“A Portrait of Despair”

By Cal Burgess

Hey, so you’re probably wondering– “what the fuck?!!”

Hear me out, this was a complex decision, and to be honest it was a joyride above all else. 

The transcendental experience is as mystifying as it is hard to obtain. I’ve been searching for it for a long time– that sensation of euphoria and feeling as though everything is as it should be. The transcendental experience is about feeling connected to the world around you in a way that goes beyond the physical plane– it’s about seeing the world and our experiences in it as an expression of the human spirit. The thing about the transcendental experience is that anyone can theoretically attain it– it is a universal human and (I believe) non-human phenomenon. 

Imagine a sunset glowing red and orange above a river framed with stands of maples, rowans and shining white birches. Imagine hanging out with friends and feeling a spiritual spark as though your souls were mending into one collective expression of your connection to it all. Imagine stumbling across artwork or a person so beautiful that your faith in the goodness of the human condition was restored. Imagine euphoric, existential pleasure– the feeling that the world is a place where we can go beyond our reptile human needs– needs animal and slimy in their nature. This is what the transcendental experience is all about– embracing the world through desirable experiences and confiding in the beauty of it all– a sort of ‘spiritual orgasm’, if you will. 

Imagine knowing of such a sweet fruit and knowing that so long as your consciousness is contained in this human flesh that your transcendence of this slimy, vulgar and filthy human existence is not possible. Imagine lacking the physical vehicle required to achieve the transcendental experience, and yet you know about all of its joys and gloriousness. 

I want to embrace the inherent beauty of this Earth. The world is good, so good, and I want to understand it on a deeper, less physically tainted level. I am trapped in a flesh prison– the body of an ugly little man that, in the realms of what we would call everyday life, cannot seem to score a win. How am I supposed to suck out all the marrow of life if I don’t have the lips to do it? I am detached, socially isolated, spiritually atrophied and mentally shattered. I am ugly, have no career prospects, and I  am falling into modern degeneracy. I cannot possibly achieve the transcendental experience within this body that I have now. The being you know as me is not real. I am a consciousness beyond what filthy, useless form the world has given me. The destruction of my physical form is not done out of a will to die, but rather the desire to truly live. It is an act of astral projection, carrying permanence, that will allow my freed and disembodied soul to truly embrace the greatness that this world has to offer. 

So I ask of you all– do not mourn me. Let there be no funeral, no obituary, no stupid page in the yearbook like that chick from back when I was in the 10th Grade, and no words of memoriam. Nothing. Let me fade away, and escape the gross deprivations of this physical plane. If I had “lived” as you all would put it, I would have simply wasted away, a failure and a dead soul surrounded by a cage of meat and bone, piloted by an inhuman mind– in destroying my body, I am embracing an existence beyond what I could have perceived, given my circumstances, in this world. 

Perhaps I’ll see some of you again. Enjoy your lives, and celebrate my suicide as a victory in the name of the human experience. There are a couple of loose ends I need to tie up. I’ll do that.

By Cal Burgess