sign of being human, all too fucking human. So be it.
I kneeled down on the floor as though in front of God. However, there was no God. There was nobody that would look out for this miserable pathetic soul who’d had enough of the vicissitudes of fate. There was nobody that cared for me. Not Vicky. Not my mom. Not my dad. Not even me.
I didn’t know much about guns, but I had been to a shooting range a few times and this Beretta seemed simple enough to operate. I took the magazine out to make sure it was loaded. It was. I pushed it back in. Then I took the safety off.
All I had to do now was to pull the trigger. It was such an easy thing to do that I began wondering why more people didn’t do it. Was it because they were against guns? I chuckled at the stupidity of my final joke.
I made a last-minute attempt to think of a good reason why not to go through with it. I couldn’t think of one. Besides, a million people committed suicide each year. It was nothing unusual. I was nothing special. Although it may have been a great tragedy for me, for the world at large I was just another statistic.
I put the muzzle of the gun against my right temple. I positioned it so the bullet would more or less directly penetrate the center of my brain.
I took a deep breath. “To die is the finest thing you could do,” I quoted from the end of Will O’ the Wisp to an invisible audience. “The most positive, the most you could do.”
I pulled the trigger.
Sublimation
There was a click, but nothing happened. I pulled the trigger again. Click. Still nothing. What was going on? Was it God? Had he intervened at the last moment because he cared? Was he preventing me from killing myself?
I chuckled. Of course not. The gun had jammed. Guns did that every once in a while. And even though the odds of it happening were small, unlike miracles it did happen. Especially with poorly cared-for guns, which this one indeed appeared to be. It wasn’t divine intervention; it was pure chance. And yet, according to my views, this chance was predetermined since the beginning of the universe.
Well, shit, I thought. Now what? It seemed I was a failure in both life and death.
I sat back down on the couch, considering my options. I couldn’t jump from anywhere up high because I was afraid of heights. Hanging myself from the steel beam in my closet didn’t seem like such a good idea anymore; besides, I didn’t have any rope. Gun range? But it was closed today. Also, since the instructor was right next to you, he might intervene, and I might end up getting locked up instead. I couldn’t slit my wrists either because I was afraid of the pain. Nor did I have any pills, which I wouldn’t be able to take anyway due to my fear, again, of physical pain.
I sat on the couch for a while, at a loss as to what I should do. I had reached the lowest point in my entire life. I had read somewhere that when Nietzsche had reached a similarly low point, he had decided to become an optimist. How he managed that, I had no idea. The hole I was in seemed fitting for only one thing. A grave.
Eventually I started thinking about Zapffe again. About his four strategies for coping with existence. First there was isolation. But that wouldn’t work since I couldn’t isolate disturbing thoughts from my mind. I was used to being honest with myself and facing the unpleasant aspects of existence head-on instead of ignoring them.
Then there was anchoring. But I couldn’t anchor myself to fictitious institutions like family, God, or country. At least, not anymore. Due to the way my family had raised me, I had no belief in family anymore. They were strangers to me. As were all the women who had left me. Obviously, I didn’t believe in God; I was amazed that anybody could at this point in history. Nor did I believe in the concept of a country. A country was an arbitrary historical idea—an illusion if you got right down to it. In truth, there was just one planet, arbitrarily divided, its various cultures engaged in their own specific forms of superstitions and delusions.
The third strategy was distraction. But I had already tried various pastimes and amusements to make life more bearable. I had seen thousands of movies. I had read hundreds of books. I had traveled, not immensely, but enough to realize that every place was essentially the same underneath its facade. I had gone to bars and restaurants, to concerts and festivals, on hikes and road trips. I had drank and I had fucked. But it was all too little. Entertainment was simply not a good enough of a reason to survive. Sooner or later, it began repeating itself. Sooner or later, it grew boring and unfulfilling. Sooner or later, it would make me feel like just another brainless consumer, one of many, mindlessly consuming some worthless fucking product.
The only strategy that remained was sublimation. The art of using your pain to create art. Of turning muck into gold. Nietzsche said that art was the proper task of life. And even though I didn’t like most so-called art—especially the pretentious kind—what I did like, for instance my favorite novels, I loved dearly. I loved works that were authentic. That were about their authors’ struggles. About their desolation, suffering, misery, humiliation, and despair. And perhaps, also, about their hope.
To me, a book that I could relate to—as rare as that was—was something to be cherished; it was more valuable than anything else on earth. What if I tried writing such a book? After all, weren’t most of my favorite books written under similarly shitty circumstances that I was in?
I could write it about my past week; it had been quite the rollercoaster ride, both tragic and meaningful at the same time. At least to me. And if it was meaningful to me, perhaps it could be to others. Others who have felt themselves similarly outcast from human society; not fit to live in this world and the world not fit for them to live in it.
Writing such a book might not solve all of my problems. But it would give me the chance of using my pain to create something for a change instead of using it only to destroy. And this alone might be enough to help keep me going for a little while longer. Just a bit. Just enough.
Whether the book would end up being considered good or bad didn’t matter. All that mattered was that it was authentic. That it was honest. That it didn’t hold back. That its contents, as Nietzsche put it, were written with the author’s own blood.
And if you’re reading this, then it seems that I’ve succeeded.
And I hope you will too.
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 Keijo Kangur
All rights reserved
Edited by Maria Sütt
Cover design by Keijo Kangur
Cover photography by Maria Sütt
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ISBN: 979-8-6632-1634-0